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Among The Wild Chimpanzees
(1984)
National Geographic Society
If there is a god, and it created anything, it created pot (food, fuel, medicine, fucking rope, and it’s perennial; c‘mon). I think that later, it created documentaries, because when the two intermingle, it’s like the heavens are rubbing the warm belly of existence into contentment again. Now, this god was probably stoked when monkeys popped up on the evolutionary radar. Dinosaurs were huge, no doubt, but at the end of the day, they’re still only lizards, and a lizard is only cool for about fifteen minutes. Wow, it ate a cricket, is it sleeping now? It’s all about the curiosity quotient of a beast. Monkeys are inquisitive little rascals, and they got even more rascally when their tails fell off and they evolved into chimpanzees. Even though a chimp’s butt looks like a mess of soggy, pink paper-towel, they are still awfully adorable. They live in extended families and they protect each other while flopping around on the jungle floor all day. Forming extremely intimate bonds with one another, they have intense emotional lives. They make and use tools! Fishing for termites with twigs, and building tree-top beds out of leaves. They can do more than Jessica Simpson. But wait, what’s this? They eat and kill baboon babies. Sometimes they even rip apart their own young and feast on the remains. They also form war parties and bully and kill chimps from other communities. Yuck, yuck, and fuck, looks like homo sapiens aren’t too far removed after all. God was probably freaked out once the chimps got themselves hairless and upright. Tools got better, numbers increased and nature braced itself for a long hot one, sprouting up marijuana plants in a last ditch effort to slow the schizoid, nude-monkeys down. It might have worked too, if America’s elected officials hadn’t ruined weed for everyone else. Gateway drug my ass. Gateway to the enhanced enjoyment of documentaries is the only gateway I’m aware of. I swear, while watching Among the Wild Chimpanzees, I saw the human in chimps. I’ve almost seen it before, but this time, they really were a nervous little tribe of people, still scared of thunderstorms. They carried themselves like relatives. I realize that there’s this other interpretation of god who said that all the humans on earth came from two people, I think their names were Adam and Steve or something. Folks who are fans of this theory think it’s an insulting thing to say we come from apes. But which is worse? If humanity’s origin is in two sole beings, then we’re all products of incest. Even though a lot of us act like inbred creeps, I think it’s less revolting to accept the fact that a great^2000 grandmother of mine probably ate her own placenta.
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