Look at the humans, what are they doing?

My daily commute takes me through downtown Bellingham, a place that is a true grab-bag of people types. You've got your homeless people who carry on conversations with firehydrants and parking meters, hipster boys and girls who both apparently want to look like Audrey Hepburn, insecure teenagers hanging out in groups smoking and wearing black clothes, hippies doing their hippy stuff, angry lesbians driving their Subaru Foresters, and paranoid suburban Moms repeatedly punching the door-lock button on their SUVs while they wait for the street light.

I often feel like an alien anthropologist as I observe the goings-on amongst the humans. I try to understand why they are doing whatever it is they are doing. Why, for example, does that skinny male human wear such tight pants with an elaborate shirt/scarf combination? It appears he must have spent at least an hour perfecting his hairdo, but to what end? Is he trying to attract a female human companion? A male companion?

And why is it that the humans who dress similar to each other tend to group together? Perhaps they wish to reinforce some group solidarity, maybe the drive is tribal; they wish to compete against other similar-dressing human groups for the rights to street corners or for 'respect'.

The other day I saw a few humans carrying leather bound books corner a solitary male and attempt to tell him the truth about the universe. He was, according to their book, lost and needed salvation and if he didn't heed their words he was in grave, eternal danger!

I've concluded that the humans are a strange species, and that downtown is a great place to study them in their natural habitat. What motivates them seems to be a dialectic of sorts; on one hand they seem to be responding to their biolgical nature, seeking mates and fighting enemies, but they also have constructed intricate identies for themselves based upon the clothing they wear, the ideas they believe, and their personal insecurities.