I once drank my own piss.
It really didn't taste as bad as I thought it would.
Now hold on, I didn't do it on purpose.
You see there are certain advantages that come with being a man & when you are on a road trip out to a place called Karney Nebraska in the hopes of getting a job at the local news paper, well, you use those advantages.
Men can kinda, sorta take it out & use an empty coffee cup in order to save time on the road.
Of course, three hours later, the danger is that you forget what is in that coffee cup.
And the contents of that cup go from your coffee cup to your mouth to your window, your dashboard, your steering wheel, & a little on you as you swerve uncontrollably in a dead panic & try to find the first possible turn off.
It really doesn't taste like anything, for the most part it is sterile, but the fact remains, human waste is not something that you want to regularly consume. And we have already covered why.
I only bring it up because it is sorta, kinda, important to the story.
Now we have already covered how we think that people first came to America & we have covered one of the more pressing of the million question marks of pre-Columbian Americas. Now, we'll talk about one of the more familiar civilizations.
I'm pretty sure there are things here that you didn't learn in school because, well, you were deemed too young by the powers that be.
In this case, the story you heard in school is on the Mexican flag.
Now, to be honest, the story you heard is correct.
What you heard in school was a story about a tribe of natives that were wandering through the desert in search of a home. One of their priests had claimed that they would arrive when they found an eagle eating a rattlesnake while perched on a cactus.
The story is true. What they taught you in school is certainly true.
But it is not the whole story. The entire story is a bit more twisted & largely ignored because of cultural sensitivities. It was one of those things that they told me not to teach because it might be a little insulting. Another example would be the mutiny on the Russian submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that was for other reasons.
The whole story starts with a wedding.
Now we have already briefly talked about how horrible Hitler's wedding was & how much worse his honeymoon was, but believe me, this was the type of wedding that the wife was not going to complain about.
Back in the day in Europe & America & Asia & Africa & well into today, the whole wedding thing was sometimes used to solidify alliances. One family marries into another family & the in-law thing meant that there was loyalty between the families, nations, tribes, whatever.
Sending your daughter to marry a prince is sometimes a little girl's dream. She was going to be a princess with daddy, but in this case, she was going to be a queen.
It's good to be the Queen. It was probably also done under the assumption that even a king had to listen to his wife & he probably wouldn't be touching that if he turned his back on her people or went to war & killed her daddy. And then, on the other side, a king is probably not going to go to war with his daughter or sister.
It was a safe alliance.
The Aztecs at the time were an upstart tribe with no real power & the prospect of marrying into a larger & more powerful tribe was, well, it was enough to make them feel a little safer.
But things get lost in translation.
So the Aztec king was pleased with his bride & he consummated the marriage on the wedding night, just like he was supposed to.
And then to honor the union, he invited the princess's tribe to a feast, along with her father.
The thing is, well, the princess was the main course.
Of course her father didn't know this. He had no idea that he was eating his daughter.
But he did find out quick when...
...I'm not a very good cook...
..I think the term is "flay."
Anyway, they flayed her alive & they saved the skin for after the feast.
And then, to honor the wedding & the union of the two tribes, the high priest wore the princess's skin & did a ceremonial dance in front of her father.
Like I said, lost in translation. Instead of being honored that the Aztecs served the king his daughter's heart in a nice stew, & then wore her skin & gave him a dance to unify the tribes under the eyes of the gods, he was a little upset.
Actually, no, he was very, very upset.
And he sort of declared war on the Aztecs right then & there, which sent them on the run. And he sort of chased them onto an island in the center of a murky lake, Lake Texcoco, in the desert of present day Mexico.
And that was where he saw the eagle with the rattlesnake perched on the cactus & told his people that this was the sign, they needn't run any further. They had found their new home. So they called it Tenochtitlan where they turned it into the greatest city on earth & from there forged an empire.
That was the part that you don't learn until college.
And with the exception of Lia & my sister, every married woman I know has bitched about her wedding not being perfect.
Perspective ladies, perspective. You have had a wonderful wedding compared to Eva Braun & the first queen of the Aztecs.
The Aztecs, by the way, called themselves the Mēxihcah Tenochca. "Aztec" was a Nahuatl word for them & they weren't exactly fans of the Aztecs because of the, well, the queen & the ritual sacrifice thing.
