I recall some random instance growing up, I was maybe thirteen years old riding my bike home from my friends house. I was riding alone and it was late at night near the start of the summer. I looked up and saw that the moon was full and then I remembered all the werewolf movies I watched. Growing up me and my nerdy comic book friends used to watch every horror movie that was ever made so I was pretty familiar with the werewolf idea.
Then I felt a little afraid. I knew that monsters didn't exist of course, they were just bullshit to entertain people. But then I thought, what if? What if? Jesus Christ that would be an unpleasant surprise. I could picture it in my mind, a blurry shape darts past me in the shadows so fast I only get an impression of it. I start to breathe quicker, looking around anxiously. Nothing there, its cool. I relax a bit. Then it gets me!
So I ride along on my bike and I think; of course werewolves don't exist. Of course not ... but what if? I mean this is exactly how one would get me. I'm all alone, no silver bullets, no wooden stakes. No monster squad to kick wolfman in the nards and save my dashing but reckless self from the things that I was overconfidently sure weren't there. People had warned me, I just didn't listen.
About 10 seconds of thinking like that is all it really takes before you start to laugh at how ridiculous that is to think. So my mind wandered on to what was a far more pressing issue, would Erin Westervelt ever like me? And by the way, she didn't.
It's a strange thing that I would feel those fears at all. But I think there might be some kind of reason for it. I have heard that during full moons hospital emergency rooms and psych wards get this huge spike in madness. For some reason there is way more craziness during full moons, and it happens everywhere. That struck me as somewhat odd, since I hadn't noticed anything much like that in my personal experience.
But if that is true, I have a theory about it. Maybe its our instincts. Our evolutionary ancestors coexisted with all kinds of predators, and a lot of predators hunt during full moons. Maybe it is in our DNA to get skittish during full moons so we don't get eaten. Perhaps it is a part of our DNA that we inherited from an ancestor animal that was a creature something like an ungulate, or a zebu?
Which leads me to something else. Evolution. There are a few people out there who consider evolution a theory and not a fact. Unfortunately a few of the people who believe that somehow have the trust of many other people who are unfortunately too trusting. So the utterly preposterous attempts to discredit rational and scientifically verified truth somehow find a sympathetic ear with people who really don't deserve to be fooled.
Anyway, evolution is very complex and only I understand it about as well as any regular person, so when I talk about it I probably make a bunch of huge generalizations and bigger mistakes. So keep that in mind.
Homo Sapiens, or humans, are thought to be descendants of some kind of ape like animal which is possibly a common ancestor between human beings and some apes or monkeys or other things like them that exist today. Anyway, homo sapiens seem to have evolved certain traits which worked out really well for them to prosper and thrive. Things like thumbs to grip tools, brains that could learn and think abstractly, and tongues and vocal chords that could make noises consistently to form a common language and therefore share thoughts vocally. Thanks to that we get to live in a world where Nelly can say things like "Na nana nana nana wooe wooe!" Cool!
So today here we are, humans are pretty much on top of the game, calling all the shots, and so on. How this happened was I guess sort a fluke, just like every evolutionary advantage is kind of a fluke, but we got on top because we are smart. Our intelligence turned out to be the adaptation that made us the strongest. Go figure. And evolution is ongoing, we are still evolving, and probably getting smarter as a species as we devise elegant new strategies for survival such as microwaves, which are neat, and pizza pops, which are gross.
Evolution for humans continues, but there is something else going on. While we continue to evolve, so do other animals. It's easy to forget that all the other species on earth have environmental stresses which must be overcome for them by adaptation, just like we do. The world around us is full of animals adapting. New species emerge, others become extinct. Bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics.
So here's something, what if some other animals evolve intelligence? It isn't impossible. There are intelligent animal species today, but the smarter they are the more time they are forced to entertain us. If I was a smart animal I would act as dumb as fuck as soon as I saw a human just to make sure I don't wind up doing tricks in the circus.
What if birds got really smart and could do math and realized they have us outnumbered? What if elephants started to work as a society and take the earth back for themselves? Or what about the octopus? What about the octopus!?!
This all probably strikes you as science fiction b.s., especially if you have seen Planet of the Apes, but just you wait. Animals who become as smart as us might not really care that we have already parceled out the planet for ourselves. They might have a good argument for asking us why we think it belongs to us. Luckily we can always fall back on finders keepers. But that might not go over.