Writing for Sanity's Sake

The spirit rises, and the pragmatist subsides, and I think of all the things I do not know…nor will I ever know.

I cannot see the wind, but I know it is there because it blows my hair in my eyes. If I cannot see the wind, what else can I not see?

I cannot hear the sounds that the wolf hears, and many other animals besides him. What sounds are there that even the most sensitive of animals cannot hear? What does the Universe whisper just beyond our ability to detect, that may hold secrets we do not know.

Fifty years is a long time. But I remember fifty years ago. I was a senior in High School. I had gotten most of the courses I needed to graduate, so I had two hours of “study hall” in a row that year. I sat there and read most of the time, but every now and then there was some excitement.

One of the radiators started clanking so loud once that we thought it was going to explode. Turns out it just needed draining out. The water in Trion is very alkaline, and water heaters, and radiators too I suppose, get this calcified sediment in them that causes them to stop working. I guess it does the same thing with kidneys, because after drinking Trion water all my life I’ve got about a hundred tiny kidney stones, and one big one lurking in my kidneys. My Urologist says don’t sweat the tiny ones, but if the big one starts to move “you’ll know it, and I’ll see you at the hospital “

We had several fights that year too. I can’t remember if anybody won. I think it was Mr. Hayes who broke them up

Most of the time though, I read books. I got a lot of them finished too. “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Dumas. “The Egyptian” by Mika Waltari, and most of all “Hawaii” by James Michener. That book made me a fan of not only Michener, but also of historical novels. I’ve read all of his books now, some more than once. Colleen McCollough is another favorite, with her long expansive historical series about Rome. Simply put, I became a fan of reading that year, and have never looked back. Those two consecutive study halls were more educational for me then any High School class I could have taken.

I also had Journalism that year, History and Typing II. I wasn’t much in mechanics, so I never took Shop. I kind of regret that at times, but never regret learning how to type 60 wpm. That skill has served me well through the years, first by being able to type my own papers in college (and charge other folks for typing theirs!) but chiefly with the development of the computer and its accompanying keyboard, I had a leg up on many people.  I can still fly on the keyboard when I want to.

Gary Clark was the only other boy in that class with me that year. “Chocks” as we called him. Gary passed away one day suddenly from a heart attack quite a number of years back. I really hated to hear it. He was a good friend.

That year was also filled with some stress. Taking SAT’s, and trying to decide on a college to attend. I finally settled on West Georgia College, and have never regretted it. It was a much different school back then, with a small college feel.

The world was changing back in 1968. MLK was assassinated, then later on Bobby Kennedy, who had decided to run for president after Johnson decided he’d had enough, and had totally screwed up the Vietnam war, and lied about it to boot.

The Beatles were preeminent in music, and brought the British Invasion to a full scale victory.

There were proms and dances. Me and some of my buddies had a rock and roll band.

I dated some nice girls, and generally was the epitome of a slightly nerdy, sometimes cool high school Senior.  I didn’t have my own car, and had an 11 O’clock curfew.  I had maybe four pairs of pants, five shirts, and two pairs of shoes, one of which was for Sundays.

But, most of all, it was a great year.  A year I’ll never forget.  I was seventeen and was going to do great things. I knew it all, and Dad and Mom knew nothing.  I was wrong, arrogant, and stupid.  How many of us weren’t?

I’d love to take the time someday to really write about it in detail.  It would probably be a very long piece.

Most of all, I’d love to go back for one last day to that study hall, with its old rope operated windows opened to the spring breeze in early March.  I’d love to hear the river rushing by just outside the window, and smell the slightly “burnt” odor of the sanforized cloth running over at the mill. I’d love to hear the “twenty minute til four” whistle blow as I was walking Home up the eighth street hill, to a supper that probably include salmon patties and pinto beans. I’d like to see Mom and Dad again and tell them how right they were about things, and that I loved them for all they had done for me.  I’d like to sit in the front porch swing after supper and strum my old Kay guitar until it got dark.

