Was Jack London Secretly a Gaian?

Summary: The knowledge of how to build a nest in a bare tree, how to fly to the wintering place, how to perform the mating dance—all of this information is stored in the reservoirs of the bird’s instinctual brain. But human beings, sensing how much flexibility they might need in meeting new situations, decided to store this sort of knowledge outside the instinctual system; they stored it in stories. Stories then...amount to a reservoir where we keep new ways of responding that we can adopt when the conventional and current ways wear out. – Robert Bly On the tiny isle of Manhattan, there are 80 bazillion human beings prowling around trying to deal with each other, or so it seems. In response to this ant-hill madness, I had no other choice but to invent a game so clever, so sinister, and so flat-out-fun that not one of those 80 bazillion people would see it coming. Nor could they stop its eventual triumph over the minds of people everywhere. (Except people who hate fun, I guess.) Thus began the era of “The Urban Fun Run.” The glorious rules of “TUFR” are as follows. You walk along somewhere in the crowded city, and you suddenly and without warning break out into a run as fast and hard and far as you want, dodging street-walkers and mailboxes alike. To improve things, you can up the Danger Quotient by running across light-changing streets, dodging traffic, and trying to squeeze through precarious bio-traffic, such as slack-jawed tourists and fanged pit bulls. Pretty sweet, right? And yet, somehow, incredibly, it gets even better! TUFR was working (and does work) pretty well to increase the Fun Factor of a boring day in Gotham. But I knew I needed to come up with something better, something bigger. Something that could be sold to ESPN as the Next Big Thing in Sporting Hijinks. The idea factory that is my brain then came up with this golden nugget: The Urban Fun Run Olympiad! The Olympiad is essentially the same as The Urban Fun Run, but with the following differences. First, it’s a competition, with many participants. Second, each participant would wear a GPS-enabled bracelet, with a beeping alarm thingamajig on it. There would be three or four “runs” scheduled of various lengths in one day. The participants know in advance the order of the runs and the lengths, but they don’t know when they will start. So, as the day begins, you just start walking along anywhere in Manhattan, or any urban area. At some point, your bracelet beeps and this signals the beginning of the first race. You run as straight as possible until your bracelet beeps again, signaling the end of the race. You have no idea what place you finish in. Then you continue walking around, and doing whatever you want, except that you can not rest. The only “resting” allowed is buying food from street-cart vendors, if you want to. At some random moment, could be 5 minutes or 5 hours later, the bracelet goes off again, and the next race has begun. You run until the bracelet beeps, etc., etc. until all 4 races for the day are over. Finally, you go to some central location to find out how well you did. (Now that I’ve revealed this publicly, I’m sure ESPN will be calling me any minute now. Still waiting…. waiting…) Podcast Powered By Podbean Now, all of this running, all of this need for an escape of some kind comes from New York City’s disgusting overflow of people, buildings, pit bulls, garbage, rats, banksters, and everything else. The running events are just my completely natural reaction to it (ahem.) And it’s not just Manhattan. Want a snapshot of modern life in this beautiful country of ours? 82% of Americans live in urban areas according to 2008 estimates, as opposed to rural. (The worldwide urban rate is 50.5%.) More than 8 out of 10 of us are squashed into a metropolis, living one on top of another, commuting like canned anchovies on mass transit for hours every day. We’re all up in each other’s spaces,