Not that the Nahuati actually were clean as far as human sacrifice goes.
You see this story really starts in another city called Teotihuacan.
For the Aztecs & just about every other people in the region, Teotihuacan was the city of the gods. It marked the place where the gods had once lived & come from the underworld to the earth & for them, just like it is for us today, the city was in ruins.
They all worshiped the gods that came from there, but the names & rituals change depending on the tribe. They knew slightly less about the city than we do.
Today we know that the entire city was ritually burned by it's own inhabitants. It wasn't burned from an invading army in a time of war. It was burned & abandoned by it's own people to remove an evil stain that controlled the city.
This wasn't unusual, from the Southwest United States all the way down to the Southern tip of Chile, the native populations would ritually burn their old civilizations to the ground to cleanse them of the evil that had taken control of them.
It reset their civilization back to zero. A lot of the time, it meant that the civilization was destroyed along with a lot of the technology & it was only the aspects of their religion that continued.
We know this because of the different counts on the Mayan calendar.
You know, the one that proved that the world ended in 2012.
One of the Mayan short count resets came with the destruction of Teotihuacan.
So the Aztecs were about as likely to sacrifice a human being as the Mayans & all the other people who followed a religion that originated in a city that was destroyed by its own people who, over the centuries they all thought was the city of the gods & worshiped the ruins accordingly in order to honor their gods & prevent the end of the world through an offering of human blood.
One of the big differences, however, was the the Aztec priests & nobility would eat you after they killed you.
They were called chinampa's & they were one of the reasons that the Aztecs were able to survive & thrive when so many people were out to exterminate them because of that whole normal wedding faux pas.
A chinampa is a floating garden. When you are stuck on a little island on a murky lake, you have to come up with creative ways for eating in order to survive & thrive so your people can eventually become strong enough to leave the island to kill their enemies & forge an empire.
They literally made floating islands that they used for farm land & harvested it on canoes. Early hydroponics.
Lake Texcoco was their protection as well as their farm fields.
It was also their water source & that leads us back to me drinking piss.
They used human waste as fertilizer, so the Aztecs were farming on the lake, they were emptying their waste into the lake, & they were drinking that same water. Is caused a lot of dietary problems.
These problems were solved, in part, by the Chili pepper, which aided in the digestion that was becoming an issue because of the consumption of their own waste.
They would actually mix it into a drink with coco, which isn't half bad, & use it for just abut everything else.
The thing is, when you are stuck on an island & living off of what you can farm, protein is a problem. Unlike a lot of the other tribes in the area, they didn't exactly have chickens, at least for the first years before they became an empire & they were stuck on an island surrounded by enemies.
Thankfully, they weren't opposed to eating human beings & like all the other religions, they practiced human sacrifice.
Babies taste of chicken. We know this because cannibals say that humans taste like chicken, so you figure that babies taste of chicken as well.
Not that they were eating babies.
Most of the time, they were eating their enemies.
The Aztecs didn't kill people when they went to war with them. They considered killing your enemy excessive. You were doing the people a disservice by killing your enemies.
When the Aztecs went to war, they fought to capture & not kill. A captured enemy could be ritually sacrificed. A killed enemy was no use to the gods.
This is another difference as most other cultures in the region sacrificed their own people, of a specific age & gender & did not eat them afterwards.
The Aztecs, on the other hand, killed people from other tribes, didn't care about their age or gender, & then the royalty & priests had a nice feast with chili flavored chocolate to wash it all down.
This meant that to assure a steady flow of sacrificial victims, the Aztecs were nearly always at war & if they were not, they would simply go to the tribes that they had conquered & choose the people that they wanted to kill in order to offer their blood to the gods & prevent the end of the world.
This tactic meant that when Hernán Cortés finally came to Mexico to conquer the region, with only a handful of soldiers, he was able to find literally thousands of people that the Aztecs had already conquered to rise up against them & help exterminate them off the face of the earth.
But first Cortés had to make up his mind about conquering them or learning from them. When he first arrived he was dead set on conquest, until he saw Tenochtitlan & came to the conclusion that it was the biggest, most populated, & most architecturally advanced city on earth & became convinced that trading with them would be the better choice.
