There are bonobos here in Des Moines.
My kids showed me a video of them. They live in a special facility. The bonobos I mean. I guess our house is also a special facility, in a way, but not one that’s appropriate for bonobos. One day, maybe. The bonobos here live in a facility focused on studying them, while our house’s focus on our children is less in service of science. In the video one of the bonobos is taught to play Minecraft using a touch screen computer, which makes the bonobo doubly superior to me, as I still use a flip phone and can’t play Minecraft. It reminded me that in one of the alternate versions of my life that I occasionally imagine I am a primate language acquisition researcher - a product of seeing things about Koko the gorilla at a young age.Well that’s got me started. My week of much work continues. It’s often weeks of much work, but this week is much mucher than most week’s muchness, and the backlog of much stuff I didn’t get to this week will mean much work next week as well. Ah well. The much work week means minimal memories, most certainly minimal memories meriting commission to the page.
One thing I do remember this week is my kids doing something I thought would be good to write down but I didn’t write it down and now I don’t recall what it was. I registered only that there ought to be a memory, not the content of the memory itself. That’s a metaphor for something, but I forget for what.
I’ve heard the thing of writers carrying notebooks around with them to write down things for use in their writing and have always been impressed by it, hearing it as a commitment to art such that life is organized around that commitment, and that may well be the case but it also seems now like without doing that less of my life sticks in the first place. Life is a cluster of the experiences hitting, like insects, the windshield of consciousness, their numbers declining over time. Not sure that works but I forget why.
The five year old brought me some tea the other day, did I write about that already? When the cat came in to see me? I think so, can’t be bothered to check. (Been a long day capping a long week and the coffee’s not working, yowza! Ages ago I’d go into book and record stores, books and records being two of my central preoccupations, yet once in the store my mind would go completely blank, like ‘do I like reading or music? I’m not sure.’ This feels a bit like that except generalized further.)
I type this with the most social of the cats asleep, paw twitching, maybe dreaming of catching a mouse. I too dream about my job, little cat. I took a nap today after the workshop and dreamed I’d accidentally clicked a phishing scam link then spent a long time on the phone with my bank. In one of their many fine songs the literary pop punk band J Church sang “even my dreams these days have work related themes,” and it turns out there are some things sadder than dreams about our jobs, which are dreams about the unpaid busy work like sitting on hold with the bank.
The bonobo video was cool though, the bonobo learned to play minecraft well enough to play with a human player who thought he was playing with a human. Obviously it’d be very strange if he thought ‘I’m playing with a bonobo.’ My favorite part is the enthusiasm on my kids’ part - they were excited about watching the video and about sharing it with me. That’s lovely. They’re lovely.
