Two steps forward

Every now and then this phrase pops into my head: "height of civilization". Some might say it happened in Ancient Greece, or perhaps the 17th-century Netherlands, or 19th-century France. But the majority of people, I think, would say this is it.

Why? Because knowledge gets accumulated -- not counting the part that gets suppressed. Because we have more conveniences than historical man ever had -- even if we're ransoming the environment to get them. Because we have more freedoms to choose -- though we squander them regularly.

Yes, we're livin' the dream.

Ha. If only.

Two random things to relate, in part because it's Friday and I haven't posted anything since Sunday.

First, a poem that I think is balls-out funny, told from the female cubicle worker's perspective. Think Pam from The Office. The poet's name is Deborah Garrison, b. 1965, Ann Arbor, MI. From her first collection, A Working Girl Can't Win, "Please Fire Me":

Here comes another alpha male,
and all the other alphas
are snorting and pawing,
kicking up puffs of acrid dust

while the silly little hens
clatter back and forth
on quivering claws and raise
a titter about the fuss.

Here comes another alpha male --
a man's man, a dealmaker,
holds tanks of liquor,
charms them pantsless at lunch:

I've never been sicker.
Do I have to stare into his eyes
and sympathize? If I want my job
I do. Well I think I'm through

with the working world,
through with warming eggs
and being Zenlike in my detachment
from all things Ego.

I'd like to go
somewhere else entirely,
and I don't mean
Europe.

I like the sense that we're in the cubicle worker's head, hearing her recollect metaphors she's probably thought of for a long time but never told anyone. Who's she going to talk to, right? Not the other "hens" and definitely not the "alpha male" bulls.

If you accept this notion of people as animals, you might try to track down some of the science behind that notion. You know, the statistic that we share 99.9% of our DNA with chimps. (Actually, it's 94%, but who's counting?)

You might even get to this word: atavism. That's "recurrence in an organism of a trait or character typical of an ancestral form". All you need is one example -- hypertrichosis, let's say, or the brawl between the Pistons and the Pacers in November of 2004 -- to know we're kept from our animal natures by the most tenuous of bindings. Snap! and we're loose.

The second random thing I want to share is the feeling I get sometimes that there's a monkey living inside me. Sometimes instead of standing in the shower, I'll crouch. From tub-level the shower stream breaks into droplets and feels vaguely like rain. And I'll wonder if there isn't a monkey in a tree somewhere in the world feeling the same thing.

Other times I'll be having a drink with friends and wonder if I'm that far removed from the first monkey biting into a piece of rotting fruit, finding nothing else on the ground that's edible. The taste to him is slightly "off" -- some of the sugars and starches are fermenting -- and the juice of the fruit flesh produces a slight euphoria. But he'll be okay -- his body makes the enzymes to break the alcohol down. Meanwhile I'll take a sip of my drink and wonder if the Muslims don't have the right idea.

How much of our sophistication is just artifice. How much of our style is just animal preening. How much of our civilization is just repackaging. I swear, sometimes I feel I'm heading right back into the trees.