Masticatory Musings

Evolution is a funny thing. Its sole purpose is to promote the survival of adaptable species while allowing the retarded, worthless species that have somehow managed to make it as far as they have to die off in a decidedly unsatisfying yet appropriately inconspicuous puff of smoke. Basically, evolution's job is to be the bouncer at a popular but horrifyingly douchey night club: if you're not awesome enough to be on the list, get ready to be turned away in a flurry of public shame and very large fists.

In any case, we humans are supposedly relatively highly evolved. I say "supposedly" because in my comparatively short existence, I've seen enough slobbering, swivel-eyed mouthbreathers to question seriously whether evolutionary biologists have spent all these years just sitting around swilling Schlitz while thinking up the best way of playing a monstrous joke on the rest of us. Then again, the fundies have already beaten me to this possibility (albeit with an entirely different agenda in mind), and I try to make it habit not to side with brainless jerks.

Anyway, evolution has, in its own spectacular little way, provided our species with certain convenient little features that make our meaningless, tortured lives a bit more prolonged so that we can bestow life on a few poor bastards relegated to their own meaningless, tortured existences, mainly just to get back at them for being younger and more attractive than we ourselves have become. Evolution has given us things like bipedality. Speech. In the case of a few lucky humans, complex brains. And my personal favorite, the ability to chew things with our pukesome, germ-ridden gobs closed.

If there's one thing I hate, it's sitting down to dinner, thoroughly enjoying the fact that some poor slob other than myself has slaved over making my meal, only to turn my head and see some disgusting creature chomping away with its gaping maw open so wide that it seems seriously in danger of turning its head inside out. It's not that I frequent stockyards or farmyards or whatever kind of yards animals are kept in; these are the pitiful excuses for sentient beings that can be found just about anywhere there's food.

Here's the thing: I may be a complete moron when it comes to a lot of things, but I do know that humans are equipped with the capacity to feed without displaying the half-masticated contents of their vile blowholes. Why, then, do people feel the overwhelming urge to smack and slurp away, spraying flecks of saliva-soaked fodder all over everything and everyone within a 10-mile radius?

Because they're disgusting. Disgusting, self-important slobs. There, I said it. And I challenge you to come up with any kind of plausible proof that they're not. Thing is, I can't decide whether these monocellular slack-jaws are doing it on purpose ( "Look at me! I'm EATING! Lavish me with praise! I am a hero of the universe!") or whether they're just shamefully ill-mannered.

In any case, I propose that anyone caught slurping and smacking away like this in public should be hauled off and locked in a small dimly lit room with nothing but a knitting needle while the children's song "Frere Jacques" is piped in on a continuous loop. If after 72 hours they haven't poked out their own eardrums, they will be reintegrated into society under the condition that any further incidents of lip-smacking will result in permanent musical incarceration.

I have a feeling the ACLU won't like it, but then they hate pretty much everything.