In Defense of Zoos

Thanksgiving dinner got me thinking about zoos, among other things. The topic came up as we gorged ourselves on the breast of a mass produced turkey. My friends were talking about places to take a couple 10-year-old kids during their Christmas vacation in San Francisco and I mentioned a hidden safari tucked away deep in the remote regions of Santa Rosa. "Is it like a nature preserve, or a zoo?" they asked. I didn't know. I've never been to the place. "I didn't think you were the kind of person that would condone the zoo." And then I knew it was too late. All of the pent up liberal scorn and seething upset that had been bubbling up without an outlet had suddenly found one. It no longer mattered that I was anti-Trump, or that I consider myself a left-leaning progressive. The only thing that mattered was that I believed in the inhumane incarceration of animals. Animal abuse. 

My comrades informed me that I was a monster for defending the existence of such a cruel and unusual institution. I was told that the zoo, or as they liked to call it - animal jail - was a barbaric and disgusting practice that I was subsequently shamed and shunned for supporting. I use the term "support" loosely, because it's been perhaps 20 years since I've visited a zoo. I told them that the last time I was there the animals seemed well-fed, exercised, protected, that it needn't be viewed as a terrible experience from the animal's perspective, necessarily. Zoos give kids the chance to see an animal that they would otherwise never see, it's educational. Isn't that a liberal value? But they would hear none of it. One person suddenly screamed, "you probably support SeaWorld, too, don't you?!" I didn't, I said. "Well, you support zoos, so you support Shamu, too." Again, I said I didn't. But it didn't matter. To them there was no difference between feeding, protecting and preserving animals and forcing an animal to perform humiliating party tricks on command. They told me it's cruel to limit an animal that would otherwise roam free to the meager confines of a cell inside a zoo. But you guys have two cats, and just recently had a dog, I said. "That was different," they explained. Then, a woman who'd had enough of my shit smashed a cup of nog onto the floor and yelled out, "you believe in enslaving animals; do you support slavery, too?!" Emboldened by the woman's cry, a man stood up and, pointing, said "I heard his family owned a plantation!" I looked toward my mother to dispel these false allegations but she turned away from me in disgust. Things were getting out of control, fast. Caught off guard, I stuttered, and fought back a little chuckle at the absurdity of the claim. "Look, he's laughing! So now you think slavery is funny!" No, I said, I think...

"Shut your racist mouth, faggot," another friend said to me, interrupting.

That's when my first amendment rights were revoked. And on Thanksgiving, of all days! I stood up to excuse myself, thinking that a bathroom break might ease some of the tension, but as soon as I stood up, the back of my leg bumped the chair and sent it crashing to the ground with a loud smack. A teething baby, uttering his first words, said, "mamma, he's got a gun!" Women were shrieking, the men had bashed their beer bottles off the edge of the table, turning them into sharp rings of glass shark teeth. Whoa, everybody, let's just be calm. The turkey had gotten up and used its half devoured body to shield the wailing baby. Stuffing fell in wet clumps out from its anus as it trembled. Listen, I said, please, let's be civil about this. "This is America," my friends told me, "we don't tolerate your godless hatred here, you goddamned terrorist!" I knew I should have shaved my beard. What do you guys want, I asked. "We want your guns," they demanded. 

First they came for my first amendment rights, and I did not speak out.

Once more I told them I didn't have a weapon. They told me they didn't believe me, that they needed to make sure. Someone blindsided me and mashed a pumpkin pie into my face while the others grabbed me and held me down. They riffled through my pockets and pants and underwear as they fondled my limp wattle.

When they came for my fourth amendment rights...

Some of them had a bright future with the TSA, for sure. Slowly suffocating from the pumpkin pie caked into my nostrils and mouth, I began to lose consciousness. The last thing I remember was someone aggressively stroking my snood while they continued to search for weapons exclusively around my groin and anus region. 

...and I was thankful for that.

