Child's Play
Last week I had an hour between the time I got off work and the time Rob would arrive to pick me up. It was a nice day outside, a bit warm, but it was a better choice to hang outside than to stay in the work cave. I hung out under a tree in a grassy area near the parking lot so I could avoid a sunburn and my mind took off into the world of make-believe. I was actually on some other planet where you had to stay in the shade most of the time because your body temperature would rise a certain amount for each minute you stayed in the sun. To travel from place to place you had to move from shady spot to shady spot and if the next shady spot was too far then you would die before you got there. The ground you were traveling on made a difference too because rock would cause you to heat up faster. I played around with some mathematical formulas to calculate distance one could travel and then thought about what sort of culture this would produce and what sort of means they would develop to deal with the situation and what similarities it might have, if any, with the desert dwellers of earth. By the time Rob picked me up I had three different culture groups (the cave dwellers, the man-made city structure folk and the shade-oasis building nomads), a variety of peculiar animals and plants, and some ideas of what sort of agriculture they might practice. The hour went by really fast, but what I'd really like to know is why the hell I can't do that on those nights when I can't seem to fall asleep?