Sabre-toothed cat. (Credit: American Museum of Natural History.)
Remember when all you needed was a stick, a rubber ball, and the fellas from around the block to have some fun? Play some ball, chew some Big League, break some windows, and shoot the breeze on a nice summer day, maybe even play hooky and swipe a cig from Pops. Weren’t those the days? Simple times, simple pleasures. Now these kids got to have their All Star Pro Elite, Dri-Lex, dual-welting, horse-leather, fastback, Trap-Eze, twin-turbo, super-rolled mitts, Louisville Slugger Code XYK 5000 bats, and fifty-dollar dual-metal propulsion hyper-jet cushion, anti-gravity, anti-aircraft, anti-coagulant cleats. Two hundred bucks for a pair of shoes? Shoeless Joe, look how far we’ve fallen.
And what happened to the auto industry? Used to be we built stuff in this country, real machines; factories made cars to get a fella where he needed to go: Plymouth, Cadillac, Continental, Oldsmobile, Bel Air. Now we just got hybrids and Priuses. Prii? Priuples? Cars didn’t used to be plastic hydrogen airbags with LCD MP3 DVD MTV players for the squirts in the back seat. They were works of art.
Don’t even get me started on television either. It’s just one piece of garbage after the next. What ever happened to sitting down by the fire with Pop, home from work, Ma clearing the dishes after a delicious three-course meal of chicken noodle soup, meatloaf, and apple pie, and tuning into that good ole’ commie FDR on the tube. Golden age of TV, my ass. Snookie, J-Wow, Dating Naked, Swamp Monsters, Fish Monsters, Naked Fishing, Naked Swamps, Fishing Naked, America’s Next Top Naked Model, Top Naked Chef, Dancing With The Naked Stars, Dancing Naked With The Stars– what is this crap? All people seem to want is sex and vampires. What about Sinatra?!
You know, it used to be, you could go to town with a nickel, see three movies, buy a holiday turkey, get yourself some nookie, have some ice cream, drink a beer with the boys, and come home with a dime! And those were pictures with real class—music, a little bit of flair—now it’s all Iron Man 5D and interweb tubes and smart pads. Must be that I’m just old-fashioned. Thanks Obama.
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Call me an out-of touch-old fart, but I miss the simpler times. You come home from a good day of hunting woolly mammoth, poke your head into the cave, and there she is, your one and only, done picking berries, having survived another day without being mauled by that pesky neighborhood saber-tooth. Geez, are those things annoying, and they’re running rampant. It’s out of control! Frolicking about without a care in the world!
There are only four things that I want in life: kill mammoth, eat mammoth, propagate genes to optimize reproductive success, and find new cave paintings. Isn’t that enough? All of this noise that the neighbors are making with those animal-skin contraptions and blowing through hollowed rhinoceros horns—it’s a disgrace to our culture! When was the last time we even had a decent B&W cave painter—artists who were content with scratching charcoal onto a flat cave wall? Can’t remember? That’s because they’re all dead! Who killed our culture? I say it was an inside job—these noise-making neighbors are hijacking society as we know it! And how about these New-Wave cave painters, huh? They’re using colors. Color in cave paintings? Next thing you know, two dimensions won’t be enough. I miss the days where I could just sit inside the cave and start a little fire without having to worry about these new-fangled sculptures strewn about my cave. I just want to listen to cousin Groot talk about the other tribes and how it’ll all turn out okay, watch the flickering light make the decently flat, monochromatic animals dance on the walls, eat meat, and then attempt to propagate genes before falling asleep. I don’t understand these youths.
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If I see just one more of those fancy-ass flagella, propelling another parasitic paramecium around this neighborhood, I swear on my genetically identical mother’s cytoplasm that I’ll release my lysosomes all over them. Speaking of which, whatever happened to good old-fashioned fission? Whoever heard of this sexual reproduction nonsense, meiosis and mitosis? I remember when it was just me and my prokaryotic buddies, drifting around those brackish bodies, chugging fresh water, maybe after a real rough day of diffusion going straight for the hard saline stuff. Now we got these god-awful eukaryotes mucking up the town with their membranous organelles, absorbing symbiotic mitochondria and releasing ribosomes left and right.
And breeding—whoever heard of breeding? I want to pass on my genes, simple, replicate DNA, and split. I almost feel bad for these kids. Genetic recombination, nuptial gifts, sexual selection, and this courtship nonsense—my God, it’s enough to make a microorganism’s nucleus spin! I’m a simple cell of simple means and simple wants, and I have no urge to seek out a mate just so I can have non-identical progeny talk back to me like one of their protozoan friends. No, I have no interest in genetic bottlenecks and punctuated equilibrium. I don’t want to pay no stinking dowry to that retrovirus down the street, or start buying chocolates and flowers for that cute bacterium in my aerobic respiration class. Am I the only one who misses that boiling hot cosmic soup of single-celled organisms minding their own business, budding and fissioining as they please?
Before I’m gone, there’s going to be flagella everywhere—I can already see them, waving around indecently. Life is tough enough; let’s keep things simple. Even complaining used to be easier.
Jonathan Green is an MFA candidate at Stony Brook Southampton. He misses the good old days of Tamagotchis, Pokémon Cards, Ring Pops, and VCR’s, like a decent American should, and fully plans on tweeting, blogging, and Instagramming all about it.