The Brains
Lately, I’ve been pondering one of life’s greatest mysteries: why does my brain always make my body do such crazy shit? Today it ordered me to wake up in the middle of the night and stagger downstairs to walk some bread and toast the dog. It forced me to imbibe massive quantities of caffeine and then skip the gym and go to work and sit in a dark cube all day watching a square of reflected sunlight creep slowly down the carpet. It makes me stay up past midnight every night clicking my way down internet rabbit holes. It routinely convinces me to polish off whole boxes of cold Pop Tarts in one sitting.
My body always tells me that these are the wrong things to do. But I do them anyway.
And the brain does even crazier things than that, of course. It forces whole countries to go to war over who’s squatting on what piece of land; it makes people jealous and afraid and tyrannical and suicidal and homocial and omnicidal. It afflicts us with an effortless proclivity for the seven deadly sins and then makes us feel guilty about them. It hooks us on drugs and booze and sex. It’s a very strange brain.
But yesterday, quite suddenly, I understood it all. The thing sitting inside our heads telling us what to do isn’t our brain at all. It’s an alien invader.
Here’s what happened. Two million years ago a race of ganglionic fudge creatures decided to destroy our planet. They squeezed into their little spaceships and hurtled across transdimensional space and landed on Earth and leapt out with squishy little war cries brandishing squishy little weapons. And then fell silent.
Because they’d miscalculated horribly: the earth was about 4000 times larger than they thought it was, and it was populated with lots and lots of really big creatures with even bigger appetites; not to mention diseases and volcanic eruptions and hurricanes and earthquakes and all that stuff. Half of the invading brain army died in the first month.
But in an amazing stroke of luck, the brains happened upon a harmless race of hominids with furry bodies and opposable thumbs and a large cranial cavity where they kept little things they’d have put in their pockets if they’d been smart enough to invent pockets, which they weren’t. In fact, the hominids weren’t really smart enough to do anything but sleep and eat and mate. And eat. And sleep. They went around collecting berries and getting eaten by dinosaurs and reproducing and falling off of cliffs and just generally living in harmony with the earth. They were the happiest most oblivious most well-adjusted creatures the universe had ever made.
They were perfect.
But the brains crept up on the hominids while they slept and squeezed through their nose into their empty head-cavities and set up shop. They figured out the mechanism of their new vehicles, and then rewired them so that they were easier to manipulate. They made them sharpen sticks and make fires and build wheels. And then they broke them up into separate little groups that soon began to assault each other with sharp sticks, and set each other on fire, and run over each over with big stone wheels. They made them kill everything they saw and spread out through the world like weeds. They made them build settlements and then towns and then cities and then countries. They taught them how to smelt iron and mix gunpowder and build factories that did nothing all day but belch filth into the sky. They showed them how to make bombs that ate whole swathes of the earth. They gave them the secret of life and told them to make new diseases with it.
And now they’re nearly done. It’s taken the brain almost two million years, but it’s almost finished destroying the world.
Not bad for a little gray squishy thing.
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