My Monkey Is Sad
Do you ever sit and think about your ancestors and who they might have been as people?
Lately I've been pondering on the meaning of life or, more specifically, my life. That's lead me to think about the people who came before me who I know next to nothing about save their names. I've participated in one of those DNA kits that rattle off a bunch of traits and hunt down long forgotten family, which I've been able to use to trace my family tree all the way back to the 1500's.
It's a really interesting thing to dig through, especially considering the service I've used has a backlog of photographs. Being able to actually see these people is a different experience altogether. Some lore of my own: I'm in the process of legally changing my name. One of the middle names I've chosen just so happens to be the name of one of my great great great and-so-on Grandparents, and it's not a common name by any means. So that's interesting. And a little spooky.
But what about before then? We all came from somewhere. A fish loved a fish and made a mudskipper. Now we're walking, that's cool. What about if we became a lizard. Neat. Mm, but I'm kinda bored of being a lizard now. I'm going to kiss this other lizard and make this mammal thing.
Every historical biologist just clutched their pearls at my brutalisation of evolution, but you get my point.
Here I am, toiling over an office job which… I'll be honest, I don't care for. It's not important work. I'm not saving lives or making grand changes to the world. It's simple capitalist toil and it is soul-draining. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for the work. I kinda need to be considering, you know, bills, but I don't want to be grateful for it. Quite frankly I would rather be doing literally anything else.
Thousands of millions of years ago my ancestor's biggest problem was "Where is my next meal coming from." There were no taxes, no bills, no stupid social interactions where no one is saying what they actually mean and telling jokes that go completely over my head because I can't tell that they're jokes. Nope. It was just find food, find shelter, and don't drink the water that killed Greg next-door.
Those of you that know their stuff about human evolution know that "We evolved from monkeys" isn't exactly true, but for the sake of brevity I'm going to simplify. These days, I think about my monkey family from many many years ago. I see them like the spirits in Disney's Mulan, gathering about my head as ghostly apparitions judging my every move. Besides being incredibly confused by what the fuck a computer is, I wonder what they would think of life as it is now. I imagine we all look rather lazy and pretty stupid. Living in one place all your life? Are you trying to get killed?
Aside from that, I also use it as a platform to think about what my life could have been all those years ago. What would my monkey be doing, thinking, feeling? I think my monkey would be pretty sad. I'm not nearly as active as I used to be; yes I'm disabled but there is still a lot I could be doing. I get outside as much as I'm able to, and I love gardening, but the majority of my time is spent locked inside. I'm also not eating nearly enough berries which sounds incredibly depressing for a monkey. I think we should all eat more berries.
In my journey of trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing, I want to listen to my monkey more. I've been focusing on the big questions too much. What monkey ponders the universe? Did my monkeys do that? Probably not. They just lived and ate berries. I want to just live and eat berries.
I'm going to go get some berries…
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