First Friday is an absolutely FREE pot luck barbeque event held on the first Friday of every month. Focused on community building and social dialogue these events are conceptually anchored to fire and our discourse with it.
Fire (and television for that matter) flickers at a very specific frequency. This frequency creates a very specific dopamine response in our brains identical to that of opiates. This is why fire can hypnotizes you into losing time staring into it for long hours. This is also why television can be as addictive as any hard drug. This rare dopamine response in our brains puts us in a very exclusive group of animals that run directly to the danger of fire and not away from it. Most animals have a primeval, atavistic fear of fire as they run away as fast as they can.
Our rather exclusive fire loving group of animals includes only a restrictive few social omnivores; Most notably including the Canis group our domestic dogs arose out of. However, this biochemically driven behavioral trait isn't exclusive to mammals. It is also shared by the avian Corvidae group of Crows and Ravens; as well as the Psittaciformes group of Parrots and Macaws. In fact in almost any high functioning social animal group in which we observe elevated levels of intelligence, empathy, & curiosity you will most likely find this freakishly aberrant neuro-chemical response to the flicker of fire.
Some scientists have even posited that it is this very attraction to fire that led proto-man to increase denatured proteins from cooked meat in their diets; Thus increasing the easily digestible availability & faster bio-available uptake of the essential amino acid strands necessary for rapid brain development. It is in fact exactly when you begin to find evidence of charcoal near proto-man's bones that you suddenly find an otherwise unexplained huge jump in cranial capacity along with the 1st evidence of tool use. It may well be this attraction to fire which caused the “spark” evolving us into modern humans. Fire must somehow be at least a variable in the equation.
Fire has permeated all of human culture as the symbol for the comfort of home and hearth as well as the symbol human innovation (a light bulb is a signifier and replacement of fire). Stories told around the fire may have become television in our modern culture, but fire itself has not lost its hold over us. It brings us together as communities to share meals and fellowship in support of our social omnivorous morphology. It helps me prove that food tastes better in the mouths of friends.
Please Join Us for our monthly adventure in Fire, Food, Fellowship, & Ferment as we experiment with the benefits of a gift economy & our abilities to change the world around us one mouth at a time.
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