...monkey business...
“Monkeys are superior to men in this: when a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.”
-Malcolm de Chazal-
Glasses steamed as though walking in from a rainstorm, wearing a tight-faded-banana-yellow-brown-striped-button-up-dress-tee, armpit stained from 26 years teaching science to bored 11th graders more interested in psychedelics and physical attributes than physics, Mr. Jacks walked back into his classroom to find it had been tightly wound from lab glass to hook hang with over 600 feet of twine. The smile of vague stoned amusement for the creativity of the prank quickly gave form to an anger he had left out of the classroom his entire career.
It only took the door but a second to pull the string and send beakers, textbooks and whatever else had been left tethered in twine path to the floor. I cheered alongside my classmates at the cacophony and chaos the stupidity had splendidly flayed upon our stage. Like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five might say “broken glass, everywhere.”
It was the 124th physics class we had attended in the year 1998 but it might have been the single most important, as no memory of the knowledge shared at those lab tables lives longer than that of a kind teacher taken to wits end by a cabal of teenagers slicing the boredom from their AM routines with a stunt built out of string. Mr. Jacks took no time off the clock, quickly pulling me to the front of the classroom, aware that no rat bastard other than I would spend their morning setting up such a shit bag scenario.
The haunt of punishment hovered miles away from my psyche, proud I was in the quality of my doofus. I stood at class front and my teacher, Jonathan “Jerry” Jacks, a weekend motorcycle mechanic who was secretly dating the photography substitute who smoked weed between her classes and trailed off every third of her sentences, made me turn to my brothers and sisters in the room.
“What are you going to do with your life?” Mr. Jacks asked me.
It is Monday December 4th in the year 2023. I rub my allergy eyes and awaken 2:22AM on the sunken seat of a second hand Costco couch covered in dog blankets next to a living room window overlooking a black plastic SEARS roof rack and some orange alley bricks growing dead weeds. My breath is a hangover stink of dinner toast rubbed in garlic and nutritional yeast, covered in the foamy sweat of two too many hazy IPAs from a local heavy metal pinball hall. My hair is matted in a curly split-ended combover capped by a navy wool beanie half falling under mulleted tendrils that won’t grow beyond shoulder length. The television is a blurred white nightlight the contacts dried into my eyes can’t make out a silent story on.
“What am I going to do with my life?” I ask myself.
I have been thinking a lot about myself, my utility and my value to the world. Falling asleep bread drunk to 2001: A Space Odyssey can do this to a man. I watch as cavemen howl at each other next to a water hole and a baby mammoth skull. My eyelids close. I watch as cavemen howl at a large black alien box. My eyelids close. I watch as a single caveman howls as he bangs the skull of a rival with a bone. He tosses the bone into the sky and the film cuts on matched action to a spaceship millions of years later. My eyelids close.
Dreams don’t only come when I sleep. My sleeping dreams are a comfort. They are things I don’t have to be, or experience. Their material reality is immaterial. I can’t make a life plan to become a James Bond Garfield skiing the swiss alps, making love to an entire spaceship of octopus sexworms like I was imagining myself doing at 1:28AM that evening. In awake I can only dream as big as the stage of the world allows me. A crew of puffy vested spaceworms begin to eat my appendages. I no longer have arms. I no longer have legs. I no longer have a dick. My eyelids open.
I don’t see myself awake on the couch, except for when I sit and write a reflection. But that is more showing than seeing. I see my sloth in the hopes it entertains you. My dream is your amusement. So it appears I have at least one goal.
I recently reflected on the hair of a woman, shaved on both sides and silky like a golden pony's tail. I feel like I can't live life wearing a mullet because I have the face of a caveman. Haircuts were not in vogue for million year old cave geeks. Fashion in the hominini era was wearing a cloak of dead beast and spreading the right mud lotion on your unstunken spots. As a 21st century man I smell almost nowhere. I shower twice daily and rub 91% alcohol on my most porous and rashy locations. I am a skeptic covered in antiseptic.
The apeman’s life goal is life. Life, grunt grunt grunt. Live, grunt grunt grunt. What a dream to want only one thing. But an oversimplification as well. He also wants dire wolf hunts, glyptodon shells, mastodon tusks to hang on the cave yawning. He wants a couch made of megatherium and wooly rhino skin shoes. He wants the worst smelling mud from the foulest bubbling hole. He wants big bones, small bones, long bones and broken bones to bone up his bone pile. He wants grunt grunt grunt, grunt grunt grunt.