November 24th

Predawn footsteps make creaky music over wooden floors. A door closes, and then locks. Silence. The distinctive sound of female urination. From a small metal vent, warm air sighs and spills out into the apartment. A brief splash of running water. The bathroom door unlocks, and then opens. More footsteps. More creaking. The couch groans as she sits down. The heat suddenly stops its breathing. She rubs her hands together to warm them up. A faint blue light glows from the screen of her cellphone. Outside, a garbage truck lumbers down the street in the dark. As the driver pumps the pedal the brakes emit a high pitched squeal and the truck halts just below the window. Like a dog the idling engine seems to sniff loudly at the night, searching for a scrap of silence. Time passes slowly. The truck appears to vanish and quiet emerges once more. There is gentle wind. The sound of leaves rustling. A croaking crow sings a staccato solo to no one. The suspension of a passing car lurches, mouselike and furtive, and then it is gone. In the freezer a frozen, fleshy bird hears no sound. A baster waits, patient and plotting in a darkened drawer. Within a few hours the apartment will be alive and bustling with family and friends, perfumed by the smell of roasting turkey and sweet stuffing. Liberal libations will bring about much laughter and many smiles, followed later by a few red-faced arguments and frowns. For now though, everything feasts on sleep.

Lestworld

My lady love is away and I've been binge-watching Westworld. Everyone keeps talking about how good it is, how the writing is so cerebral. Multiple people urged me to watch it, and kept nagging me to do so. So I did. Honestly, after finishing the first episode I doubted whether the series would rise to meet its heavy praise. Nothing about the pilot drew me in in a way that was meaningful, except maybe for its appeal to my love of westerns. The premise is simple enough: escapism. Wealthy vacationers frequent the park, which is essentially a microcosm of chance impossibility - a trip back in time, to the wild west - where visitors can forget about their real world responsibilities for a while and indulgence themselves in unfettered fantasy. In that way, the show offers the viewer something with the potential to be self aware; the parallel between the viewer and the guests of Westworld is not one that should go unnoticed. Because of this I kept watching, half hoping to see something inventive happen. All seemed rife for a modern commentary on voyeurism, distraction, the willingness to pay exorbitant sums of money for the illusion of satisfaction; the tendency for the modern man to seek satiety in the virtual instead of the real. The recent emergence of viable VR, artificial intelligence, and the ever increasing immersiveness of gaming seemed to set the stage for thoughtful observation. But alas.

Last night I finished episode seven. After seven hours of watching, the show still seems to fall short of being truly engaging. It takes big, weighty questions like the nature of reality, identity, the real vs the unreal, and it uses a unique genre fusion to examine them, but it does so lazily. It's philosophically superficial, yet it postures itself as something somehow more prescient. The whole season has been a repetition of the same theme, running itself in circles. Almost nothing happens until the 7th episode, where the viewer is greeted by an all too familiar twist. None of the characters are particularly compelling, save for Dolores and Maeve, and the story relies on tropes and predictable arcs; the robots are more human than the humans; one of the characters thought to be human is a robot. Surprise! I think what bothers me most is that they started with something too fresh and fertile for the to viewer to be left with something so uninventive.

To get my fill of westerns, I’ve started reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Initially I found myself unable to put the book down, engrossed completely in the macabre foreboding and his distinctive writing style. At this point I’m half way through it and the story has plateaued somewhat. The pacing, which was at the beginning quite pleasant and steady, has slowed to the point that my attention is waning. This won’t deter me though, because this is often how westerns are - mainly slow and sprawling, punctuated by moments of perforation and tension that can only be resolved with spilled blood and gun smoke. His descriptions of the desert topographies are alive and inspired, breathing life into an otherwise barren and uninhabited dustbed. McCarthy has a knack for depicting grizzly scenes in gratuitous, gory detail. At times it’s as though he’s reached between the pages and clapped together a pair of chalkboard-erasers, and through the plume of white dust a savage band of Apaches emerge, menacing, wild and merciless, descending on the reader like a plague. The native American tribes are truly terrifying, but not as terrifying as the band of American mercenaries the story follows. They commit heinous acts of unspeakable evil and insensate destruction, and they do so unrepentantly, with cold impunity. Death’s horsemen. It all gets fairly dark fairly quickly. But with a title like Blood Meridian, what do you expect?