One Monkey in a Shiny Box

My wife cheated on me ten years ago. Shortly after our wedding. I don't know why, because I've never brought it up. The years have chewed away at the memory like so many thousands of moths crawling on an almost forgotten wool sweater. Almost forgotten, except for that one picture, of that one day, so many years go. The notion detached from the event.

In my head I know these thoughts and these emotions are the result of this very physical, very tangible web of tangled neural connections in my very real brain within my very real head. And yet, the whole business is a dream. I float.

Much of my life is floating now. We diminish our agency. But why? When we are young, we develop our higher order thinking - our sense of self. We are on both a physical and mental track which begins when we are each conceived in the womb of our mothers and continues through the separation of ourselves, albeit the two tracks do not run in tandem. We physically separate at birth - maybe by the cutting of the umbilical cord. Or, like a wide receiver breaching the goal line by a margin to make the goal count, maybe at first sight of the crowning head, we become separate.

Separate. I often wonder how separate we each are. Am I separate in traffic - crammed between two minivans and flanked by a container truck belching noxious fumes into the air I'm breathing? Am I separate in the office - tethered to a physical location at my desk or a physical gadget - my phone? A ball of energy in my chest looking to burst out and roll over every separate monkey.

Monkeys. Aren't we? People look unique and I think that's got us all fooled. But science caught up. Science caught up to where evolution was at - rolling along as it does like a stream of molten magma pouring at an immeasurably slow pace. And so, we caught it. So we can see. A man is a monkey.

Said another way, of all the animals who persist today, who has not been wiped from the science journals and history books, who have left behind some memorabilia, who have made their existence known to the keen and searching eye of man, of all those animals, monkeys are right there by our side.

The monkeys, you see, split at some point forever ago. Changes to the terrain, the movement of the earth's surface, caused us to have two kinds of monkeys. There are monkeys from the New World - the American Hemisphere. And, there are monkeys of the Old World, from which all primates and therefore humans have evolved. Interestingly enough, considering the anatomical disparities between New World and Old World, any New World humans who would have evolved along a similar trajectory to Old World humans, in my head, look an awful lot like Voldemort in their flat, off-puttingly predominant nostrils.

But, despite the monkeys - humans - of the old world populating the New World after their evolution, we hairless monkeys are all of one more common ancestor. Primates beget monkeys, monkeys beget apes, apes beget hominids, and then there's some gray area - a few million years later, you have us people.

Half a million years ago, we weren't even the only people.

I just want to know why. And, it comes from what I sense is a very primitive part of my brain sending me these signals - urges, thoughts, emotions. The thing has been grasped by the mind and spun around and examined from all angles. And I just want to know why.

A sense of inadequacy grows in me. A self-centered disposition, I feel inadequate and also deceived. I feel bettered by another, perhaps more cunning, male. Maybe there is more to that. Maybe that is all there is. Maybe my feelings toward her and about her are reflections of my emotions toward him and my positioning about him. Was I overcome by a superior male or was I outmaneuvered by an opportunist.

A man must not become enraged with a female for being taken from him - either permanently or perhaps merely sampled. Becoming emotionally charged toward a familiar woman is tantamount to raging against a ripened fruit which was unceremoniously pilfered from the branch of your tree. Its sweet juices sampled by another.

That is the source. The situation as laid out is exacerbated by the foreign male being a relation of mine. A male with which I was competitive within my familial unit. This was a male who bested me in competition in the past both in feats of strength and ability as well as in some social endeavors. That sophomoric competition seems a product of the lurching of evolution forged in the unforgiving flames of life and survival. It feels also unresolved. Our environments, our interests, our talents, and subsequently our paths diverged in childhood itself. Therefore, our competition, a tool designed to make us more rounded and capable representations of our gene pool, feels still today to be stunted.

So the book was never finished. The chapter left half read. And, on the rarest occasions, this relation of mine has managed to bubble up into my sphere of attention and display himself for my observation. He makes a point of showcasing his capabilities. I do not, by both nature and an underdeveloped social faculty. But look at me making excuses for myself. Whatever the case, he is a familiar contemporary male competing for resources. Abundant or otherwise, my mind holds dear to the social bonds and resource allocation which I have diligently built up over many years.

Being a male who adapted to both roving in packs of young-adult males as well as survival as a lone male, I have developed versatile skills and perceptions. This allows me to navigate around situations in my environment in a unique way. If I wish to make best use of my ability rather than ruminate on that which I may have conceded to a competing male, I may well better identify myself as a source of bounty unworthy of the efforts made to extract such.

