...and such was life in Leningrad.

Too much electricity.

It feels so much better when you don't have the hum of electronic devices around you. In other words, I'm waiting for a powerout. Those are nice. The only disturbances are the flickering of a candle, the shuffling and blabbering of people around you, and your own breath. Now I think about that and I don't know whether that's natural anymore.

I mean, think about it. Is it natural for there to be a lack of electronic-device-humming and then of basically any other sounds? In this case, what is natural? Would it be more natural if you heard the sounds of animals scurrying through leafy woodpaths? Would it be more natural if you heard the sounds of animals in the process of mauling their prey? SCREEEEEEEEEEK!

Or am I going too far back? Would it be more realistic to think of something tribal, without the distinct noises of the animals that (should) surround you? Would there be some chant? Not a KUMBAYA campfire tone-deaf disaster, but something more melodic or intricate? Should I define the time period? Nah, I'd like to think that one time period was more natural than the others. How easy WAS it to die back then?


All of this makes me ask one major question: Why, nowadays, do we have to resort to killing amongst ourselves?

With that, how often did we kill amongst our own race back then? Is it something in our blood? (For example, you can look to the kinds of animals that fight each other in the battle for a mate.) Or is it a substitution for the fact that we don't really have to exert that much directly-related effort to eat dead animals anymore?--Is it like those things in our blood that cause allergy symptoms, because they don't have to go after intestinal worms or malaria or whatever they would've gone after when we were under those threats? (We don't know that such things are the cause of allergies, but it is one of the major theories. Still, there are too many major theories to single it out as being the foremost obvious cause.)

And, having just read an article Porter gave me entitled "The Spirit of Disobedience" by Curtis White, published in Harper's Weekly, what happened to Religion and Reason that didn't pit us against each other?

It'd be pretty ironic or stupid if we experienced nuclear winter and humans just downright lost the battle against other animals.
Too much electricity.