Strange Beginning, Abrupt Ending
In the beginning, the Aliens drafted blueprints of human civilization on paper & plaster models like sandcastles with Lego men & buildings like in dollhouses.
Up on their fluorescent blue flashing light floating platform hovering over the barren & desolate rock, they dropped down pellets of various colors that were
encoded, like DNA, with specific instruction s on how to become an atmosphere & all the elements, then trees, water, earth, & pyramids. The pellets multiplied like cells & the Aliens zapped them with massive psychic energy, which emitted beta photons, to catalyze the process.
As their Petri dish incubated to fruition & they observed their creation, they did not smile but instead recorded & timed the first beings, archae, slouch toward life. They observed & recorded as archae turned to eukaryotes, then to sponges, then fish, then cyodonts, then squirrel-like mammals, then lemurs, then gibbons, then orangutans, then Neanderthals, then humans, then to consumerist fuck by-products. The Aliens watched as language was formed from guttural grunts, & agriculture began, & villages then cities were built, which marked the beginnings of the humans’ aspirations to cover the planet with their human anthill.
The humans (thought they) invented art. Their very existence was just the product of science as an art. Civilization was an experiment with controls (limited resources) & variables (“free will”). But humans thought they were divine, unique creations from a benevolent god &, based on this premise, each new empire that emerged tried to take as much space & as many resources from their neighbors as possible. They regularly performed genocide as a means of monoculture.
They were the special ones & “god” would protect them, bolster & uplift them, for their values were god’s values.
Said the Egyptians.
The Romans.
The Greeks.
The Dutch English.
“We’re the chosen ones.”
Chosen by whom?
“God.”
The Aliens observed, laughed amongst themselves, & ate alien popcorn with their minds up on their platform, nearby but hidden from humans by a dense layer in the space-time continuum. Humans knew about the layer but were too self-absorbed to succeed in navigating very far past the planet on which they resided. Their planet, a goddess. Humans were too busy obsessing over proving their points to realize the Truth that was obvious to the Aliens & unrelated to all the humans’ points.
Each of the humans saw his/her personal way as the best. Humans created hierarchies where some humans had access to most of the resources on Earth & others survived on the minimum. They chose their leaders arbitrarily, as if drawing names from a hat. But all of the paper slips in the hat were names of humans who originated from antecedents with the most resources, & with ownership over the most stuff. Imagine that—the humans thought they ‘owned’ things.
Humans even thought, at a time, that they ‘owned’ other humans. From the beginning of civilization, the Aliens watched as humans with penises displayed ownership over humans with vaginas. & penis-owning humans with skin containing lower concentrations of melanin violently displayed ownership over those with lots of melanin in their skin.
Eventually, the penis-owning low-chroma-skinned humans started blasting open the planet with explosives & pumping out decayed dinosaurs called oil. They burned oil to power all aspects of their society. They manufactured all sorts of stuff & transported themselves across the planet by burning oil.
By accruing the goods, they became reminiscent of their squirrel-like ancestors, who would brag about having the largest stockpile of acorns. The Aliens saw this similarity but the humans overlooked the comparison because they were beginning to believe that owning all the goods made them gods. The more dead dinosaurs they burned, the more god-like they felt, & the thicker the atmosphere of the planet became.
The rich humans kept getting more from the poor by taxing their wages, earned by manufacturing stuff the rich wanted. Rich humans manipulated less wealthy humans into sacrificing paper-that-could-be-exchanged-for-goods for them & convinced them it was for their own welfare.
The more goods humans accrued, the larger the volume of goods buried below the earth accumulated, heaping over in piles. Islands of the goods formed in the oceans. The chemicals humans made in labs were molded into goods that eventually where buried, underwent physicochemical reactions, & produced more chemicals, which leached out of the ground & into the water of the humans-with-less-goods. Lots of the humans that drank this water became sick, so they used other sickening chemicals to become less sick.
The chemicals they took went from stomach lining to blood stream across the blood-brain barrier & drove them insane. Their insanity/mania made them believe with even more conviction that they were gods. The gods started ending their lives with firearms & more chemicals.
The Aliens observed & recorded this. They sighed without emotion as they ionized the blunder with gamma ray lasers made of antimatter.
