Royal Imposters: the Great Biological Swindle

In King's Cross in Sydney, motorcycle gangs and underworld figures have clashed over territorial disputes since the 1960s, which can often explode into violence. It's a commercial zone and it looks much like anywhere else in the Sydney CBD during the day, but at night it's all vice (prostitution, gambling, drugs, etc). 

I was told the police take twice as long to arrive in King's Cross. There's a large police HQ at Darlinghurst but apparently police who move quickly around the Cross are brave to the point of being reckless.

One morning, after a night spent clubbing in the Cross, I was eating breakfast on a terrace overlooking the main street when I saw this biker - a fierce behemoth covered in ink and roid rage - come charging down the sidewalk as fast as he could move without running (which was likely his top speed, each of his legs were roughly the size of my torso). He was a monster of a man and he wasn't hiding his feelings or playing coy. The look of fury on his face screamed, "Someone is going to die."

Needless to say, everyone on our side of the street quickly crossed the road to get out of his way. Only one little girl remained, standing directly below the terrace where I was eating. A woman that must have been her mother was walking about 80m up the road talking on her cellphone, unaware that her daughter had stopped. The little girl had lost her balloon and when the biker stormed past her, she demanded his assistance. "Help!" The biker froze and turned around. "My balloon!" She pointed. A balloon was skipping across the street.  

Fascinated, I watched this 400lb monster fight a losing battle with Natural Selection. He clearly didn't want to help, mumbling something about the time, motioning off down the street. Someone clearly needed to die, or be made to wish they were dead. But evolutionary biology crushed his resistance like a paper cup. It was comical. He looked down at her with a tortured expression that pleaded, "Why me?" She was having none of his excuse-making. She just stared at him in earnest, pointing at her balloon. Grimacing, he accepted defeat. His shoulders slumped and his gaze dropped to the ground. I thought to myself, "This is real power." I could imagine him saying, "As you command, Your Majesty."

He then lumbered off to fetch her balloon as it lazily swept and circled away. Keeping one eye on the pursuit for the runaway balloon, I watched the Toddler Queen peruse the contest, the inscrutable intensity of her stare belying the look of unemotional detachment on her face.

Fetching the balloon looked an easy task initially but a gust of wind gave the balloon legs and for a moment, it looked likely to make good its escape. But the biker persisted and eventually got ahold of it and brought it back to the child. He wasn't happy about it, handing over the balloon with a sullen and resentful expression, as if he'd been forced at gunpoint to do something distasteful. He was sulking.

The toddler took possession of her errant balloon with a shriek of joy and then ran up the street to join her mother, interrupting her phone conversation to say something about her balloon. The mother listened and just returned to her phone call without saying anything, clearly disinterested.

The toddler girl's cry of joy was the only reward the biker received but he looked like a man who'd just won the lottery. The transformation was unbelievable. Her pleasure had invigorated him, triggering a chemical rebalance in his brain. He looked as if he'd just mainlined speed.

His shoulders arched back, his head came up as his chest puffed out with pride, his eyes sparkling with life and spread across his face was the stupidest grin I have ever seen. Not that anyone would be game enough to tell him, but then I don't think he could have cared less. He was just enjoying the moment, chuffed with himself -- he was smug. A million years of evolution had just patted him on the back and tousled his hair, "Good boy. Who's a good boy? You're a good boy."

I watched him grin, stupidly. I could tell he knew, he was a good boy. He watched Her Majesty skip along and when they were out of sight, he quickly blinked a few times and slowly looked around as if he was coming out of a trance, trying to find his bearings.

He remembered something he'd forgotten, his hand reached for his wallet as he spun around looking for what he'd lost. I had a gut feeling I knew exactly what he'd lost, and if I was right, it had been confiscated from him and he wasn't going to be able to get it back, at least for awhile.

He wanted it back, trying hard to find it again. His eyes narrowed, his forehead wrinkled and his fists clenched as he fought in vain to reacquire what I suspected the child had taken away. But his efforts were to no avail and I punched the air in triumph when my gut feeling proved correct. His anger was gone, she'd pickpocketed his rage without even realising what she'd done. Whatever offence had infuriated him only moments prior -- to the point where he genuinely looked fit to kill -- no longer seemed important or relevant.

Shaking his head, he turned and slowly walked away in the direction he'd come from. Change of plan.

This is pure speculation of course, and it stands to reason that he would have found his rage again sooner rather than later, but I suspect someone owes that toddler a debt of gratitude. Or their life.
________________

When I sat back down, I was mildly embarrassed (the biker wasn't the only victim of enchantment). I nervously glanced around expecting to see the familiar signs lunatics use to signal to each other that someone is crazy. Anything people don't understand, they imagine to be insane. People are morons.

I imagined everyone on the terrace would be awkwardly making subtle gestures, raising their eyebrows, nodding in my direction, making cuckoo sounds or whatever as I'd completely forgotten myself, lost in a trance which included an air punch towards the end.

"Those who danced were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."
- Nietzsche 

But no one appeared to have noticed. They couldn't have cared less. The cafe was full of zombies eating in silence, cattle chewing the cud, a crowd of people sitting alone in tiny bubbles of self-important repetition. Even the girl I was having breakfast with hadn't noticed. She was peering intently at her Sunday paper and on impulse, I asked her what was so interesting only to immediately regret my stupidity when she started reading her horoscope out loud. I had to listen to hers, and then - when I wasn't bright enough to claim we shared the same star sign - I had to listen to mine. Utter gibberish from start to finish, mind-numbing inanity written to target reduced narcissists. Or asylum inmates. 

"An interesting financial transaction is heading your way."

"An opportunity for romance beckons." 

I zoned out as she stammered her way through the reading, pausing a couple times to pronounce difficult words phonetically. I looked around the terrace in disgust. Not one other person had noticed the fascinating incident play out on the street below. They just didn't give a fuck. Not for the first time I wondered why people even bother with life. If they have no interest in it?

Despondent, I looked at each of them, scanning their faces for signs of life, my eyes sweeping the room. Nothing. They were all dead. Morose, glum human robots trapped in universes built-for-one. Wanting to get out of there, I turned to finish my breakfast, looking up briefly as the girl asked me something inane. Just mind-numbing small talk but I wasn't listening. I'd seen something horrifying. Getting up and backing away, I bumped into the waiter, fumbled for my wallet, paid for breakfast and escaped.

It was her hair. The girl I'd just met that night, hooked up with and was about to take home -- the woman who'd put her hands down my jeans in the club and whispered incredibly adult things in my ear -- the grown woman I was about to sleep with had something weird going on with her hair.

It was meticulously braided like a little girl's, tied with a pink ribbon. So creepy. This was not a little girl, she was a woman acting like a little girl. I didn't need to wonder why, I knew exactly what she was doing. She was illegitimately tapping into biological power, unwilling to forfeit her royal privilege.

Women are stealing children's biological protection mechanism, but not for biological reasons. Women don't need to do anything to get sex, their motives are cannibalistic. They're stealing little girls' birthright to gain competitive edge in their perverse and unnatural exploitation of men. I was about to take a predator home, as her prey.  

There is nothing -- nothing -- as creepy as a grown woman acting like a little girl to exploit men's biological instinct to protect and care for little children. They have the nerve to call men creeps.

Men are creepy, in our own way. We might not pretend to be little boys to prey on women but we do pay for their breakfast. It's not like little girls can pay for themselves, right?

"Women are NSFW."
- women