100 Monkeys

An Old Fashioned Press Kit

After nearly two full years of pandemic isolation,  I'm beginning to feel that my life is like a car whose brakes have failed and I'm hurtling downhill toward a brick wall with no way to stop. One may say that this sensation is simply the theory of relativity at work -- time just seems to move faster when one has more behind than ahead. But I beg to differ. I think time actually is speeding up. It must be. It can't be that my brain just can't keep up. Sometimes I become homesick for the 1970s, as though that decade were a physical place.*

Things, they do change, don't they? For most of human history, the skills a person learned in youth served him most of his life, but over the last century, events have been moving at such an accelerating pace that it has finally become almost impossible to keep up. A person's knowledge becomes obsolete practically as soon as it is learned. When my first novel was published in 2005 (which is not that long ago, I'm telling you!), I was advised to create a physical press kit with photos and flyers and mail it to as many reviewers and book buyers as I could afford to buy stamps for. Ebooks were a novelty. Author websites were the new thing. 

Nothing is physical anymore - it's all virtual. Yesterday morning I attended a Zoom meeting on how to promote on Tik Tok.** Instagram is apparently old hat now, and I just created an Instagram account which I still don't know how to use.

A couple of days ago I was talking to a friend about the “One-hundredth Monkey” philosophy, which, briefly, goes like this: If you teach a certain number of monkeys (maybe a hundred, it’s a nice round number) how to do something, then suddenly and mysteriously every monkey in the world will know how to do it. This idea is based on a Japanese research project that occurred during the 1950′s, which is too convoluted to go into here, but in the end, the scientists proposed that this phenomenon suggests some sort of monkey collective consciousness in the universe. There was a book that was published a few years ago by Malcolm Gladwell called The Tipping Point, which proposes something along the same lines for human beings. One person can come up with an original idea, and tell it to another person, who tells someone else, etc., until a point comes where the idea has spread throughout human consciousness, whether each individual has been told or not. I like the idea that we’re all connected somewhere on a subconscious (or should I say superconscious) level.

All throughout my life, I’ve felt rather like monkey number 101, at least where my generation is concerned. I’m a leading-edge baby-boomer, and since I was quite young I’ve noticed that as soon as I get a brilliant and completely original idea, it suddenly becomes a standard Boomer fare — from getting tired of curling my hair and letting it grow long and straight (1960s), to horrible fear of housewifeliness (1970s), to suddenly wanting all-white walls in my house (1980s) And those are just a few of my innumerable 101st monkey moments.

Then as I passed the half-century mark, I started to look back and take stock. I became open to something I had never even considered before — appreciating my elders. I think that writing about the past is an attempt to understand a mind-set and way of life that was completely foreign to my young self. I was clueless about the world of my foremothers. Just as the Millennials are clueless about the world that made me.

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*I’m kidding. No one who ever wore platform shoes or drove a Pinto is homesick for the ‘70s.

** Just shoot me now.