Of Electric blankets and futons

In “My dinner with Andre”, he mildly chastises Wally for loving the comfort of an electric blanket, feeling that it separates him from whatever residual connection there may remain between “man in city” and “man in nature”.  Feeling the cold is good.  It can make one feel alive.  Comfort, in contrast, is soporific, not just in the benign sense of a good nights’ sleep, but as something which dulls and deadens the animals senses.

Ones sees this impatience with excessive comfort in things like CrossFit, Spartan Races, commando training for civilians, adventure races, and the like.

But ponder the next step: Virtual Reality.  Ponder children growing up in climate controlled homes, lathered in sun screen when they venture out (never too far, and in most cases never out of the sight of the nervous mother), and surrounded by mind deadening electronics almost from birth.  I will leave that thought there.

The other thing I wanted to share was a thought about the health of Americans.  What if, as a thought experiment, all chairs and bed frames were banned, and all toilets converted to squat toilets, such that people had to eat sitting on the floor, shit squatting, and sleep on the floor, as they do in much of the world?  How long would it take the balloon people to figure out how to not be absurdly obese?

So many people think that lines constitute intelligence, that logic flows in the real world the way it does in thought.  This has always been ridiculous, but it is reinforced by an educational system divorced from animal realities, from cold and heat and hunger and thirst, and the following needs to be functionally intelligent to survive.

I am not one of those people who assumes that because things are flowing in one direction that they cannot reverse course.  We can never know what will happen, can never know when a simple idea will take hold, can never know when the light will dawn again in long vacant eyes.