Memepark

Our perception of the world is the end product of immensely complicated neural processes that filter and modify raw sensory data and turn it into a useful, navigable picture of reality. Details deemed unimportant are edited out, and familiar patterns have labels attached to them, allowing us to act on objects in the world without constantly pausing to reidentify them. These labels turn an undifferentiated field of sensory data into discrete objects that fit into a system of classification: a jumble of light and color resolves into a desktop, a pen, a coffee cup. Once an object has been classified, it tends to retain its label, and seeing it from a fresh perspective can be difficult -- once seen, a pattern is hard to unsee. Occasionally, however, patterns that we have long held in our memory can slip, and we can reevaluate our take on familiar objects in our environment. Artists train themselves to see light and shadow and color instead of a house or a tree or a face, and everyone has moments when the familiar becomes suddenly, shockingly new and bizarre.

An example I'm thinking about, specifically, is something that happens to me regularly: I see people not as "people" but as the monkeys they are. The last time it happened, it was triggered by one man whose face had a simian quality that poked through his human disguise. Suddenly I saw not just him but everyone around me as they really are: big, hairless, upright monkeys. The males mostly had shaved the fur off of their faces, and they had all done weird things to the one little patch of hair left on their heads -- some of it had cut it short, or they had it tied or shaped or colored -- and they all had these huge foreheads and jutting brows and big monkey-mouths and nostrils. And they had put all kinds of crazy things on their bodies: these weird clothes, all different colors -- you could barely see their monkey-bodies through all the cloth. And some of the females had actually put makeup -- face-paint -- on their eyelids and paint on their cheeks and lips and I didn't know if it was, like, comical or obscene to see a monkey with paint on its face, and some of them wearing glasses -- glass lenses to correct their vision because their eyes were messed -- up and the craziest thing is suddenly I look around and these monkeys are driving CARS and it's these two-ton metal juggernauts of death flying down the street at thirty-five miles an hour and whizzing by you like three feet away from you and behind the wheel's this monkey, just looking around and yelling these monkey sounds out the window, "OOH OOH AH AH!" and you keep waiting for two of them to smash into each other because clearly it's just a matter of time, and then the thing is that they're driving these things on streets that were, you realize now, laid out and the concrete and asphalt poured and smoothed and painted by teams of MONKEYS. And you look up and you're surrounded by these giant enormous buildings made of metal and glass and stone and some monkey, a bunch of monkeys hooting at each other designed this thing, THOUGHT THIS SHIT UP and imagined what it would look like and somehow got, like, dozens, hundreds of other monkeys using other monkeybuilt machines to cart around these stones and metal and glass and stack it up and fucking construct this collossal piece of shit sticking like a million miles into the air and that's when you realize that these screeching, hairy, smelly, sweating, eating, screwing, pooping, masturbating apes have used their oversized brains -- these overgrown, enormously complicated cortexes that they've got grown all on top of the rest of their brains -- to scribble little monkey-scribbles on pieces of paper and screech at each other and they've put together this little metal shell and stuck it on the end of this big tube full of explosive fuel and blasted a fucking monkey into OUTER SPACE, like to the moon, and there's this fucking MONKEY jumping around on the MOON, all "OOH OOH AH AH!". And I laugh out loud right there on the street because I'm like, "What are you DOING?!? Monkeys! You're crazy! You're MONKEYS! I mean, you guys are going to get into so much TROUBLE!" I mean, it's funny, but it's also totally fucking terrifying, because come on, it's impressive, absolutely fucking mind-blowing that they've managed to do all this, build all this shit, but at the same time, you know, like, it's only a matter of time: we're about ten seconds away from complete ecological collapse, from nuclear annihilation, complete breakdown of this impossibly complex mechanism that's flying in fifteen million directions all around us. One collision. Boom. The End. Goodbye monkeys. Goodbye everything.

Does everyone have these moments? Or just me?

[Read part two.]