Just one day, then I’d come back…….I swear I would.  And I’d be a better man than I am now.

As I was fishing the river earlier this week, It woke some old memories. Solitude, serenity, serendipity. I used to stumble upon things as a child that may seem very strange to others, but which in my lone way were calming and beneficial.

I would skim rocks across this same Chattooga river for hours. I think once I got up to eight bounces…imagine that sense of accomplishment! I kept a secret place behind the house on Eighth street where I piled unusual and different rocks. Unless someone found them, which isn’t likely, they are still there piled in a pyramid like group.

We all have our secret eccentricities. And our secrets. I was thinking of one of my deep, dark secrets at my granddaughters band concert the other night. How I had always wanted to be in the band…but could never learn to read music. I remember trying out for band. I was give a clarinet. For a few weeks I simply memorized the tunes and played along. But the squiggles on the pages never made sense, and I was too ashamed to ask for help. I could have gone on and just memorized the songs, but…I just felt out of place. I didn’t belong.

I have gone on and learned to play and sing, to write and even lead choirs…all the time not knowing how to read a note of music. I’ve memorized thousands of songs, hundreds of musicals, millions of notes. I can harmonize with anyone on any song. But if someone showed me “Mary had a little lamb” written out in notes with nothing to identify it..I wouldn’t know what it was.

I wish I had said something back in the eighth grade…maybe I would have enjoyed being in the band..who knows. My knees were bad, so no football either. I simply ended up as a cheerer.

Math was pretty much the same also. I faked And guessed my way through algebra. I liked Geometry though, thanks to a very understanding teacher, Mr. Alexander, who gave me a B based more on my great writing and the ability to produce a fifty page term paper on angles. I can remember to this day his surprise that anyone could turn out that many pages on something so innane.

I’m just weird that way I guess…my talents lend themselves more towards slideshow entertaining than reality sometimes as I realized tonight after my bath as I shaved left handed, and brushed my teeth right handed with nary a nick nor a tooth missed. Guess things could be worse. I write with both hands too.

Ah well, enough of this rambling. I have important sleep to get too.

One of the things I used to enjoy the most when I was eight or nine years old was hitting rocks with a stick. I especially enjoyed this activity when I went to my Grandparent’s house.

Grandpa and Grandma lived on the end of an old dirt road and of course that road was loaded with…rocks! I couldn’t wait to get there on a summer day back in the late 50’s. I’d go down to the road right next to the barn and find me a stick about the length of a baseball bat and make a pile of rocks about the size of a quarter. It didn’t matter that the stick was skinny because I could hit those rocks. I honed my hand/eye coordination with hours of hitting rocks into Uncle Lark’s corn field for hours at a time.

“There goes another Home Run for Mickey Mantle” I would holler out in my head. I could hear ol’ Dizzy and PeeWee Reece calling it out over the center field fence at 410 feet.

Mantle was my earliest baseball idol, and still to this day is my all time favorite. There’s a signed photo of him from his Triple Crown year of 1956 hanging on the wall down the stairwell from where I’m sitting. I wish I had gotten it signed in person, but I never got to meet Mickey.

I’d pick those rocks up and toss them in the air and whack them. I’d whack them and try to knock flying birds out of the air, although I never hit one.

This morning as I was walking down by the river, I picked up a skinny stick and a rock and when I got close to the river I threw it up in the air and swung….I was exhilirated and excited down inside as I heard a loud “crack” and “Mickey Mantle hit another home run” into the depths of the Chattooga river.

I looked around to make sure nobody had seen me, and I walked on….

Me and Mike Brown and David Hayes went up on the banks of the Chattooga river back when we were young, about twelve or thirteen years old if I remember correctly. We were on the south bank, and had originally been going to do some fishing. Summers back then were lazy days, baseball games and swimming in the river, hunting golf balls up at the Trion golf course, and exploring.

