The Evolution Won't Be Televised

Think about how incomplete you felt the last time you left your home only to realize a while later that you left your phone at the house. Ever been out somewhere, went to grab your phone to check facebook, twitter or heaven forbid, make a call, and you nearly lost your shit because you hadn't a clue where the damn thing was?

It all started when it became commonplace for everyone to have cell phones. At first it was considered a luxury of course. As a kid I remember my dad had one of those vcr-sized phones installed in his company car, and I remember thinking I just wanted him to take us for a drive so we could call someone and look bad-ass doing it.

Later when everyone had a phone, I remember resisting the urge to have one on me constantly. I recall a bunch of us guys going out to some club or bar and I'd bust this one guy's nuts because he insisted on having his with him at all times. In my defense, my main reason for teasing the dude was a result of the douchebag aesthetic since it was one of those 3" wide phones that clipped onto your belt. Similarly, nowadays I would do the same with a dude I was out with if he wore one of those bluetooth headsets. He might be ready for that, but I am not. .

Bill Johnson on his cell phone, circa millions of years ago.

But things have changed a little since the early days. On my iphone right this second, I can watch live video of our planet from space. From fucking space.

Clearly, the advances and benefits are enormous. From emergencies to navigation to research to ordering a pizza without having to talk to some CSR, we've progressed enormously and this trend will continue, exponentially in fact.  Although Google has decided to stop selling their glasses, this is only a temporary blip - us soft mushy humans are still adverse to clunky wearables. Since many of us are already used to seeing people wearing watches, perhaps that's the direction we'll go. But I suspect the Next Big Thing will be when all this tech can be shrunk into a contact lense. Biotechnology is clearly the future and we've already seen it in the past and present, ranging from metallic hip replacements to artificial hearts to unbelievably advanced bionic limbs.

The average person might think we've completed our journey from star dust to single cell organisms to apes to humans, but they couldn't be more wrong. We continue to move forward and although the pace is picking up, it will still be hard to see it coming. The gap between machine and human is thinning. At first we'll still mostly be flesh and blood, but over hundreds and thousands of years, we'll eventually become something else.

As we should. 

There's No Such Thing As Small Change

I went to a local old timey diner for breakfast this morning. The food was fine and cheap and the servers were classic diner-lady types.

The decor is straight out of the mid 80's, and even the bathrooms were from another time. They have those really annoying faucets that only stay on when you physically turn them - I've never quite figured out how I'm supposed to properly wash my hands with those.  And even better, they had those manual towel roller thingy's to dry your hands. These are the kind where you pull down your bit of clean towel, and as new towel is pulled out, the old towel is fed back into the unit, and I guess they eventually take the whole roll out and have it washed. Even though I always get a clean bit of the towel, these things creep me out because you can often see the soiled towel that someone's just used.  For some reason the material - particularly the soiled portions - reminds me of old man's underwear. I just hope there's not some terrible incident from my past I've repressed that causes me to think this. But why is it that these old fashioned restaurants still exist? Certainly there are modern places to go, yet there's still something appealing about the diners. Often they remind people of their childhoods or some other earlier time.

Taking a larger view, we appear to be hard wired to seek out basic pleasures from an earlier part of our evolution as a species. This explains why we all love sitting around a campfire - it's primitive and cozy and strikes a chord, and we often just sit and stare into it. Similarly, we all crave the basic elements when we are denied them. In the desert city of Dubai, a gigantic indoor ski park was built. You can stay the night at an ice hotel in Quebec. City dwellers will drive hundreds of kilometers from their homes while enduring traffic congestion just to sit in the middle of bug infested woods.

We've certainly become an entitled society too. If you want ice cubes in your drink you just grab some from your freezer. Not long ago, massive blocks of ice were actually transported in ships from colder climates to warmer ones, making it a very hot commodity. The point is that as a society, we take a hell of a lot of things for granted. The invisibility in everyday things is the sheer brilliance of them. So although it's easy for me to scoff at the old man's underwear towel dispenser thingy, for a time that too was a very advanced solution to drying your hands.

An actual photograph depicting the invention of the donut.

Another misconception people have is the so-called "Eureka!" moment. Conventional thinking suggests that a single inventor or scientist would suddenly have a singular moment of brilliance. But in reality, major inventions were actually a compilation of hundreds of minor improvements from many different people over time. Whoever was able to pull everything together at the right time was the one who reaped the rewards though. Thomas Edison and the light bulb is a perfect example of this.

So pause sometime and look around you wherever you are. Think about all the blood, sweat and tears that went into making life unbelievably comfortable for you. You'll be amazed at just exactly how much was involved to get us from there, to here.

Darwin was right

It's no secret our musical preferences are forged in our teen years. The youthful mind is a hungry gorging beast, like a sponge or that giant sand vagina with teeth in Return of The Jedi.

When I was about 13 I was bored with what I was hearing on the radio. I grew up in a time when Top 40 radio was on the AM dial. I hated it all. I didn't relate to Michael Jackson, Pat Benatar or Madonna.  Then I discovered FM accidentally when I tuned in to Toronto's CHUM FM to listen to Theatre Of The Mind late Sunday nights. Musically I'd hear deeper album cuts from bands like The Police and The Boomtown Rats.

It wasn't long after that I discovered the station that changed everything for me. It's branded today as  102.1 The Edge, but then it was the one and only CFNY The Spirit of Radio.  From top to bottom it was free-form radio at it's finest. DJ's would often pick their own music, and once or twice I even remember "The Live Earl Jive" pulling the needle off a record mid-song because he simply didn't want to hear it anymore. Think that would happen today?

I was exposed to punk, new wave and innovative electronica that heavily influenced the alt rock bands of today. Of course there was New Order, The Smiths, The Cure and Depeche Mode, but there was also a lot of obscure artists who wouldn't get airplay anywhere else, because other than a few college stations, it was considered too weird for mainstream radio.  Love and Rockets, Siouxsie and The Banshees, The Cocteau Twins were just so completely different, and I loved it all. CFNY would also spin tunes from Canadian bands who wouldn't get a lot of exposure otherwise like Skinny Puppy, National Velvet and Blue Peter. And, I must admit it's easy to throw on the rose coloured glasses, but in reality some of the music I heard wasn't really to my liking. At the end of the day, it's an artform and up to interpretation.

I know I run the risk of sounding like a cranky old bastard stuck in another musical era, but that wouldn't be accurate. See, I believe in evolution in all its forms.  Today, I embrace new music and listen to bands like Bloc Party, Muse, James, Mother Mother and many others.

Much like Jones The Cat, I too want to end up with only
a couple of teeth in my head.

The point is, for me it's important to never stop growing. This applies to everything that comes along with life, good and bad. Roll with the punches. Adapt or die. Instead of fighting change, choose to change because time will march on anyway.

As Moby so brilliantly said, we are all made of stars, literally. Everything that's happened before this moment has all lead up to what you are this very second. And if it's worked for life on this planet for a few billion years, how can we possibly think otherwise?