God really broke the mold when he made humans, according to the Abrahamic faiths. It goes a little something like this: Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, and let them have dominion overrrr…damn, I can barely remember Sunday school. Dominion over basically everything, yada yada yada.
What a crock of shit! But you believe it.
As a card-carrying member of Homo sapiens sapiens, saying you don’t believe that we are special on this Earth is like an American cop saying they’re not racist: you don’t think it’s true, but deep down it is.
We as a species have this self-centered notion that just because we have language to communicate and have thumbs to make tools (tools which mostly tend to focus on more efficiently removing another person from their head) that this somehow “separates us from the animals”. In reality, we may be different from the animals, but only because our societal assumptions are representative of a weird anomaly, and not a supreme life form.
No offense to Allah, Brahma, the Great Spirit, or any other deity that I don’t believe in, but the mold was actually broken right before humankind came about, then literally rebuilt backwards from scratch.
One area where we see this discrepancy is the hierarchy of the sexes. While we have idioms about females, naming them “the fairer” or “the weaker sex”, this is not so among our animalian co-denizens of Earth. For example, from peacocks to mallards to goldfinches, male birds are the “fairer gender”, desirously begging attention from the choosy gender with mesmerizing color, all in the pursuit of getting laid.
One such mesmerizer….hey, buddy!
And what of the weaker gender? This also shines forth during mating. With praying mantises and spiders, females of almost every species will begin to devour their sexual partner whole before, during, or after the deed is done. Definitely tweaks the definition of “being used”, huh? Shit, I could get used like that…
As for the supposed “King of the Jungle”, the lion should really be called “Sub-par ex-prize fighter who won one amateur match and now rests on his farcical laurels while napping all day…of the Jungle.” Actually of the savannah; lions don’t live in the jungle. Damn you and your uninformed nicknaming practices, ancient humans!
So much for this “king”. A male lions grows up, fights another lion, takes all his women, and then just chills all the livelong day while his harem goes out, aggressively hunting game to bring him back some food. Oh yea, I forgot to mention that he also murders all the previous lion’s offspring. Every. Single. One.
Do ya hate lions yet? Yea, fuck you, lions.
My point is this: the ancient, patriarchal notion of the “weaker sex” is probably more so a social construct, with far less of a biological rationale than we might think. Hundreds of millions of years of female superiority, and here we humans think that, as the recent usurpers of the upper food chain, there’s somehow been a complete shift?
As a man, I can attest to the falseness of that statement, and my recent sojourn in Central Europe was proof. It was only as I ambled down a breezy alleyway, that I realized I might need to assume my male duty and protect a female life. In front of my eyes, a pleasantly pastel, pink polo shirt tried in vain to mask the heaving, ropy-muscled back of a white-haired old man who probably compressed rocks into diamonds with his bare hands.
As we entered a dilapidated building with no one in sight, my thoughts immediately turned to Lara, my girlfriend who was traveling with me. Maybe I am something of a machista, but I get fairly protective of her and something was not right here.
The address of the room we had booked online, had it existed, would have been in an empty lot on a riverside. And then all of a sudden, this lummox of an elder had appeared, magically knowing my name. Of course, he led us somewhere entirely different, making small talk with a suspiciously forced smile. Now we were packed tightly into a miniscule cage-type elevator, the man taking up 3/4 of the space with his belly, still forcing a smile as he looked down from on high past his muscled chest. I just hoped that it was all in my head.
Oh no, it definitely got worse. The apartment was a suite, except all the doors to the rooms were locked. What he said next could have been plagiarized from any horror movie: “Don’t worry about those rooms. Nothing, and nobody, are in there.” He was still smiling, as he motioned up to where we were staying. This required a climb up a creaky, wooden staircase that shook from side to side with each step like a suspension bridge in hurricane-force winds.
Great curtain rod placement. Guess I’m taking a shower on the john.
At the top there were more rooms, all empty, and a common area replete with cheap, mismatched furniture, folding plastic card tables surrounded by chairs that could have been whittled from particleboard. Here, on one of the tables, we found a paper to sign, and subsequently had to pay the man up front for the next two nights.
The ensuing speed with which the man left should have been a dead giveaway that this was a bad idea, but when I chased him down, I didn’t demand my money back. I stupidly only asked how to connect to the Internet. His rambling explanation essentially amounted to “there is no Internet”. Great. Having only electronics that needed WiFi, we were left with no way to contact anyone. Not even the police.