All three of us were dedicated golfers and golf ball hunters. We would go up to the slough on #1 hole and find 8 or 10 golf balls, and then move on down to the creeks on #2 and #3 holes. We’d go into that squishy mud barefooted, and feel for the lost golf balls with our feet. Sometimes some of the leeches in the creek would attach themselves to our legs or in between our toes. We never thought anything about it, we’d just pull them off. Occasionally a water mocassin or some other type of water snake would hear or see us coming, tromping up the creek and would splash in the water. I remember one time when Mike and I were hunting up the middle of the creek and a HUGE snake came swimming right down the center. I went to one bank, and he hit the other one. Once it swam by us, we went right back into the muck.

We needed all of those golf balls, because at that point in our golfing career we lost about two balls per hole. We got better as the years passed and we played on J.W. Greenwood’s golf team. In 1967 we won a big trophy and in in 1968 we finished just out of the “money” at the State tournement. I won a couple of individual medals both years and thought I was pretty good. I shot even par at a youth tournament late in the Summer of ’68 and thought I was gonna win for sure. Old boy named Andy Bean shot three under par, and I ended up in second place. He went on to do pretty good as a pro, and me…well, I think I peaked out that summer.

Back to the banks of the Chattooga that day I was originally speaking of…

We three decided we would find the Trion Dam cave. We didn’t know exactly where the entrance was located so we went past it and ended up climbing the rocky hill that lies just above the dam. I was hopping over rocks like a mountain goat, as I had pretty good balance back then. I heard somebody yell and saw that ol’ David was sliding down the rocks. He had turned his leg and torn up his knee. We helped him back home, and it was a long recovery. No more ball playing or fishing or golfing for him that summer. It was a little bit of a wake up call for me. I’d been way up ahead of him on those rocks and if I had fallen down, it would have been a lot worse than a torn up knee. It mighta’ been goodbye…

I looked up on that rock bank from across the river just a few weeks back as I was taking some photos and wonder what prompted me to climb up that high. Was I crazy?

At 65 years of age I think about how lucky I have been to be able to survive this life up to this point, where some of my friends and comrades have not. Michael Brown has been gone for quite a few years. Old David is still around, and I have seen him a lot over the years. He still has a bit of a limp from tearing his knee up that year. I came out of it with just a few bites from some little leeches, and maybe a bee sting or two. One has to wonder at how fate, luck, time and place have so much to do with how we end up.

I’ve eaten a lot of different kinds of food in my life, especially as a kid.

I had to stay with my Maternal Grandparents a lot when I was young because Mom was sick quite a bit. I stayed there almost one entire school year in the 4th grade, and almost every Summer I spent 3 or 4 weeks with Grandpa and Grandma. Grandpa had grown up eating wild game and he never intended to change as long as he had a choice. He had deer horns lining the upper beam of his front porch from one end to the other…there were dozens of them. Rattlesnake rattlers also hung down from the beam, trophies of killing some of the biggest Eastern Diamondbacks I ever remember, or want to think about.

My Grandpa’s Uncle Larkin Davenport once killed one that stretched from one side of the old dirt road to the other. I wish there had been iPhones back in those days, oh the photos I could have taken! But, back to the food…

Besides venison, Grandpa also had a craving ever now and then for a Possum. Yes….a possum. The kind you see lying dead on the side of the road almost every time you take a trip up the old Alabama highway. Of course Grandpa wouldn’t pick up roadkill! That was for the REAL hillbillies in the backwoods of Kentucky. Up at the end of Snake Nation road in the Blue Ridge mountains, things were done in a civilized manner.

Grandpa would trap or catch a possum when he had a craving for one, and keep it up under a big old, huge wash tub for about a week. During that week, the possum would be fed the leftover vegetables from our meals, along with the peels and scraps from the vegetables. Grandma gave the little beast bread with a little honey on it on the day before it was to meet his maker. I believe it was to “sweeten” the meat, although maybe it was a last little treat for the critter too.

