Let me tell you my favorite story. I’ve told this story many many times. It always gets a laugh, a lot of laughs. Someone would always say something like “Thats not a story!” and they would laugh and start to tell their own stories. Most of those other peoples’ stories were all pretty great since they were all told by 4 years old kids and as such the tellers hadn’t been taught by society to hate themselves yet. Wow, that got pretty serious for a sec. Lets push past society’s negative and powerful effect on the psychology of kids and get to the story. Thats a pretty big thing to skip over but hey, society has taught us all to skip over the important things. Boom, suck it society.
The story, right, of course. Uh… Once upon a time there was a broccoli. It was always this broccoli’s dream to be a cauliflower so one day he painted himself white and lived happily ever after.
Classic. That one always worked. The mix up play here is to then pretend you’re gonna tell a real story afterwards. Pretend you’re about to tell a good one. Lean in. Then tell this story. Once upon a time there was a cauliflower…
You can probably guess the rest and yeah it also gets the laughs. That’s my favorite story. I’ve never actually thought about it as a story and, when I thought it up I know for sure that there was no conscious purposeful decision making going on in the forefront of my head. I mean, there’s not really any deeper meaning behind any of it. It works really well as a joke and I would always tell it during lunch time so that’s why my brain thought of food. It’s odd that looking back on it now I start to think about what it means. Like, I need it to mean something because it’s my favorite story. How could I let my favorite story be not meaningful? If I was to think about it as a product of the subconscious brain what would I think.
First off, let me say that I don’t really like the word “subconscious”, not because it sounds bad out loud or because the word is offensive. I don’t like the word because I think it doesn’t do a good job of explaining the actual thing. I also, probably foolishly, divide the mind into two. My two sides are called Lingual and Non-Lingual. Humanity, on a technological level, has evolved dramatically in the Lingual section of Technology. This would be books and text messages, facebook and twitter. This lingual technology has had some incredible and surprising outcomes. Humanity, has been making fantastic strides in facilitating the spread of language and words. Ooh, ooh! Let’s just talk about that for a couple pages.
Ok, so lets make a sort of map of how humanity has evolved, not just on a technological level, but on a… uh… “Entirety” Level. I just googled ‘how old is the human race’ and now I’m here to tell you, it is… I had to tab back over because I forgot… 200,000 years old. So according to the majority of scientists according to google according to the general public’s click rates, that’s when it all started for us. That’s the beginning of our… Wait. I gotta start from even before the beginning so that the actual beginning has more depth to it. Classic writing technique. Get a little prologue action going.
Let’s go all the way back to the birth of Humanity’s dad. Our dad’s name was Homo Erectus. Classic dad to be so embarrassing in front of our more immature friends. We are all partly products of our parents so any really deep story about us has to include our dad, even if only for one scene right at the beginning of the movie before we get a massive time jump. Anyway our Dad… Wait again! Am I offending anybody by calling it “dad”. I’m being too gender Okay, I’ll refer to Homo Erectus as ‘Our Parents’ from now on. Will you, as a reader, start to slowly personalize this story to yourself because you also have parents that were around for a while before you existed and you can therefore relate to this? Yes, of course you’ll personalize it and become invested in the story! Ha ha, you are so easily to emotionally manipulate. Sorry, sorry, sorry, I mean, WE are so easy to emotionally manipulate. It’s OUR parents that we are all here to talk about.
If you’re still here to talk about broccoli and cauliflower then just grow up already, jeez. Try to keep up with the times, being what they are.
So, Our Parents was born 2,000,000 years ago. A cool 2 Milly. That’s a long ass time ago, right? Right? Can you even imagine 2,000,000 years? No, you can’t. The first thing that probably comes to mind when you hear that number is all the expensive stuff you could own with $2,000,000. Oh, baby we gettin’ the pool with the jacuzzi in the center of that pool and the Tiki Cabana Bar is gonna be in the center of that jacuzzi! That’s a lot of money right there. Two million YEARS though? I’m picturing Dinosaurs on Pangea or somethin’.
Hey, Dinosaurs! Thanks for fueling my car. Dinosaur more like Dino-sore, right? More like Dino-thank-you-very-much. lol. Stupid dinosaurs.
Wait, Dinosaurs are how old? 230,000,000 years old? Ok, now I actually don’t know what numbers mean anymore. Two Milly made sense to me, at least a little bit. It’s just one super awesome pool. Two Hundred and Thirty Milly? Sorry pal, my brain can’t imagine that high. That’s a lot of years right there.
That means the world Our Parents was born into was quite a crazy world. A world that, over the course a baJillion years, had been molded in to the All Time Greatest version of Capitalism. Anarchy isn’t possible since, you gotta eat stuff, who’s gonna make that stuff, boom anarchy is gone. This world of long ago is Capitalism at its height. Oh, you should have seen the old gal in her prime. It was truly beautiful and majestic. Everybody just doing whatever was Good for Them.
I mean, if I’m a lowly normal gazelle in the olden days I love my kids as much as the next gazelle. But, if that cheetah over there makes eye contact with me I ain’t stickin around to help the Fawns. If my old man starts to get too slow I ain’t even stoppin to notice. I’m just gonna keep on eating this wonderful green stuff I’m always walkin on. That’s the way it has Always been and that’s the way it Always should be. Everything is just so simple that way. After all, we are just lowly animals and simplicity is very nice. I’m a Gazelle, I don’t even know what a “species” is! I just follow these other gazelle because… well… it’s obvious that’s what I’m supposed to be doing, duh. Why are you even asking me this? That’s just the way it is. I’ve never even asked Myself why we stick together! I’m a Gazelle! I mean, what is a gazelle? I don’t even know what that is. There is no reason behind any of my actions. Well, the reason is that I want to live obviously but there’s no motive. “Survive” is literally the only thing that goes through my mind.
