Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

 

I've just posted I think about a hundred and seventy or so new experiences to BME. Thanks to all the writers and of course the review team as well. I couldn't do it without you! And to Pincushion for the cover shot as well go some thanks.

As you know, Rachel came to visit today. I played with and cooked breakfast for Nefarious (waffles again with fresh berry sauce), and then at I think around noon we all headed out for sushi (we're lucky, because Nefarious has always been exposed to food of all sorts so there's never an issue — yet — with “that's gross!”), got a few books (I got a book about the history of walking, and then some kids books too), and then finished that off with grocery shopping.

I've also got ModBlog updated, but now that there's advertising on this blog (Z*) I'm feeling all guilty that my writing is so trite lately! I feel like I owe all the traffic truly horrific political coverage, or at least some insane sounding rants that contain (hopefully) at least a tiny and thought-inspiring seed of truth?

But seriously, here's a topic for conversation:

Who would you rather be?

“What is the best point in history to live in?“. In the past I've thought that now is a good time because there's massive change going and maybe even an apocalypse or two to witness… but because I watch a lot of Survivor, I've been wondering to myself whether it might not be more fun to have been a hunter-gatherer (in a nice, warm, fertile part of the world anyway — Siberia might suck)?

When they first started the show Survivor, they weren't really sure how well city folk would take it dumped in the middle of nowhere. It turned out though that even people with almost no experience in the wild were able to figure out how to make fire, find food, build shelter, and even have fun — almost all contestants have described the largest constant on the show as boredom.

But imagine the “show” without physically draining challenges and emotionally devastating “tribal councils”. Imagine if instead of strangers, you were with friends and family you loved… The simple truth is that we humans are so much smarter than just about everything else on this planet that nothing else even has a chance. Given the right environment, life could be nothing but playing and story telling — what humans are best at.

I've been thinking about this more as well because as you may have noticed, I've been doing a lot of painting. One of my big influences is Paul Gauguin (“In order to do something new we must go back to the source, to humanity in its infancy.”) as I'm sure is no surprise at all to anyone who knows me and has a decent knowledge of art history. Anyway, at the age of 43, a destitute Gauguin sailed away from a Europe that he saw as increasingly artificial and conventional, and with a shallow imitative art world.

Arriving in first Tahiti and later the Marquesas Islands (French Polynesia), Gauguin never looked back (and I think never really went back to Europe physically other than one brief trip to France). His best work was produced on these tropical islands, and I think it was this “culture of playing” that captured him. For those that prefer a more modern reference, the movie Thin Red Line's deserter scenes (based on the Battle of Guadalcanal which is in the same general region) tell the same story just as beautifully.

Now I've just got to get Phil trained on the BME software enough that I can take off to the islands! Oh, and someone to come with me. So far my “find Zentastic's sexiest reader” contest has only gotten one application, and it included neither photos nor a proposed travel destination — “NEXT!”

Oh, and I almost forgot: Gauguin's paintings were relatively worthless while he was alive, but their value spiked once he died, and they now collect as much as (a truly ludicrous) forty million!