The Ascent Of Man

Yesterday, I concluded attendance upon two days of very happy business by the bay and decided to celebrate with a reenactment of humanity's rise from the sea into rarefied heights of land and gas. We begin with a primitive life-form assembling itself from siphonous seaweed utricles and puppydog tails:

In the background, where time and tide slide back into the sea, the wet verge is lined in gulls. They watch as our specimen ventures clumsily onto a new world, a new future and history, while they peck hapless crabs apart. They screech, "Bye! Uh, you gonna finish your hapless crab?"

But the evolving creature doesn't answer. He is entranced with oxygen, nitrogen and aqueous clouds. He is giddy with gas. He forms legs, pockets, eyeglasses.

He evolves primitive and unattractive clothes, but he is happy. Perhaps he never looks down. Let us examine our specimen's habits and motives more closely.

Ah, he has found a mate. This is what really makes specimens happy. Together they find a car evolved for them on La Playa Street and check into Hotel Monaco --an establishment based less on survival of the fittest than gratuities of the most comfortable-- before Man expands his diet beyond hapless crabs. They dine at Don Ramone's, prehistoric home of the giant tusked wooly-chimichanga. This allows Man to internalize the exotic gases of land life.

Man's Ascent is a journey upward from mud-bound protolife to oceanic hiccups, then out of water into air. It is a progression marked by adaptation to rarer and rarer atmospheres, presumably continuing into outer space and intergalactic exploration. Each stage has its challenges, rewards and measureless evolutionary advancements. This essay, however, must conclude with its subject deciding to remain at this one.