I had to help Grandpa skin the possum, and it was done just like skinning a rabbit. If you have never skinned a rabbit, I won’t go into it right now, but if you need to know, send me a message and I’ll give you instructions. Chances are if you grew up in the deep South you already know.

Grandma was very particular about cooking wild game, so she carefully cleaned the possum and poured nearly boiling water over him in order to get any scraps of hide off. All of this was done early in the morning. The possum then went into a large pot for parboiling. After about an hour of parboiling, Grandma would take the possum out, put it on a large pan, and sprinkle salt and spices onto it. Peeled sweet potatoes where added, and some slices of bacon, in order to add back some of the flavor which was lost during the parboiling process…which was essential in order to make the meat tender. It then went into the oven to finish cooking by being baked.

I have to note that parboiling was also necessary when preparing and eating squirrel, if you were going to fry them. If stewing the squirrel, you just went right on and kept boiling, but added some spices and some other ingredients. I ate a lot more squirrel than I did possum, and they aren’t half bad.

The last possum I ate was back around1960 if I remember correctly, when I was ten years old. My Grandfather was 67 years old that year. I can’t remember ever eating possum again, although venison and fish still graced the table at times. For the most part Grandma stuck with fried chicken, and beef roasts, and other pretty ordinary stuff in the subsequent years. Of course her cooking was anything but ordinary. Never had another biscuit as good as hers, or a cherry cobbler, or fried chicken…or fried apples for breakfast straight off the apple tree, or…well, you get the picture. I have wished a million times I had paid more attention to how Granny prepared food…especially the biscuits!

As for the possum? Well, I ate the sweet potatoes. The meat was just too greasy for me.

The thing which is most disturbing about Social media is that it could be used for such tremendous good, yet is primarily being used for such pervasive and intrusive evil. It’s being used for bad.

I started a couple of times today to comment in a post about some of the things I see happening in this country. Things which are not right, but which need to be discussed. But I know what would happen. People would line up on the sides they have been told they…we…are on, and would argue, call names, throw nasty pre-made talking point memes at each other, and nobody would change their minds about anything.

It almost seems like the indoctrination of America into two diametrically opposed partisan camps is almost complete.

Kudos and thanks to those of you my friends who post those wonderful recipes, the encouraging memes with the cartoon characters, the dog and kitty photos, the nature photos, and the baby pictures. Always those. You encourage and enlighten me with those. You are the best of the best.

All of this stuff, these current spat of problems, continues to detract us from the major issues which absolutely do have the potential to impact mankind to the extent of extinction. Nuclear war and climate disruption.

With those two monsters staring us straight in the face it really doesn’t matter if a bunch of nuts somewhere are worshiping their AR-15’s or their AK-47’s.

To the people who I have loved and who are now gone: I try and remember you as much as possible! I try and think of you each and every day! It’s not maudlin to remember your loved ones and the happy memories you had with them. I think it’s theraputic. It keeps them alive in your memory. They exist there as they once existed physically here on Earth. I try not to think in a mournful way, but in honor.

And, as one song I have heard so succinctly puts it, “Even the bad times are good” We learn from the bad times how better to enjoy the good. We learn from the bad times that we are all human. There are no perfect people. Not now.

As I grow older, I am trying to leave better memories than I did when I was a younger man. I was so self absorbed, and trying always to “get ahead” and “make ends meet” How little I knew about life. How off the mark I was about what constitues happiness. I’m not sure if it’s the dwindling years, or the gathering of more tender memories with those around me. It really doesn’t matter now. What matters is that most days I remember to try and leave a memory with somebody.

I always thought this tiny house in which we live to be a sign of not succeeding.

Now when I think back, I remember the times when everyone was packed in together. We were close. We grew closer. Three kids and their friends. Games played and meals eaten. Shows watched together in silence or in noisy celebration. Report cards reviewed, and papers written and assissted with. Research which benefited me as much as it did the primary party. Situations discussed and problems resolved…..or not. Life lived!

