Kittens Fall

It's been a jungle of a week. Well, actually, a jungle of a year. Make that a decade, and to a lesser degeree, a lifetime.

There are times I lay aside the stripes that make survival of a greater ease, attempting to rise above the state of my environment, my surroundings. It is not an elitist thing, it is a sentience thing. I believe in things greater than the day to day.

That makes me a dichotomy and a conundrum, even to myself, on occasion. It also complicates my life in ways you can't imagine if your worst problem is mired in the day to day or, rather, in your day to day.

Memory is the curse of those who care. Good line. Glad I wrote it. In the quotable works of the Romantic Poet of the Internet (some days I am effing tired of that sobriquet) it has a place. But memory is not the only curse of sentience. We live in a graceless age. But, having not lived in other times, how are you or I to know that it has not always been so. Again, the issue of the now comes forward, the now might always have been thus.

Having a larger brain, perhaps Neanderthal Man achieved true self-swareness before Cro-Magnon and that's why the latter survived...sentience is not a good survival tool, if the necessity of actions for survival are rooted in the here and now, in an hostile environment. A sentient being is less likely to win a barfight, but more likely to build a society or plan for a future catastrophe on a global scale.

The sentient beings advance the environment in which the non-sentients fight to survive, making (ideally) the environment less hostile (and by environment I am not referring to it in an ecological sense, but as the world around them).

A lot of people who are friends and loved one have taken it on the chin this week (I, as well, actually), and I have been busy diverting all resource I can to solving problems, from my children to my past proteges, these are all people who need (yes, need) an outside force to help make their environment more conducive to survival, to ease of life, and I am not so cynical to believe the line I sometimes quote from a song about the kitten managing to get down out of the tree whether or not you ever show up.

Sometimes, the kitten dies. And I am not so debased of a soul to just shrug and say "well, kittens die". It would be easier to do so. Simpler, less stressful, to be sure. But morally vacant, and certainly not the act of a sentient being with an ounce of empathy remaining. I'll rescue who I can, ease those who can't avoid their problems and be available as empathetic ear to those I can do naught for.

There are times I feel like a human battery, like the poor souls in "The Matrix", turned into energy sources for a conqueror. But this is a place in the universe I have chosen to put myself in, and if you think a decade (or a lifetime) of venom does anything more than make my eyes water, you have severely misjudged the value of sentience.

Plug me in and point me to the nearest kitten in a tree.