I have become progressively absent minded as an adult,
wisdom teeth, tonsils, my appendix
As a child I had a friend who's house
especially since finishing my
Ph.D.
little toes, pubic hair, my coccyx
burned down. They had no insurance
I don't forget keys, or appointments,
so they moved to a farm
or to tell my wife I love her.
the hair that stands on the back of my neck
where they ran a riding stable, with no electricity I don't forget faces, or
conversations, or running water.
or the important details of events in my past.
fear of the dark
I would often spend the night on that farm What I tend to forget
riding horses,
are names,
cravings for fatty food
swimming in the river,
what I'm saying in the middle of a sentence, putting pennies on railroad tracks,
facts during a lecture,
playing in the hay in the barn,
xenophobia
or a meeting,
arm-wrestling over getting to ride the black horse, labels, numbers, trivia . . .
telling stories in the dark of the old wooden house, the thought I just had
meritocracy
having the best
thirty seconds
time of my life.
ago.
cruelty
in nature
is
simply efficient
laziness
My favorite memories of childhood
are going with my father to the field,
the hills of Kentucky. He was working
for the U.S. Geologic Survey,
animals
(evolution)
necessity (laziness)
mother
of invention.
to map the geology of the state.
I remember the beauty of the knobs,
the green hills and deep gorges, the opal in the side of a cliff, watching for snakes,
predation is
often
crueler
than seems
necessary
awakening in the world. A journey
into wilderness, past dumps of human
garbage, frothing streams full of human waste, over-grown strip mines, and dirt-poor
people.
effort
is part
of the efficiency
equation
(laziness?)
Game theory calculates the evolutionarily stable strategy
for the balance between aggression,
School boards
are being infiltrated
by creationists
Cuckoos lay their eggs
in the nests of other birds,
avoidance
(retreat), and cheating.
Cheaters will always
exist but can never take over.
in order to prevent evolution
from being taught
to our children.
relying on the unsuspecting birds
to nurture their offspring.
Both dove and hawk
strategies
will be maintained
The courts have ruled that creationism
could not be taught as science
so they renamed their beliefs
They push the eggs of the parental birds out of the nest, destroying them,
within a species
due to the increased
success
of each strategy
creation science,
but the courts ruled
that a rose by any other name--
so now creationists call their ideas
special creation
(sic-spontaneous generation),
and the unsuspecting parents feed the gaping mouths of the hatchling cuckoos, seeing only
as the other tends
to become
predominant
in the population.
and are taking their arguments directly to unprepared, naive, and easily intimidated
school boards
the bright red intoxicating mouths of the starving chicks.