So, I guess it is not so bad. Not really a “sign of success or failure” My grandchildren run and crawly the halls and draw on the walls now. I don’t care. If you looked around now, you’d see crayon pictures hanging and momentos magnetized to the refrigerator. You’d see kids books partially filling the bookshelfs and plastic crates full to the top with stuffed bears and letter blocks. My wife sits not eight feet away from me. I’m glad she’s that close.

So, in twenty or thirty years, or whenever, I hope I’ll have made enough memories in the heads of some of my favorite people that they might even think back and remember when I wrote a little page about it.

The Boy’s in OUR Band….a fictional account, based on a real incident. The names have been changed to protect the innocent….and the guilty.

It’s the 1966-1967 school year, and I’m a High School junior. My best friend Bebo Sears and I were headed back to his house out in the country, about eight miles North of Welcome Hill. Along the way, there was a popular little eating joint known as the “Riverside Barbeque.” It was appropriately named, as the murky, slow flowing Chattooga was right across the road. The Riverside, was affectionately known as Dub’s. They probably had the best Barbeque I can ever remember putting in my mouth. They also bootlegged beer, since our county was dry back then. They didn’t care what age you were, since they were already breaking one law, what did it matter to them if you were only sixteen or seventeen years old. Maybe it’s what made the Barbeque taste so good.

Bebo and I were in hog heaven, as his sister had let him borrow her car. We decided we were hungry so we stopped by Dub’s for a sandwich and a beer. We got our goodies, and Bebo kicked it into high gear up the little hilly, curvy road toward his house. We rounded one steep corner with him doing about 60 miles an hour, and there was a car coming the other way over on our side of the road. Bebo did a one-handed-emergency-avoidance-maneuver (he had a beer in the other hand) which took his sister’s new Buick up the side of a twelve foot dirt bank. The car did a 360 degree turn, and came back down onto the pavement headed in exactly the right direction. Besides kicking up a little dust, you would have never known anything had happened. There wasn’t a scratch anywhere on the car, or on us.

“Sheeiiit,” Bebo stated calmly.

I never said a word, I just took another bite out of my sandwich, and continued to chew, out of reflex…

“What do think about THAT little bit of driving?” Said Bebo in a bragging tone.

I never said a word, I just took a huge swallow of Black Label, and sat perfectly still, like a rabbit that’s just seen the barrel of a twelve gauge shotgun poke through the weeds.

About ten minutes passed before my vocal cords became “unparalyzed” from the sheer fright they had just been given. In that time I had mentally asked God to forgive me for all the things I should have asked him to forgive me for during the three second period of time we were up on that dirt bank.

“We’ve got to find something else to occupy our time, before we get killed,” I managed to wheeze out.

“Let’s start a band.” I suggested

Two weeks later I talked my Dad into letting me trade my scroll side Kay dreadnaught acoustical guitar in on a cheapie Bass guitar. This was one of the biggest mistakes of my musical life, as I have wished a million times I had that guitar back. But…I did what I did.

Bebo bought an electric six string, and we recruited Bill West, and Peewee Jones as keyboard player and drummer. Thus began “AT’S US.” In my mind this was being done mainly in the interest of self-preservation on my part, in order to keep Bebo out from behind the wheel of a car as much as possible, and to keep me from becoming an automobile fatality due to his wild-ass driving. Our first rehearsal was not a pretty sight nor sound.

Bebo and his family had just moved down to Frogtown, as the farm they had been living on when he and I just about died in an auto accident, had been too far away from the mill (where his Mom worked) and the school. This suited Bebo and me, as it was just a two-minute walk, or a thirty-second drive from my house to his. Not enough mileage to work up any significant speed.

We gathered our equipment and went into the bedroom to begin rehearsal.

