1. That moment when, alone among the great apes, you blush to be seen naked.<\/p>\n
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As if, in a universe of unveiled and uncovered animals, you alone are best seen covered, hidden \u2014 an insecure ape, a monkey deeply ashamed\u00a0of being seen as a monkey.<\/p>\n
2. That moment you really, personally and intimately consider the fact that you will die, cease to be, stop \u2014 flicked off the face of Mother Earth like an unpleasant scab. And then you keep playing Mario Kart.<\/p>\n
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You might envy the plankton or the cow, which gives no evidence of living under the shuddering weight of\u00a0an inevitable death \u2014 but then again, can a cow play Mario Kart?<\/p>\n
Pros and cons, kids. Pros and cons.<\/p>\n
3. The capacity to know that human sexuality is nothing more than a drive for the reproduction of the species \u2014 and to subsequently orient this reproductive drive towards sexualized images of Sonic the Hedgehog.<\/p>\n
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Thus proclaiming, in one moment, our freedom from the fixed drives and orientations of the biological world\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0our complete and utter inferiority of sexual habit compared to, say, the evolutionary-appropriate humping of Rhesus Monkeys.<\/p>\n 4. That moment when you die because your mother didn\u2019t hold you.<\/p>\n 5. To know, absolutely, that the universe is reducible to causally determined, physical exchanges of matter and energy, and that any act we perform is simply the latest movement of atoms and quarks, a movement with its beginning in the very origin of the universe. To know, then, that everything we do is really just the continued trainwreck of the Big Bang, playing itself out with strict necessity, such that we might say, quite honestly, that it is not I who do but the universe who does in me. To know all of this \u2014 and to still hold your friend personally responsible for stealing your Pokemon game.<\/p>\n 6. That moment when your own existence becomes a problem, and in the midst of rocks who don\u2019t question their rockness and dolphins who are not known to pause and consider what it means to be dolphin, you ask a sky that does not worry what it means to be a sky\u2026<\/p>\n \u2026ousting yourself as the singular point in the Cosmos which is a problem unto itself, a black hole, poison in the well, a cog in the Cosmic machine that became self-aware and has no idea what\u00a0to do with itself.<\/p>\n To which the sky\u00a0responds:<\/p>\n \u2026because, really, that\u2019s a human\u00a0thing.<\/p>\n 7. To live in a world in which the best science tells us that all our actions, thoughts, attitudes, cultural mores and social arrangements are driven by our basic drive for survival, a biological tendency towards the preservation of life without which evolution would be impossible \u2014 and to subsequently kill ourselves, because you know what, the foundations of evolution can take a flying leap when it comes to humans.<\/p>\n 8. That moment when you make art.<\/p>\n 9. That moment when, in a world driven by utility, in which everything we do has some biological end, we stop to draw (draw!) an image (an image!) of a peach we will not eat, of a woman (naked!) with whom we will not mate, revealing ourselves, once again, to be an aberration of nature, a horrifying anti-animal animal, who can deliberately unplug from the purportedly unavoidable influence of stimulus\/response and biological necessity, and\u00a0consider things apart from drives, wants, desires, and tendencies as objects of contemplation, existing for themselves \u2014 and desire nothing more than to imitate their form of existence with lines and shapes.<\/p>\n 10. That moment when you, an ape in a world of things to eat and climb, begin to ask for the names of these same things. You treat them, not as physical objects in the Cosmos, but as ideas, identities that continue to exist even when not physically present, so that a tree can be encountered just by hearing the word \u201ctree,\u201d inaugurating a life in which the entire Cosmos, through language, has the capacity to settle in the human head.<\/p>\n 11. That moment when, in a universe in which every known animal is limited to its specific environment and interacts only with those things that concern its immediate needs, you, a\u00a0mammal\u00a0among mammals, interact with such things as \u201cthe rings of Saturn,\u201d \u201cnothingness,\u201d \u201cGuatemala,\u201d and \u201cFrodo Baggins.\u201d<\/p>\n 12. That moment when, though every animal that has all of its physical needs satisfied tends to sleep, we satisfy every possible physical, emotional, and social need possible \u2014 and start to panic.<\/p>\n 13. That moment when you, healthy, happy and sane, grow incredibly hungry, make yourself your favorite meal, set it before your nose, and refuse to eat it, for the simple reason that you can, and that where every animal is observed to obey its drives, your drives obey you, dammit.<\/p>\n 14. That moment when you, healthy, happy and sane, don\u2019t stop eating when you\u2019re full, nor drinking once your thirst is stated, nor copulating once your drive for copulation is quenched, making yourself horrendously sick and exhausted, for, where every animal is observed to obey his drives \u2014 your drives obey you.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gifrific.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/its-science-anchorman.gif\")
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