I want grunt grunt grunt too. I am greedy for that grunt. I’m envious of the fur legged simplicity of life goals set from the comfort of a granite hammock. It is the end of the year 2023, the start of another 2024, 22 years after the year 2001, and 55 years after a movie called 2001 has been released and what an odyssey it has been. The alien black boxes are in our hands, taking pictures and holding them in a cloud. We still brandish bones to bully beasts but now you can buy them in boxes and build them with blue prints.
The apeman used the cave walls to tell his stories, not to make plans. His opus was “Mammoth + Fire + Stick”, 25 symbols painted in Titanoboa blood on a rock wall buried in rock layers beneath some shoe store in Salt Lake City. He wrote it in one night, and here I am a million years later still hoping to read it. Simplicity was his harbinger of quality. This article might have benefited from me keeping it to a word count of two.
Me. Ape.
“It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.”
-H. L. Mencken-
When my science teacher left the classroom my only instinct was chaos. Organization felt to me the enemy of inspiration. I had attended 124 classes of photons and neurons that only made me feel like a moron. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the concepts, enjoy the teaching, or appreciate the way my brain felt when I psychically gained knowledge of physics. Rather it was the dried perspirant chalk spray reality that I was doing something I shouldn’t.
School can be so rewarding for those who seek its riches. But when your attendance is mandatory it all feels largely maybe and might. Maybe I’ll learn something. I might just enjoy this. What then when you don’t? Each passing day in 8 hours of rooms became a game then of that maybe and might. Maybe something new will happen here. If not, I might need to make it happen.
We would rap to our math teacher, her name replacing Snoop Dogg’s for whichever track our cassettes had been blasting that week. We would trade shoes in social studies, the smaller or bigger the foot the better to ensure a clumsy walk and fall on the way to sharpen test pencils. We traded notes about nothing with no ones we no longer remember. We weren’t present when raising our hand to say “here” on the attendance call. Our minds walked the recesses of hours yet to come. So when the window came to be alone in a room with ourselves we didn’t build a business, we built a bomb.
Collaboration in an educational setting does not guarantee edified pursuits. Our boredom wanted to have a blast. The goal wasn’t to break stuff, but rather to make something that might break. Why the twine was in the room never crossed our mind as we took turns passing the spool by hand above and below and between the seats and stuff that surrounded us. We were spiders and Mr. Jacks would be our fly, shuddering in the web we wove around his room.
He was a good teacher, taking time out from the textbooks to show us the science on our tables. We had made smokes and solids, and used magnets to move metal marbles. But none of that mattered now. Empty opportunity had inspired us to act, and we now were all players in the theater of prank. The door opened, everything broke, and scene.
“What are you going to do with your life?” Jonathan “Jerry” Jacks asks me again in a voice only memorable as text. I throw my phone into the sky, an alien black box named after a fruit sometimes filled with worms. My film cuts on matched action to a spiraling giant beaver femur spinning past my paw into a bundle of browned ivory beast pieces.
Grunt grunt grunt. I’m going to be an apeman.
“We ape, we mimic, we mock. We act.”
-Laurence Olivier-
FOOTENOTES FOR FEEDBACK
Dearest Reader, you have made it this far, and who knows how long, possibly 2001 years or more? I am doing some planning for the new year, setting goals for this blotto and other business. It would be awesome and helpful for me to know a bit more about who you are, why you are here, and what kind of stories and writings you would like to read in 2024.
Please use the comments section below to share a bit more about yourself, and let me know what kind of things you have enjoyed thus far on this radio station. If you have any feedback or suggestions I would be so grateful for them.
What do you like about the show? What would you like more or less of? I feed off of your feedback. I am a fruit loop. You can e-mail me if you feel more comfortable communicating that way. You can also psychically grunt grunt grunt at me if you prefer.
Also If you dig what is going on here please pass along these reads to a friend.
Yours in furry feet, C. Foote. Grunt grunt grunt.
I love how I can read your stuff and guaranteed it will put a smile on my face. 😆 Thank you for putting your story and whimsical words on the page!!
I've enjoyed your creative word choices on calls, but man that opening line and the rest! I get too indulge in more through reading your work. Such a joyful read.
A bit about me, I like human stories so a variety. Basically keep doing what you're doing. That's probably not helpful for growing your readership. I'll give it some more thought and let you know.