I had been playing the guitar for several years, and although I never was a virtuoso or anything, I was adequate. I could pick out the chords to popular songs pretty easily, and knew quite a few songs on which I wanted us to work. The problem was I had never played a bass guitar before, Bebo had only been playing for a couple of months, Peewee had just bought a drum set the week before, and Bill had only acquired his keyboard the night before our first practice.

“Let’s try Twist and Shout,” I suggested.

Nobody did anything.

“How do we start?” Asked Peewee

“Let’s go on four,” I speculated. “One, two, three, and four….”

Bebo had his amp volume on par with his car speed… turned up to the maximum, and when he hit his version of the opening of “Twist and Shout,” the brick dust started coming out of the cracks in the ceiling where the chimney was connected. His Daddy’s two beagle dogs started howling at the top of their lungs. I felt like a B-52 bomber had just landed on my head, and shattered my eardrums.

“You might want to turn the volume down a little,” I screamed

About an hour later, after the police had left from investigating the disturbing the peace complaint from Bebo’s neighbors, we resumed our rehearsal with the volume cranked down to a one on all of our amps, and with Pewee’s drums padded. With about three hours practice a night for the next two months we gradually developed a repertoire that included enough songs to start our playing career.

Bebo’s cousin owned a skating rink at a place called, “Pigeon Mt. Lake,” and after a phone call or two, we were booked to play a weekend engagement there. I was as nervous as a porcupine in a room full of balloons when we arrived. Bebo, Bill and Peewee had drunk most of a six pack of beer each, and were not feeling any pain.

Unfortunately, or fortunaely depending on your point of view, I was not a good drinker. I had the tendency to get really bad vertigo after about three beers, and was prone to spend the balance of the night sitting on somebody’s bathroom floor, clutching a toilet to keep the room from spinning, and up-chucking occasionally. I was therefore appointed lead singer, and designated driver.

Things went O.K. for the first three or four songs. The crowd was really getting into the music, dancing and having a good time. We noticed that a small group of nice looking girls was getting closer and closer to the stage. They were all dancing by themselves and making eyes at the boys in the band.

I had just launched into our version of the Beatle’s song, “I’m Down,” when I noticed we no longer had a rhythm guitarist. Next we lost the keyboard sound. I thought something had happened to our power supply. When the drums stopped playing, I looked out into the glare of the spotlight and saw Bebo, Bill, and Peewee wildly dancing with the girls. Luckily, we had picked up a lead guitar player named Jimbo Black, who was more interested in making music than being on the make, who continued to back me up as I sang.

“Play a slow song next, Birdbrain,” (my nickname) yelled Bebo from the crowd, seemingly unaware of the fact that he had switched from band to fan.

“Get your ass back up here you dummy,” I countered “or you guys get to walk back to Trion.”

They relented, and we finished our set without further incident. After that, we played at mostly local affairs around town, and the guys always made a point to wait until after we had finished before plying their romantic skills on the unsuspecting female population.

We covered (played familiar tunes which had already been recorded and made popular by other bands) all sixty’s tunes, and as Rock bands of that time go, we weren’t half bad. A lot of the bigger towns had numerous, and I mean NUMEROUS, Rock bands back then. It was just the in thing to do, since music was such a big part of everyone’s life in the sixties. Groups were the rage because of the tremendous popularity of the Beatles, Stones, Animals, etc.

In our small town, our band was one of only about three going at that time, and we were the best of the three. We thought we had the gig for the senior prom sewn up.

We were already planning what type of equipment we were going to spend the money on. It turns out we had counted our chickens before they hatched. Or maybe we had counted too much on the girls that were on the committee to select the band to play at the prom. Some of them apparently still held grudges against us for various reasons, not the least of which was the smug attitude of a couple of our band members, and the fact that one of them had just broken up with one of the committee’s best friends.

Enter a band from just across the mountain from us known as “Wildfire.”

Wildfire was not any better musically than we were at that time, and they were a cover band just like we were. Add that to the fact that they were from out of town, and we were just a little upset at the fact they had gotten our gig.

