Real Life

Real Life:

Are there two tribes of people?

I see vacancy in a lot of eyes that I envy sometimes. But not really. Just wistfully.

Am I just more sensitive to the input of the world? Is my experience what everybody experiences but doesn’t talk about? When I walk down busy streets and I see people doing things that I would never ever do and act in ways that I would never act, I wonder.

I heard recently that there was an overlap of the homo sapiens and the Neanderthals. That they mated. That our race might have two strains running through it.

I see that some people lack the capability for introspection and self-correction. The concept that they might be wrong about their beliefs is foreign to them and will never cross their minds. It makes me think that if I didn't question myself, that I wouldn't push forward or ever change. That maybe doubt is what leads us to being more than we were, to being human.

I wonder about nature versus nurture. The origins of our race are lost to supposition and best guesses.

Like the etymology of slang terms.

I also remember the Germans putting forth "concrete proof" that the shape of a Jew’s skull proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were lower on the evolutionary scale than an Aryan.

That makes me feel like the closer I get to feeling like there are two kinds of people in the world or that some people are better than others, the more I feel like a Nazi.

My brother had a dream where he and I were super heroes. We were in the Hall of Justice with the other heroes. They were in a circle with their hands in the middle making a ‘circle of power’ or something like that to activate their powers in a true ‘Avengers Assemble!’ battle cry before they fought the bad guys. My brother didn’t feel like joining in and I was trying to convince him to do it. He said that I convinced him to do it in the end.

Just the thought of him having this dream brings tears to my eyes.



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Pink Planet

It was the tails that gave them away.

A lot like the ostriches back on earth. Those big birds would stick their heads in the sand and think that they were hiding, safe from hunters. They weren’t.

Here on this interminable pink planet, we were clearing the inhabitants. There were squat creatures with long tails.

Every time they hid, they’d stick their long pink tails up straight in the air like flags at a golf course. Herding them was easy.

I wasn’t sure if it was because they had no feeling in the tips of their tails, that they had no awareness of the tips of their tails, or that they were just plain stupid but I was starting to lean towards the third option.

Policy: Shoot one in front of the others so that they understand what our weapons do, then walk towards them. They back up right into the nets.

The whole operation is taking less time than expected. There’s usually a token rebellion or a smart couple of natives that spontaneously develop the ability to plan before the Full Clearing is done but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen this time.

They’ll be shipped off to other worlds as pets. If they turn out to be edible, they’ll be bred to be used up as protein rations. If they turn out to be edible and palatable, they’ll be bred as delicacies for off-world gourmets in fancy restaurants.

When I mentioned before that this planet was pink, I wasn’t doing it justice. The planet is all shades of pink. There are shades of pink here that I never want to see again. There is an unending palette of pinks that somehow never creeps over fully into the colours of red or purple. The sunsets, the translucent lakes, the trees, the grass, the little guys we’re hunting, even the god damned ground.

The experts are happy because they think that a lot of the crystal deposits might be diamonds, making this a very valuable planet indeed. Not that I’ll ever see any of that money.

I shoot a concussion flash straight up. When it goes off, I can see two hundred golf-flag tails quiver in the bushes around me. Here we go.

Two more months to go.




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