Commons and cave bears

Columbus wouldn't have discovered the New World if he was married.

As it turns out Columbus was married.

Well, it's fair to say that that's why he found a New World that was already inhabited.

Sometimes, after s has been staring up at the mobile for five minutes or so she throws her arms out wide in the classic moro reflex and then she commences screaming as if the bears were real and possibly going to eat her. It's fair to say that she's far more intelligent than I sometimes give her credit for. Bears are scary. Every time I go hiking, even when it's in Alexandria, I briefly entertain the idea that a bear is going to appear on the trail and attempt to eat us. And I always had to ask myself whether I'd run or let the bear eat me while S escaped. I think it's fair to say that meeting a bear on the trail is probably the sort of thing that builds character.

Now I'm pretty certain that I'd let the bear go for me first. I have 2x S now.

Sometimes I say things like, "I want to move to a college town sized place that's a bit warmer than here." And S says, "Wait, what type of place do you want to move to?" This is the sort of conversation that I'll probably be having in my eighties.

One of the things that I've always remembered from an old DFW interview was his assertion that the basic sorts of things we have in common don't turn out to be all that interesting. Specifically, the shared love of a quick sort of joke as an expression of humor. I like this about people. It is commonplace.

A lot of the time I find myself writing about loneliness because I think it's something we all have in common. The act of writing, ironically, is a sort of bridge between reader and writer.

If I tried to build a bridge in reality, it would fail. Oxen would die. Oregon would never be reached. Words are not all that I have, but it's close.

Sadie, unquestionably, is a very aesthetically pleasing child. I attach a great deal of importance to imminently banal things.

Someone who wasn't her father might question it.

They would be wrong.

In an essay by Milan Kundera he describes the great French writer, Rabelais, experimenting with the concept of the novel. He says, back then, it could have still been anything.

s looks like a pear in her cloth diapers. A giant pink pear.

I am bored easily. However, I will always teach my child that old maxim, "Only boring people make you bored."

I find travel interesting but not work. This probably falls under the veil of things that nearly everyone has in common like quick jokes.

For a while, everyone told us that s looked a bit more like me. However, the more that I see of her, I think she looks just like herself. This is not intended to be profound. Years ago, a fellow writer put it best: Profound-I'm in favor of things being found.

I have an overactive imagination, which may or may not revolve heavily around a fear of bears. I'm fairly certain that if I lived alone I'd sleep with a baseball bat under my pillow.

I think the most salient thing we have in common is a love of money or perhaps the self. Perhaps the self just loves money.

The Cave Bear lived during the Pleistocene and in my childhood it was thought to have been even bigger than a polar bear.

s is sleeping now underneath her mobile of bears seemingly unaware of their malevolent intent.

Why do movies suddenly seem too long?

The morphology of cave bear teeth suggests that some cave bears may have been herbivores. Ergo; one would not have to be afraid of encountering an eight foot bear while hiking. Though, they would never be able to find out if they would run or stay. This seems like a flaw in the whole idea of a cave bear. Presumably, a wise person could just avoid caves.

Humans are responsible for a number of bad things, but we probably didn't kill off the cave bears.

The thing that I've never liked about strict non-fiction is the lack of an imposed narrative. The inability of historical data to present a coherent story.

When s sleeps, she squeaks like a mouse. Mice are reputed to scare off elephants, which has nothing to do with cave bears.

One of the main reasons that we probably don't have ancestral roots with Neanderthals is the evidence that they may have worshiped cave bears, clearly we have nothing in common.