Hello all,
My name is Elric. I was fifteen and a half years old when the universe dictated to me that I must start working. It then took me 20 years to get my G.E.D. (explaining that would take a while) and 10 more years after that to find myself here, finally enrolled in college. I have Asperger’s, Sensory In-Put Disorder, M.D.D., and P.T.S.D.. Truth be known, these are only some of the reasons my life’s experience is unlike 90% of those I have met in life, you see, all of that was happening in a house run by two heroin addicts… So, I was left to explore and discover the world on my own.
In way of sharing a passion with the class I will offer this; I wish to be happy. When I was a small boy, I was asked like many of you were, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” to which I always answered “Happy”. Finding myself in a complex, confusing, and violent world I determined that the reason it was like this was because I did not know enough to understand what was going on (the world as I saw it, my addict parents receiving absolution every Sunday, why the people on the T.V. were happy and we were not…). I love to learn, I always believed that if I only knew a bit more, I would get it. Even better it turned out that I really enjoyed learning, History, Science, Math, Physics (Quantum and otherwise), Reading (from Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and Homer to Edgar Allen Poe, Orson Scott Card, and my favorite of all, Neal Stephenson). I love to learn, to understand (I take a special pride in being able to see other people’s perspectives on things even when I do not agree), to ponder and to debate. I am thrilled by intellectual discourse even on such distasteful topics and politics (which always seems to leave a sour taste behind but the topic needs discussion that it may improve). I have very few photographs at all, and none of myself reading nor at debate, I did take one first semester for a class and I will include that.
I have been told that I was not one to suck my thumb as an infant but instead sucked my big toe, which I remember doing until I was five to be honest. As far back as I can recall, mostly from age three on, I always had a sort of fascination with my feet. I have longish, and dexterous toes. I have always thought of them as hands with larger palms and short fingers. When I saw the chimps at the Chicago Zoo back in 1977, saw how they gripped the tree with their whole foot… I saw value, I saw better use, I saw feet being used as the hands I believed them to be, and I felt vindicated. I had been using my feet for all sorts of things, not just as a pacifier. To this day I pick up items with my feet, I open doors, turn lights on and off, turn on or off the water, I always flush with my foot… I even used to sit on my couch and eat ice cream or cereal while playing original Nintendo (Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda) using the “Nintendo Pro Controller” with it on the ground using my feet to play. I catch most things I drop on one foot or the other, and that without looking… I find my feet are extremely sensitive, to this day I can feel small pebbles and cracks in the sidewalk while wearing logging boots, in part simply due to the amount of constant attention they receive from me (I have been wiggling and playing with my toes the whole time I wrote this).
I have met other “finger-toe” people in my life. They shared a similar experience in their lives with me, in that those around us seem to have a low opinion of the usefulness of feet. Those with less dexterous feet and toes seem to more readily think feet “dirty” and /or look down on them as somehow beneath their concern. I always ask, if you do not love and care for your feet how will you get around? If you ignore them and keep them eternally in shoes, how will you learn to use them fully? Do your feet not talk to you like our hands do, with a constant barrage of sensory input signals and information about the environment?
I suppose it has to do with my running around barefoot all year as a child, except in winter (and when I was not barefoot, I wore sandals, I did not wear “shoes” before kindergarten except to go out to dinner, or to church on Sundays), helped me to see the value of my feet, the amount of information they convey about the world, I even noticed how standing on concrete barefoot is different from standing directly on the earth. What I mean to say is that I can feel the ground beneath my feet, feel that it is alive, but concrete and steel do not feel like that when you stand on them, concrete does not even feel the same as granite or other still in the earth ore does. I imagine that hard sole shoes (which my ancestors did not partake in until the 1930’s) took away (muted or blocked) much of the connection to the earth we all once had and made it much easier for the world to become industrialized. I do not see native peoples or Africans digging every single salable ore, mineral, or oil/ natural gas from the earth. Now, this world we live in, it is over-run with people that feel no direct connection to this earth and the results, in North America are fires throughout the northwest while the southwest floods; people dying from heat in the southeast while people in Texas suffer their first blizzard since 1929 and this year’s storm covered significantly more of the state that that little storm in ’29 did.
Other ways in which we have forcibly altered our own biology and physiology include losing most of the body’s hair through climate control and the use of clothing. Prehistoric humans wore skins, slept in caves, went without fire for ages, and were extremely hairy but as we developed better means of feeding and housing ourselves, as well as better and better clothing to provide environmental protection, our bodies began losing the hair that had protected us from both environmental damage and the cold as well. Another example comes from an article I read in March. It was about how we had to choose to evolve and adapt when large animals became scarce. In the recent article titled “The human brain grew as a result of the extinction of large animals”, published by Dr. Miki Ben-Dor and Prof. Ran Barkai from the Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University, Israel, (https://www.newswise.com/articles/the-human-brain-grew-as-a-result-of-the-extinction-of-large-animals) they theorize that the necessity of learning to hunt small animals after the death of the megafauna (large animals). In the article the researchers tell us, “The decrease in the size of game and the need to hunt small, swift animals forced humans to display cunning and boldness - an evolutionary process that demanded increased volume of the human brain and later led to the development of language enabling the exchange of information about where prey could be found.”