But that attitude changed from conquest to knowledge to genocide the moment he saw the temple & watched the human sacrifices.
The Aztecs, after they took the heart out of their victim would boil it until it blew up & use the blood to paint the inside of the temple that sat on top of their pyramids.
Imagine the smell.
It was enough to change Hernán's point-of-view for a third time. After witnessing the human sacrifices he concluded that, for the good of the world, the Aztecs needed to be completely exterminated & the people that the Aztecs had already conquered & were occasionally used as human sacrificial victims concluded that they were better off under the Spanish than they were the Aztecs.
The war had begun.
And it wasn't just the Spanish versus the Aztecs, it was the Spanish & everyone the Aztecs had conquered versus the Aztecs.
The Aztecs didn't stand a chance. Once again the entire world was against them.
But the really amazing thing is that all of this took place within the span of 200 years. The Aztecs went from a nomadic tribe on the run from everyone else, to the world's biggest & most populated city & Mexico's largest empire, to nothing in the span of just 200 years.
They were not so much a flash in the pan as they were an explosion in the pan.
But hey, that's what you get when you eat your wife & dance around in her skin. That is kinda, sorta, the moral of this story. Whatever you do, do not flay your bride alive, serve her to your guests, & dance in her skin. It is a regularly occurring wedding faux pas, but one that you want to avid at all costs.
I'll leave you with this:
It really didn't taste as bad as I thought it would.
Now hold on, I didn't do it on purpose.
You see there are certain advantages that come with being a man & when you are on a road trip out to a place called Karney Nebraska in the hopes of getting a job at the local news paper, well, you use those advantages.
Men can kinda, sorta take it out & use an empty coffee cup in order to save time on the road.
And the contents of that cup go from your coffee cup to your mouth to your window, your dashboard, your steering wheel, & a little on you as you swerve uncontrollably in a dead panic & try to find the first possible turn off.
It really doesn't taste like anything, for the most part it is sterile, but the fact remains, human waste is not something that you want to regularly consume. And we have already covered why.
I only bring it up because it is sorta, kinda, important to the story.
Now we have already covered how we think that people first came to America & we have covered one of the more pressing of the million question marks of pre-Columbian Americas. Now, we'll talk about one of the more familiar civilizations.
I'm pretty sure there are things here that you didn't learn in school because, well, you were deemed too young by the powers that be.
In this case, the story you heard in school is on the Mexican flag.
What you heard in school was a story about a tribe of natives that were wandering through the desert in search of a home. One of their priests had claimed that they would arrive when they found an eagle eating a rattlesnake while perched on a cactus.
The story is true. What they taught you in school is certainly true.
But it is not the whole story. The entire story is a bit more twisted & largely ignored because of cultural sensitivities. It was one of those things that they told me not to teach because it might be a little insulting. Another example would be the mutiny on the Russian submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that was for other reasons.
The whole story starts with a wedding.
Back in the day in Europe & America & Asia & Africa & well into today, the whole wedding thing was sometimes used to solidify alliances. One family marries into another family & the in-law thing meant that there was loyalty between the families, nations, tribes, whatever.
Sending your daughter to marry a prince is sometimes a little girl's dream. She was going to be a princess with daddy, but in this case, she was going to be a queen.
It was a safe alliance.
But things get lost in translation.
So the Aztec king was pleased with his bride & he consummated the marriage on the wedding night, just like he was supposed to.
And then to honor the union, he invited the princess's tribe to a feast, along with her father.
The thing is, well, the princess was the main course.
But he did find out quick when...
...I'm not a very good cook...
..I think the term is "flay."
And then, to honor the wedding & the union of the two tribes, the high priest wore the princess's skin & did a ceremonial dance in front of her father.
Actually, no, he was very, very upset.
And he sort of declared war on the Aztecs right then & there, which sent them on the run. And he sort of chased them onto an island in the center of a murky lake, Lake Texcoco, in the desert of present day Mexico.
And that was where he saw the eagle with the rattlesnake perched on the cactus & told his people that this was the sign, they needn't run any further. They had found their new home. So they called it Tenochtitlan where they turned it into the greatest city on earth & from there forged an empire.
That was the part that you don't learn until college.
