Of Primate Psychology and Frozen Mullets

On moving houses, raising children, and why humans are essentially monkeys in trees.

So, this week we're moving houses. I haven't talked about it here, because I would then have to describe how everything to do with real estate in Australia is, at a base level, evil and despicable, and because most people in the world have their own problems.

The move is on Friday and I still have much to do. And perhaps first on my list would be to confront my almost profoundly heightened levels of denial concerning all of this.

But the main issues, as usual, lie with my children. When I elected to have children, I did so on the condition that I be able to teach them how to be creative people—you know, somewhat like myself. This wasn't too much of a challenge; generally speaking, children are innately creative and it's really only our schools—our entire education system and way of life, in fact—that train it out of them.

My daughters attend a reputable public school that might, in fact, be the best—or second best—in the state. And what that also means is they spend much of their time learning how to jump through absurd, arbitrary hoops. They learn how to do busy work. They learn how to use commercial office software. I'd go so far as to say that public schools in Australia teach children how to sit in offices and do as they're instructed.

Private schools, I suspect, teach children how to be in charge of children from public schools. They fill them with status anxiety and encourage them to get MBAs, in the hope they can grow up into the sorts of people who enter companies and fundamentally ruin them from the inside, and make everybody secretly hate them. Mind you, I do not know for certain; I am merely conjecturing.

Last night, Boudica, who is eleven, said to me that her friends keep saying to her, "What's the matter with you, do you live under a rock?" She is unable to detect all the references to television shows—and anime, in particular—that other eleven-year-olds are dropping in conversation. I think it's fine to be out of the loop. In some ways, television might be compared to whiskey, in that a little of it can be quite nice, and too much can turn a person into a complete bore. And also—why are people giving this stuff to children?

I'm not mean about it. I let them watch KPOP Demon Hunters, which I promise you I did not make up, in the spirit of being satirical. And every second or third week, Boudica and I watch an episode of Pushing Daisies. My daughter has a lively and vivacious imagination, and that is best cultivated away from digital media.

But again, she does get a lot of "were you born under a rock?" remarks, so a few days ago, I sat her down on the couch and delivered quite a good lecture about what was really happening.

"Humans," I explained to Boudica, "are primates, and if you are not a student of primate behavior, you will be endlessly confused by their behavior. But the good news is, there's not much need to take any person too seriously, because they are—like everybody on this planet—essentially a monkey in a tree.

"And you see, when you're interacting with primates, they often want to re-frame your existence onto a branch below theirs. For instance, are you not intricately aware of the plot of Season Two of Attack on Titan? No? Then it's a case of: 'You are an inferior monkey! I look down on you!'

"But if you've seen all four seasons, you can make an offhand remark about a spoiler from a later episode, and say it in such a way as to suggest that you watched the entire show when you were five, and have moved on to far more obscure animes that your interlocutor would never have heard of.

"And if done properly, they will be impressed and mentally cower, somewhat. If they were chimps, they would slap the ground in agitation."

Now, here's something about me I would never normally admit to any adult: I am extraordinarily adept at impersonating chimpanzees. I can drop into a low, bow-legged stance and raise my arms above my head and let my elbows go limp and walk around shrieking in primate agitation, at the drop of a hat.

I never do this around adults, naturally enough, because mockery at an almost genetic level really upsets them. Which isn't to say that when people try to mindlessly impress me with their fancy car I don't dearly want to show them how a chimpanzee might react.

So, I showed her how a chimpanzee would attempt to appear larger and more menacing—or more knowledgeable about popular culture—and how they scurry away when intimidated by higher-status chimps who, for instance, have watched Cowboy Bebop a hundred times.

I hooted and screeched. I leaped around one moment, then paused to deliver, rather soberly, what precisely the chimpanzee was thinking in that moment.

My point was this: if she bears all this in mind, humans—and their subtle denigrations and attempts to diminish others—make a lot more sense. It's also entertaining to watch men pretend to be tough "alpha dogs" because—well, they're neither dogs nor even wolves; they're primates! And many men do look like strategically-shaved baboons, anyway. Especially when they're middle-aged and fond of carbohydrates. You know that species of man who has no neck, and likes to wear wrap-around sunglasses and a goatee? I want to slap my chest at them and grunt gruffly, like a gorilla.

(Chimps don't slap their chests unless they've observed gorillas doing so; I sometimes wonder if the chimps do it to make fun of gorillas, to teach baby chimps how ridiculous it is to be a primate.)

Anyway, an hour later, Boudica's mother came home and Boudica begged me to show her how chimpanzees behave when they're intimidated. I explained to Boudica that I would not, because—in terms of primate psychology—it would make me seem like a nonviable mate.

But I did show Hattie when my wife was out of the room, and she reacted precisely the way Boudica did. She rolled around on the floor, shaking with laughter.

It is a sad fact of my life that my children are not serious people. It's just the way they are; I don't know if anything can be done about it at this stage. If the gravity of my primate psychology lessons can't perforate their flippancy, then I don't know what can be done for them.

Meanwhile, getting things done around my little girls is rather difficult. I can't pack up boxes around them. I'd be packing a box on one side of the room and they'd be unpacking it on the other, just to amuse themselves.

There's also a lot of singing and dancing. I blame myself, chiefly, because I stayed home with them when they were babies and often, when I was bored, I sang songs to keep everybody amused. So, through their toddler years, I moved on to dance routines. Obviously, I'd never do any of that around adults, because fully-grown primates are dreadfully serious about everything, and endlessly preoccupied with social status. You can't hoot like a chimpanzee, you can't even flail on the ground in agitation—even for demonstration purposes—or they place you on a lower branch of the social hierarchy and become all superior and smug toward you.

This is why I don't want my children rushing through their childhoods. This also explains why I don't let them use YouTube or TikTok or watch much television. I don't want them internalizing all the neuroses and status anxiety of bewildered, domesticated primates. Let them be children, I say. Their grown-up lives will be onerous enough. Decades of listening politely to dreary adults talking about their renovations, or the so-called "property market." In a better organized world, whenever somebody mentions tiling their kitchen, I should be legally entitled to remove a frozen mullet from a briefcase and slap them upside the head with it.

Picture it. Somebody says, "The housing market is up eleven percent in this area just this year—" and SMACK! They're on the floor, dazed and picking frozen fish scales out of their ear. Life would be glorious. I'd be bouncing out of bed each day, hoping some lunatic won't be able to resist talking about the property market—which is, not incidentally, precisely the opposite of how I start my day.

Anyway, I still have boxes to pack. But I've liked this. I like writing to you people. It's cathartic. And I don't simply mean "thinking about hitting people with frozen mullets is cathartic," though that obviously is. I just mean, it's nice knowing you're all out there, thinking much the same thoughts, vis-à-vis frozen mullets. And that's why I absolutely mean it when I say I remain...

... yours with chaste affection,

Kris St.Gabriel