When he was gone, we surveyed our place. Several things were very, very wrong. First off, we had not heard a single person outside, even though the apartment complex had to have at least 30 other units, and the walkways fastened to the building on every floor teetered over a large courtyard where we would literally hear anybody entering their apartment. Secondly, the place itself was very spacious…too spacious. The kind of spacious that leaves plenty of places for bad guys to hide.
Stapled to the walls was this amateur religious art that looked like it had been made in a kindergarten at an evangelical preschool. The technique of the drawings on the bottom floor was possibly watercolor, but who could tell? Each work was a scene painted within a clock face, representing the various epochs in the life of the world. 3:00 was Noah and the Flood, 6:00 was Jesus’ life, 9:00 was painted as modern day, and 12:00 was missing. I thought to myself eerily that midnight was probably the End Times. OK, I was not liking that symbolism.
Something’s missing…
Of course, in the tradition of religious hypocrisy, depictions of Jesus did not prevent the installation of a fixture next to those paintings where business card-size ads for prostitutes hung. Lol, religious people.
Sorry, Noah, can’t help you with the Ark. I’m going to Massage Island!
Even more unnerving was the long piece of butcher paper affixed at the top of the staircase. The art on it was a bit more professional, but still pretty shitty: a pencil-shaded scene of Daniel in the Lion’s Den. The drawing beseeched us to repent and be saved like Daniel among the lions…WTF, so were we in the den?! This only bolstered the creepy notion that we were in a very dangerous place.
Nothing compared, however, to the fact that at the bottom of the staircase, carved into the wall and barely covered with whiteout, was one word: the name “SAM”. When I saw this, and as night gradually fell, my heartbeat progressively descended into my stomach. My mind raced, contemplating who Sam could be and how much I really didn’t want to find out.
Uhhhh…wut?
That evening we locked our door, and spent the entirety of the night wide-eyed in the darkness, cringing at every creak, positive that it was Sam coming up the staircase to pay us a visit. Given an imminent attack, my plan was to tell Lara to crawl out of the skylight and slide down the tiled roof while Sam made me the pincushion for his Bowie knife. And if you know horror movies, you know that he would eventually catch up to her anyway after I was good and gutted.
Once it finally came, daylight emboldened us, yet at breakfast we still attempted to contact the man for our money back. Of course, no answer. We were even brave enough to joke about our mysterious absentee bunkmate. “Ah, we shouldn’t find another spot. Sam would miss us too much.”
The second night was still scary, but I made sure to check every corner of the apartment (even under the sink) for signs of Sam. Nothing there, not even a speck of blood or a chalk pentagram with written incantations. All clear, I concluded.
Should I have checked up here?
The next morning at 7:00 am, we were getting dressed and almost ready for a flight. I was buttoning up my shirt, and then suddenly…footsteps at the bottom of the staircase.
I looked up at my girlfriend, and she was wild-eyed. She had heard it too. I called down, my voice trembling: “Hel-lo…?” I peered down the staircase, and saw a foot. A human foot. As I leaned farther out to get a better glance, petrified and feeling like a large jawbreaker was being crammed forcefully into my larynx, a black, curly flash of hair flew by my face…
“Excuse me, who are you?! What are you doing here?! Do you know what time it is?! Do you work for these people?! Do you realize we had no towels for two days?! Do you realize that the shower dumps liters of water on the floor because you put up the curtain a foot away from the shower?! Do you understand that we had to buy our own toilet paper?!?!?!?!” My lioness had swooped in with a vengeance, showing herself to be the more courageous of the both of us, and was in the process of severely tongue-lashing, no, severely tongue-eviscerating a mousy-looking, young man with a mop, surely here to clean the apartment.
Quite reasonably shocked, the teenager sat there and took the abuse. To be fair, Lara wasn’t aggressive, just agitated. And here I was, gripping the railing of the staircase like it was my childhood blankie, while Lara had barreled down the stairs in my stead. So much for machismo and so much for the weaker sex.
Once Lara finally finished, the boy looked ashamed, and probably knew just how shady his boss was. Good we weren’t spiders. Lara would have devoured us weaklings in a heartbeat.
Lesson learned: Women are genetically-engineered to squeeze cantaloupes out of their bodies, so naturally they are the tough ones. And if the name of a horror movie murderer is carved in a wall of a rental, it’s probably better to just leave and splurge on a hotel. For the sake of you and the cleaning staff.
–Bruno and Lara (28/25), Salvador, Brasil, waiting for Sam to eat us with fava beans and a nice chianti