DATELINE–The Natural World

HBO. Nintendo. Doritos. Bonita Bananas. IBM.

A late-breaking wave of Computer Generated Advertisements (CGA’s) feature nothing less than a planet filled with singing Apes.

The dream of a thousand Adams before him is finally realized in the whimsical hit-or-miss tactics of the modern day Marketing Executive. Tarzan in a power tie, the V.P. thinks naught of what he does though nature will remember.

Odwalla will not recall this wacky head-on collision between simians and Silicon Graphics workstations. But nature will remember this turning point wherein the boundaries between humans and their surroundings became petrified, immobile, just as their vision of the world feigned a degree of transparency previously reserved for gods. Walls of glass, frames of silicon, windows of stone.

But nature has no memory, you respond, glibly. On the contrary, gentle reader, nature’s memory is Read Only and it is written into the ground with a freehand of fossils, ash and blood.

The talking monkey is a wild card, the gratuitous Joker of the pack. When it has finally risen to the top of the deck, it will not be man who (or which) has the last laugh. For the cages we build weigh us down deeper into the ground, tethered to an artificially fixed place in the food chain by means of animal skins, bones and monkey brains feverish with the next Prozac, Xanax, Zoloft.

Go ahead, naked chalk boys, make the monkeys sing and laugh and sell your crappy products. The best baseball players come from Latin America. The natives always have their turn at bat.