“Time wounds all heels,” quoted the Archangel of the Proconsulidae, scratching his ear with
an imperfectly adapted hind leg. Sitting amid throngs of spirits belonging to
the Circle of Fallen Primates, the AoP gazed down at the Earth: still green;
still full of life and promise; still full of Homo sapiens sapiens. Still empty of Proconsuls and a whole host of opposable-thumb types who just didn’t
make the cut for The Disney Channel, the Moon landings and sub-prime mortgage
bundling.
“Nuts to dat,” growled an orange-grey Afrotarsius whose dorsal tiger stripes
and buff thorassic fur-patch the exact shape of the KFC logo no paleontologist
had been able to infer from the lower jaw and handful of teeth that had so far been
the sole evidence of his people in the remote, terrestrial here and now of the
Twenty-first Century Earth. Gollum-like eyes resembling sulky grapes stared down
at Hollywood Boulevard
moodily; dreaming of dating J-Lo and cruising The Strip in a Ferrari or running
bamboolike fingers through Emma Thompson’s hair, for some reason. Maybe the
British accent works even in the Evolutionary Cul-de-sac neighbourhood of the Afterlife.
Or maybe that should be ‘perhaps,’ dontcher know old boy? “Look at all dose stoopid
Progenitor-mating biped types screwin’ it all up. I mean, seriously? Friends goes ter ten seasons an’ De Howlin’ gets six sequels an’ still
dose dopes down dere expect ter colonize Outer Space fer Goodallssakes? Gimme a
break! De Biohaz musta reached deir evolutional zenith wid de original series Star Trek. It’s gotta be all downhill
from now, right? Am I right, guys?”
“ I don’t know ‘bout that, Marley,” muttered
a Gigantopithecus in the back row;
dividing his attention between pitching a baseball upward toward the starry
firmament and popping fortune cookies between his huge, square jaws. “The
reptiles must of thought they was finished back in the Permian–Triassic
extinction event. Rise Of The Mammals an’ all that but then, bingo! Along comes
Coelophysis a-swingin’ those dinky
little hips an’ all of a sudden it’s back into the burrows for the uppity mammals
for the best part of another quarter billion years. You can’t extrapolate
Mankind’s imminent extinction just because Battleship
followed Alien. Things can go
backward for a while without it being the end for a line of evolution; look at
the ‘prequel’ Star Wars movies, for
example, or Alien 3 or Terminator 3. Sheesh! But then came The Matrix. Awesome. And remember when
we all thought that sliced bread was the best thing since, well, unsliced bread
and believed baking could never get any better but then they came up with
Twinkies? How cool was that! Not all
apparent evolutionary degenerations are dead-ends; some can be loops, kind of: are in fact just stages to something better. take
Bruce Willis. Are you seriously saying that David Addison was cooler than the
later, self-referential John McClane or the Special Forces guy in The Fifth Element? No way it turned out
to be true, but looking at that hairline over the years you might guess he was
on his way out.”
“The point is,” put in a rather camp Homo
heidelbergensis drinking soda and watching The Eocene Channel through a laptop
Time Portal where a pair of so-far undiscovered and unclassified saber toothed caribou
were sparring over the sad-looking corpse of an equally unclassified giant tree
badger, “you can’t just say it’s lights out for ole Double Sap just because
they elected, well, you know. They can still bounce back from their lows, and
if you don’t believe me, all I’m gonna say to you is walk upstream in time from
Bewitched to Pushing Daisies and just accept that a species can survive one
helluva lot of lot of Golden Girls
and Dukes of Hazard on the TV pageant
to Buffy and South Park.
“You Tea Party Mammoth guys always mention South Park, don’tcha? Never reference M*A*S*H or Taxi, do yez?” sulked the Afrotarsius,
tossing an ectoplasmic peanut at the big hominid’s head. “You Red Ochre Cave types had it easy up in the Ice
Ages. Us so-called ‘lower primates’ did all the heavy lifting long before yez
came on da scene an’ took da world away from us. We scampered up into da trees
once da dinosaurs was gone. We did da whole nocturnal-to-color-vision change
thing. We suffered and starved and bred and survived and developed da opposable
thumbs millions of years before you from da Giant Elk’s Club came along and
stole all our achievements.”
“That’s ‘Log-cabin Mammoth guys,’ if you
please, Mister Occupy Madagascar ”
retorted heidelbergensis, mincing away to mince a ghostly cave bear.
“Hey, why the long faces?” asked the returning
Archangel of the Proconsulidae, carrying a rather
batter football. “Just because you folks no longer rule the Earth, and never
did in some cases, it doesn’t mean that the Creator doesn’t have a Plan for
you. And the Plan is to be happy. This is supposed to be Heaven for crying out
loud, so get happy. And even Mankind won’t last forever. Touch football, people?
Furs versus skins this time. C’mon guys, the clock's ticking, let’s go.”
After
a while, even the resentful proto-tarsier ghost Marley the Afrotarsius cheered up. Football really was the best - especially
with this particular ball. Even though the long beard was ragged by now and the
frock coat torn and stained from being used in a thousand touchdowns, Marley
just loved to kick and punt this very special ball. This really was Evolutionary
Dead-End Heaven, he mused, kicking Charles Darwin as hard as he could for a
field goal.
4 comments:
Loved it! Amazing.
Oops. Sorry. The comment posted twice. Tried to remove one and it didn't quite work...
Why, thank You Shiri. It's instructive what ideas whacky titles will dredge up from one's unconscious, isn't it?
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