Perspective ladies, perspective. You have had a wonderful wedding compared to Eva Braun & the first queen of the Aztecs.
The Aztecs, by the way, called themselves the Mēxihcah Tenochca. "Aztec" was a Nahuatl word for them & they weren't exactly fans of the Aztecs because of the, well, the queen & the ritual sacrifice thing.
Not that the Nahuati actually were clean as far as human sacrifice goes.
You see this story really starts in another city called Teotihuacan.
They all worshiped the gods that came from there, but the names & rituals change depending on the tribe. They knew slightly less about the city than we do.
Today we know that the entire city was ritually burned by it's own inhabitants. It wasn't burned from an invading army in a time of war. It was burned & abandoned by it's own people to remove an evil stain that controlled the city.
It reset their civilization back to zero. A lot of the time, it meant that the civilization was destroyed along with a lot of the technology & it was only the aspects of their religion that continued.
You know, the one that proved that the world ended in 2012.
One of the Mayan short count resets came with the destruction of Teotihuacan.
So the Aztecs were about as likely to sacrifice a human being as the Mayans & all the other people who followed a religion that originated in a city that was destroyed by its own people who, over the centuries they all thought was the city of the gods & worshiped the ruins accordingly in order to honor their gods & prevent the end of the world through an offering of human blood.
They were called chinampa's & they were one of the reasons that the Aztecs were able to survive & thrive when so many people were out to exterminate them because of that whole normal wedding faux pas.
A chinampa is a floating garden. When you are stuck on a little island on a murky lake, you have to come up with creative ways for eating in order to survive & thrive so your people can eventually become strong enough to leave the island to kill their enemies & forge an empire.
Lake Texcoco was their protection as well as their farm fields.
It was also their water source & that leads us back to me drinking piss.
They used human waste as fertilizer, so the Aztecs were farming on the lake, they were emptying their waste into the lake, & they were drinking that same water. Is caused a lot of dietary problems.
These problems were solved, in part, by the Chili pepper, which aided in the digestion that was becoming an issue because of the consumption of their own waste.
The thing is, when you are stuck on an island & living off of what you can farm, protein is a problem. Unlike a lot of the other tribes in the area, they didn't exactly have chickens, at least for the first years before they became an empire & they were stuck on an island surrounded by enemies.
Thankfully, they weren't opposed to eating human beings & like all the other religions, they practiced human sacrifice.
Not that they were eating babies.
Most of the time, they were eating their enemies.
The Aztecs didn't kill people when they went to war with them. They considered killing your enemy excessive. You were doing the people a disservice by killing your enemies.
This is another difference as most other cultures in the region sacrificed their own people, of a specific age & gender & did not eat them afterwards.
The Aztecs, on the other hand, killed people from other tribes, didn't care about their age or gender, & then the royalty & priests had a nice feast with chili flavored chocolate to wash it all down.
This meant that to assure a steady flow of sacrificial victims, the Aztecs were nearly always at war & if they were not, they would simply go to the tribes that they had conquered & choose the people that they wanted to kill in order to offer their blood to the gods & prevent the end of the world.
The Aztecs, after they took the heart out of their victim would boil it until it blew up & use the blood to paint the inside of the temple that sat on top of their pyramids.
Imagine the smell.
It was enough to change Hernán's point-of-view for a third time. After witnessing the human sacrifices he concluded that, for the good of the world, the Aztecs needed to be completely exterminated & the people that the Aztecs had already conquered & were occasionally used as human sacrificial victims concluded that they were better off under the Spanish than they were the Aztecs.
The war had begun.
The Aztecs didn't stand a chance. Once again the entire world was against them.
But the really amazing thing is that all of this took place within the span of 200 years. The Aztecs went from a nomadic tribe on the run from everyone else, to the world's biggest & most populated city & Mexico's largest empire, to nothing in the span of just 200 years.
They were not so much a flash in the pan as they were an explosion in the pan.
But hey, that's what you get when you eat your wife & dance around in her skin. That is kinda, sorta, the moral of this story. Whatever you do, do not flay your bride alive, serve her to your guests, & dance in her skin. It is a regularly occurring wedding faux pas, but one that you want to avid at all costs.
I'll leave you with this:
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