Logically, I get it.
Sloths are innately slow creatures. We’re all just supposed to accept that and believe they’re not lying arseholes.
We even use the two words interchangeably – it’s why the junkie in Se7en got strapped to a bed and force-fed dope into his veins till he ate his own tongue off. (Best PSA for drugs ever.) But, still, sometimes I can’t accept that they aren’t just trolling us. Ya know? Maybe it’s that creepy grin they always pull that was the fodder for launching a trillion seedy pervo sloth memes. Or maybe it’s the fact that when they suddenly find themselves on a Costa Rican sidewalk, they look entirely too human to be taken seriously as some poor creature with an efficiency deficiency.
Let’s be serious here.
Homie looks more like he’s auditioning for the role of some malevolent mystery monster crossed with a Pekinese.
Ya know? The kind you’d find crawling out of a manhole in a Japanese horror flick, chasing you at glacial speed, but then suddenly right behind you the next time you glance backward? And I just have trouble believing that they behave this obnoxiously all the time. Like, maybe, they follow the double slit experiment rule. When we’re not paying attention, they’re not just quickly street-crossing, but also Cross-fitting and carrying all eighty pounds of their Wegmans groceries inside at once…
But then, the second they see one’a us, they act helpless. (Much like how I am when I’m single versus the second I enter a relationship). Because, from what I’ve read, the claim is that they have about half as much (or was it even less than that?) muscle as other animals and that they can’t get off their welfare couches ‘cause of their weak, herbivorous diet. Psssh, right. Blame it on the veggie diet. I eat nada but plant stuff and I never stop moving except to write these species-ist shade-blogs. So, come off it, ya lazy bastards. No one’s buying into this half assed Jaywalking attempt that looks like me trying to do a bear crawl after a long all-terrain jog. Which I do bi-daily also on non-sentient nom fuel. And I don’t even have an arm’s length arboreal fridge fully of snack branches constantly at my disposal like you do, either.
But, even if I did accept all this nonsense I would still wonder: how’d they even manage to get and stay here? I mean on a survival of the fittest level? Is it the claws? Camouflage? The fact that they spend most’a their time Vietcong-ing in the trees? Or is maybe what we’re seeing just some sayonara phase for their species – like maybe they’re on their way outta the world because they’ve been devolving ever since they couldn’t top this crazy ass dino-sized, opportunistically carnivorous, apparently pole-dancing ancestor they came from?
Or …maybe they’re waiting for their environmentally favorable moment to slowly morph back into that.
In which case, we should probably keep Supermanning them across the roads to safety for now.
Ya know, so that they remember our kindness when they’re big enough to smite us in one swipe but don’t.