We were mollified by the explanation from the committee that since a couple of our members WERE Seniors, they didn’t think it would be right that we would not get to enjoy the dance, if we were providing the music. We accepted their patronage. Wildfire came to play at the old gym in the upper floor of the “Y,” and it turns out that they had really been practicing. They were a lot better than when we had previously heard them, and our band ended up really enjoying the prom, since we got to dance, and appreciate the music, instead of working.

Years later, this little group from Ft. Payne, Alabama went to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and started playing there. They had stuck together, and stuck with their dream of making a living making music. It was many years after our band had played our final note, and I had broken my last guitar string. We had been long forgotten by everyone other than a couple of really fanatic fans, or good friends.

In the meantime, “Wildfire” had been practicing their act, and getting better and better. Finally, after an incredible amount of hard work, they landed a recording contract with a major label, and cut their first major album. They also changed their name to reflect their pride in being from a great Southern state. ALABAMA, was born.

I didn’t even know for a long time. It was at one of our class reunions, and someone was playing, “Feels So Right,” for everyone to slow dance to, when

“Corky” Vineyard said: “Did you know that this is the band that played at our Senior Prom?”

I had never made the connection, and it floored me to find out. What might have been if me and the other guys in “At’s Us,” had been a little more dedicated to our dream? What might have been…….? As Robert Frost might say, I guess that’s one of those “roads not taken.”

Anyway, can you Country music fans picture Randy Owens with long hair, singing “Mustang Sally?” Well, as I recall, he sounded pretty good.

Our closest relatives are quite telling. I mean, they are not telling us as in writing us a book or anything. They are not speaking English to us. Maybe a little sign language now and then. Rudimentary stuff. Yes, No…Gimme’ banana. Stuff like that.

99.6% of our genome is shared with Chimpanzees, and now scientists have found, also with Bonobos, (pygmy chimps) although we share a different 1.6% of our genetics with Chimps than we do with Bonobos.

Monkeys and Greater Apes, like the Chimpanzees, are generally not pleasant creatures. Chimps especially will become very vicious creatures as adults. Just think back a few years when the poor lady in New York City got her face ripped off by one of her friends “pet” chimpanzees. Vicious.

My Father in law was a Veterinarian. Dr. L.J. Neurauter. He was an administrator, and after he retired from the Air Force, he ran the BIG primate center out in Davis, California. But he didn’t like monkeys. He certainly didn’t like the Chimpanzees. One time we visited them in Davis, and took a tour of the primate center. “Don’t get too near the Chimpanzee compound,” said Dr. Neurauter. “They’ll throw feces at you, and they are really accurate.” I took him at his word. He went on to tell us how none of the handlers would ever…ever…get in the chimpanzee compound with them out, unless they had a death wish. Vicious with each other, and vicious with human beings. Almost like a hatred of human beings.

Our closest relative, as far as genetics go. I know a lot of people are gonna’ say: “We didn’t evolve from monkeys!”

So true.

We had a common ancestor with the chimpanzees and bonobos about 4 million years ago, and the ancestor who eventually evolved into human beings split off from that common ancestor. I imagine they were pretty vicious animals. Out of the three most closely related Primates, the Bonobos, who are the smallest, are the least vicious. Humans and Chimpanzees….not so much.

Survival of the fittest…and the meanest.

As Anthropology major in college, I took a lot of classes in Physical Anthropology. Dr. Butler. A hard man to please if you didn’t study like you outta’. He once told me that early man was probably a vicious animal, but also a social animal. Conditions of living dictated that families stay together for protection from larger predators. Sabre tooth tigers, Cave bears. You know…all that Jean W. Auel stuff. Eventually families started hanging around together for even more protection. They became tribes. Tribes grouped together and became ethnic groups. Discovered agriculture. Started building small villages, towns, cities. Still maintained the viciousness. The aggression and the primal instincts of those first ancestors.

Survival of the meanest?

For how long?

The creator alone knows, and he ain’t telling.