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Things crawled. Not before things swam, of course; organisms first drew breath while immersed—glub, glub, glubbing—beneath a boiling brewer’s broth of Primordial Sea. But crawl things did, eventually, as soon as Earth dredged sufficient magma from its guts to provide decent footing. On all shores, on all fours, they crept… slug-like, in most instances… gaspingly… yet bravely… willing to risk suffocation in a new medium to experience something different. Not much to look at, these Half-n-Halfers sputtered, gurgled, coughed, rolled their fishy eyeballs, and practiced walking on rudimentary feet-fins, for the most part (with a smattering of flippers). It was exciting, in a sub-moronic "land ho!" sort of way. A far cry from intelligent forms, these bumbling Adventurers had no clue about Where or What; they simply knew When (as in ‘Now’), and Why (as in ‘why not?’). Humble as that may seem, it sufficed. Beaches had inhabitants. Epochs of life above sea level ‘wigglingly’ began. The importance of pace ought not to be underestimated. In every example, Creation/Evolution—‘Cre-volution’—has proved a plodding affair. Anthropomorphizing the process, its principal attribute was and is patience… the saintly variety. Re-forming gills into monkey lungs, apropos, was not a rush-job. Nevertheless, it happened… e v e r s o g r a d u a l l y… examples of transmutation becoming as numerous as cells themselves—perhaps even proportionate. Countless versions were measured upon the scale of successful adaptation: nice idea, nice idea but, the buts falling along the wayside of Cre-volution’s thoroughfare. Not because they were any less elegant, less ingenious, less advanced. There once existed a strikingly colorful glowworm, for example, whose iridescence set it apart from all other bugs of its kind, until a gecko came on the scene with an appetite for wingless beetles. Good-bye glowworm. Survival is fickle. Only the vainest of the vain claim immunity from the vagaries of Chaos. Ah, Chaos—more than a Where, What, When, or Why combined. It is a Who beyond Who-ness, requiring no worship, demanding no acknowledgment, no obedience, an outlaw midst a calculus of rules and regulations—each one breakable on the slimmest pretext; Truth itself is an utterly violable whim. Chaos is Overlord, expecting no allegiance; like loyalty to a lunatic, what would be the point? Chaos is the eye seeing itself seeing. Chaos is its own witness. Chaos contradicts as a matter of course.
Thus, when the earliest digits itched through amphibious webbing, Chaos neither "saw that it was good" nor considered it "all that bad"; value judgments to the Pre-God were as morals to a sociopath, i.e. estimations of absolutely zero concern. If anything, it might be said, "the phenomenon went ignored." Not by him, her, it newly possessed of the welcome dexterity, however. Bites by swarms of elementary insects could henceforth be scratched (hallelujah!), among other benefits. Cre-volution continued dawdling… dabbling… developing everything from hooves, wings, and fangs, to scales and antennae—under nobody’s supervision (save by the blind-eye Chaos cast). An orgy of production and reproduction peopled the planet—with creatures other than people… for a while… an extended while… a sprawling span of easygoing propagation protracted unto perpetuity—glitches notwithstanding. Glitches, in fact, were part and parcel of the misnomer "Plan." Whereupon Chaos flexed its option and unpredictably MANufactured Man… by degrees. No faster, no slower, Humankind took its shape via the same painstaking trial-and-error trudge traveled by everything else. Oh, clay played a role, insofar as Folk came into being on terra firma. But dust joined with spittle, much like cloning mates from cartilage, was merely a biblical figure of un-invented speech—and arrived well after the fact, anyway. Apes were it. Endowed with attributes no more extraordinary than those possessed by other landlubbers, they took their place on Earth’s crust, with only their tears to remind them of an earlier (soggier) genesis. Omnivores from the get-go, they fed on whatever… preyed on it, too, if something that looked tasty proved catch-able—that is without much effort; laziness, ever, has been a primary primate trait. Second only to cleverness. A one-two punch having negligible effect on Life’s bounteous stomping grounds… for millennia… until that quirk of aberrant behavior seized the aforementioned Juke.
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