You see how crazy this world is? Our Parents were born in a world where every other living thing did whatever it could do for itself. The weak are food. My life is more important than my child’s life. I only feed MOST of my children any food because I can’t afford to take care of any fucking Dependents who are more work than I think they should be. I can take care of some kids, sure, but only if they’re capable of learning to live just by watching me. Heck! Depending on what kind of animal I am I might just abandon my children on a beach before they’re even hatched. What children? Who cares?
Not a single living thing on that planet had any idea if it was gonna get to eat tomorrow. For the prey, well… they could be dead tomorrow, killed by something that looks different than they do. For predators, maybe their prey gets away tomorrow. The predator knows it’s whole life that one day, many years from now, that prey will get away. The predator and prey both know that one day they’ll be dead but hey, that’s the way it has Always been and that’s the way it Always will be.
Anyway, enough delving into the mind of Mr. Gazelle, and back to Our Parents. For Our Parents things were slow, real slow and real hard. Our Parents had to work almost every second of every day, starting from age zero, just to stay alive. Literally, they struggle all day every day while only being able to accomplish the great achievement that is, Remaining Alive!
You think, YOU reading this, that you are bored at home with nothing to do?* You could have handed Our Parents a dairy cow, milked it in front of them to show them how it works, and they would just let the cow walk off because…
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You’re probably wondering what happened. Why did that paragraph go all Sopranos on us? You see I left that space there as a Representation. Remember how I got all weird and showed you what Mr. Gazelle was thinking? That was all a lie. I know that the realization that Mr. Gazelle simply a product of my imagination is hard to take. In reality, if we asked a gazelle a question, that blank space I left there would be a far more accurate recording. That Gazelle has no actual thoughts, sorry. It obviously doesn’t know a language, you fool.
Only, that empty space up there wasn’t meant for another Gazelle was it? No!! It was meant for Our Parents. Ya see, Our Parents, (our parents of the timeline Two Milly years ago that is), are pretty much just Gazelles that have learned to hide things. Seriously, that’s all they are. They know how to read and write just as well as a gazelle. That one empty paragraph is the entire thought database of ALL of Our Parents’ nearly TWO MILLION year history. Like, they didn’t even have spoken language back then. Our Parents did not even know how to talk to other… uh… other Our Parents. That one empty space really is it. They don’t even have stories they pass to their young. They have never spoken a single word to their young. Their children don’t even have names. That’s the world of just a relatively short time ago. A world without humans is 200,000 years. A world without life on this planet? 4,540,000,000 years ago. If you take a really close look at those two numbers you just might notice that one is alot bigger than the other. We are basically about to hit puberty as a species and look at all the stuff we’ve figured out. Let’s get back to the olden days though shall we? Honestly the world sucks big time but the plot is about to pick up.
Finally, on one especially hot day in Africa, over the course of thousands and thousands of years, our parents had us. This is where things start to get real crazy. Homo Sapien starts to be a thing and well, we’ve got ourselves some ideas and we ain’t gonna wait around on our asses for 2 million years just waiting to see how “Natural Selection” outdoes itself next. That’s a pretty stupid idea if you ask us. Non non, mon frère!! I think not! In only 150,000 years we came up with a little something called LANGUAGE!!! Suck it dad! I mean, Suck it Our Parents! We know you guys don’t really “get” our new idea but believe us, it’s the bee’s knees. I know that to you, Our Parents, our ‘language’ only sounds like more confusing grunts and… in reality that’s all it is, but!,* it is also the start of something amazing, dad!
I feel like this connection between my actual parents in real life and this name I gave to Homo Erectus is starting to feel weird. I love my parents. My parents are not Our Parents though. IF I write a story about MY parents and how that relates to YOU, or some shit, it will still just be my parents and my story. I’m trying to do something else. I’m trying to contextualize humanity’s Path as a coherent and somehow accurate re-imagining of that path, as a story. Wow. That last sentence was a doozy to read. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Homo Erectus is gone now anyway. Thanks a lot old man ..l.. I’m told thats a middle finger, see? ..l.. It’s just a joke Actual Dad, relax.
That’s as far as I wrote. I’m writing this part later after sobering up. I guess the point is that humanity is moving REALLY, REALLY fast. We keep getting more and more impatient but instead of trying to figure out how to be happy or how to be friendly to people we keep just trying to keep the Cheetah’s away. We have this idea in the back of our heads that material things will keep us safe from the existential cheetah that is Death. I’m not saying to never complain or to let things happen. All I’m saying is that if you want to to change the world you better remember that the whole thing is a process. Instead of trying to skip to the very end of the process we should try and focus on speeding the process up. People aren’t just born with this innate understanding of how the world really works. As they grow society lies to them about how life works and they get even further from the truth.
The “truth” is that goodness, compassion, and understanding through empathy. You can’t force the truth on people. Telling them what’s at the end of the rainbow doesn’t really help them get there. Even standing on the rainbow and calling them over doesn’t work. You gotta get over there and build a big ass bridge to the rainbow. You gotta print maps to that bridge. You have to teach people. They wanna know.
I’m starting to lose track of everything in this post. It might be a new record but I didn’t write it all at once so it has an asterisk next to the record.
The Mind of Joshypoo 
There are like, 3 really amazing commentaries in there!!!
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