There are three distinct categories of perception of life which may be broken down into age ranges. Childhood is a time marked by rapid growth and extreme vulnerability. Early childhood is unlike late childhood due to exponential growth of both structure and function. The child gradually separates from the parents and identifies as an individual more and more. This is when culture begins to take hold. Cultural norms, flow of information, radicalization of generations as they move through the stages of life - these influence a child who is moving toward higher independence and higher cognition. In some nations, the people are communal and knowingly fall into a hierarchy within families and society. In other nations, extreme cases show individualism to the point of many humans within a society spending most of their lives in isolation in the typical sense.

These isolated humans may simply exchange labor-power for consumption options. They eat, watch, read, etc. the culture of their people but do not people within their culture. So to speak. This can manifest in humans living not unlike a lower animal in a cage. Except the caged animal is the one with the key - he's the one who locked the gate. Not to keep himself in, which he will do so willing, but to keep the world out. He creates a barrier and separates himself from the world, perhaps because he fears the world will want to separate itself from him if given the chance.

The young adult period of life sees the males disjoint from the familial circle and congregate with other similar males. These all-male troops typically convene in search of resources. These resources are typically sex, food and drink, and as a lesser order or importance economic prosperity and power accumulation (money). They also instinctually hunt or clear away competing males, when able.

The males accumulate resources and cultivate a sense of safety in their troop. However, individual members will break off a) to join other, more desirable troops (perhaps with more capable males), or b) to mate with females. The females know this and will try to incentivize males into contrived traps meant to subdue the brute and socially bond with it. If successful, the female may separate the male from the influences of the all-male troop. This is a tenuous relationship. The female must bond sufficiently with the male to procure her own safety and increase her own labor-power to a power of more than two, three, or even four times in terms of capability, and double her labor-power in terms of time allocation for labor. This is a promising path for the female and male alike as they stand the best chances of bringing a human baby through to adulthood.

This next part is tricky. Inevitably there are males, as part of these young-adult troops organized around protection and resource gathering, who evade the social bonding of sexual partners. These males may become trapped in a state of arrested development. A male with good utility - good capability - may continue with troops for a large portion of this adult life, but not forever. These males may terminate this stage of development - unarrest oneself - by one of three means. The male may ultimately find sexual companionship and socially bond with a partner by some other means other than resource gathering in one of these small bands - dating sites, classifieds. In this case, the male is likely to progress in an expected fashion to the next, yet unexplored, stage. Other males may fail to demonstrate capability or utility to other males and as a result be marginalized in the resource-allocation space. These males may have had some success in navigating intragroup dynamics and demonstrating value but has lost his once lofty appeal. These males may remain solo for the rest of their lives - eking out a social existence on the margins of society. They may also regress to an early state. These regressors, and also males who may have failed from the outset to demonstrate capability and utility to male peers, may escape the social discomfort in their failures by returning to or remaining with that earlier familial unit - their childhood family. In this role, they remain inferior males. In order to ascend now, they must cultivate power and influence within the usually rigid pre-established social hierarchy. This can be a difficult task.

For those not stunted in one of these earlier stages, the male should develop into the role of leader of a familial group, or at least into a role among its core administrators. The male is placed in a position of power which may be built on that initial incentivization by the female to procure sustenance and protection during childrearing. The opportunity to shift perspective may be first available at this stage. The male has ascended the stages of life - beginning in a dark, wet sac in the womb, emerging and growing into an individual member of a group through childhood, competing, honing, developing, then embarking on resource gathering with male peers, finally emerging from a sort of social jungle of his early life. He can peer out over the canopy of society and see the world farther and in greater detail than he ever could on the social forest floor.

The final stage comes upon the male only after all that came before and makes use of a man in the way unique to only man. Among the robust life that has both come and gone from this planetary theater, man is not the only one with opposable thumbs, not the only one with a prefrontal cortex, not the only one with sociability, not the only one with cooperation, not the only one with problem-solving, not the only one with tools, not the only one with self-awareness. Man is the only form of life with rationality and the written word.

With those tools of his mind, a man as explained above may manipulate himself, his peers, masses of people, dogs, lions, the largest elephants of Africa, and pea plants. He may organize his world to his preference. He may travel to a foreign planet, and he may split an atom here on our own. The consciousness of man blossoms like a flower in the apex stage of life.

Like the cart on a rollercoaster track, the chains within the ascending portion of track clunk and grind as the cart lurches up the slope. For a moment, perception is clear and the world is more visible than ever before. The cart halts at the apex - you breathe it all in. If you're fortunate and disciplined, you have suppressed the fear and anxiety and worry what enshroud your inevitable future descent. You find nirvana in a moment - a moment is all we ever have. It is all we are ever promised at birth and it is all we relinquish in death - a moment. What follows is a violent gravitational jerk as the cart careens over the peak of track and plummets to the bottom. The ride is over.