Animal, Mineral, Radical by BK Loren

Author:BK Loren
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619022010
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2018-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

THE EVOLUTION OF HUNGER

As their diets changed . . . their teeth, no longer a primary weapon, changed shape, which ultimately led to the development of human speech.

—Reay Tannahill, Food in History1

We crossed mountains and plains, rivers and deserts, our knuckles raw for dragging them across so many millennia. It was finally time to settle down, maybe plant a little garden, balance our diet of wild mastodon with a few fruits and grains, some leafy vegetables. It was back then when our mouths changed. Our teeth no longer hung like sharp icicles behind our lips. We learned to grind back and forth on our molars. Our tongues became a different muscle, with a different shape, and when we sat down to dinner, new sounds floated out of our mouths—sounds that, with our newly evolved lips, we could recreate over and over. We called the new sounds syllables, and as they slid across our tongues, we created words. We celebrated our newly found gastrolinguistics as hominids tend to do: with food. Our souls hunger for communication. Our bodies hunger for food.

When I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I hungered for sleep. Depression, the clinical kind, and its best buddy, insomnia, kept me company, and we went walking together, sometimes late at night, or early in the morning: any time, that is, when everyone else was sleeping. Sometimes when we walked, it snowed. It rarely snows in Albuquerque, but when it does, it comes in the night, when you can sip darkness from the sky like wine—a little celebration with confetti. At the first sign of morning, though, the snow sinks back into the earth, soaking the dry desert beneath the city.

I lived on Central Avenue, the skanky end of town, across the street from defunct, boarded-up buildings, strip joints, and neon bars (now closed). The skyline behind the low buildings was humped with dead volcanoes, ancient, impotent, caved in at the crater. But on one particular night, those spent volcanoes looked like tufts of meringue, and snow blanketed the street. The city was like a baby sleeping, and I needed to be quiet so as not to wake it.

I walked alone, unless you counted Ragman as another person, which most people did not. His nickname was given to him by the homed-ones because he had a fondness for suit ties, the kind worn by businessmen. He tied them around his body, his legs, his arms, his waist, his head. Navy blue ties, red ties, Mickey Mouse ties, golf-tee ties, diamond print ties, silk, cotton, polyester ties, all up and down Ragman’s body. His skin was leathered, though he was still young; his hair was bleached blond, though his given name was Carlos, and he was skinny as a rock star in his tight, worn-out jeans.

If there could be a rock star of the homeless, Ragman was it. People in town avoided him, to be sure, but it was 1988, before the paranoia of the masses (or more accurately, of the classes), and we spoke of Ragman with more gravity than disdain.

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