Arcs of Recreation

Become a Chimp Guardian-- a primatology motto

Gertrude Lintz is a period figure footnote, and the film based on her captive apes plays itself out like a comical footnote. Alan Cummings might as well have written a skit about getting his balls twisted, given his hyper manic throw away as the assistant. So much video footage is a form of trivial pursuit, and then there are auteurs, like Thomas McCarthy, whose work is so much more; then there is my annoying identification with Massa, the dead Massa, the movie puppet Massa who was evidently not Massa but another lowland gorilla who died in a circus, an attractive anadiplosis; not quite what I'm after.

Do socialites still exist? Our ape cousins only rate slightly higher on the commiseration scale than we do ourselves. They aren't quite human, and I was not entirely unmoved by Jane Goodall's life death and empathy in chimpanzee groups documentaries, but how often do we need to see agitated juveniles act out? Bush hunters poach them or slaughter them for food, and Europeans are still engaged in a jazz quartet with Darwin. Twinge with rebuff.

My post student interlude with Tom Reid was an important lull in my life, because Tom and I had shared sensibility and education in common, and maybe this is what my heart thought it might have relocated in fag boy Jesse, why his lurch off behavior hurts a little more. Marie said I would have made a pass at him, but I do not do forced conversions.

It did matter however, the hope of new relation, discovery of the other. He made me realize the extraordinary weight of the loneliness I carry, with his Google plus hockey mask image, and my Andrew Sullivan screen shot of the darkly overcast Amazon tower. Amy Purdy is the next generation; Sarah Kaufman's writing is of a caliber I once believed myself capable. I cannot enter into what resilience this young woman needed to come back from the devastation of meningitis, but the abyss she confronted, for me, is coming down to a stark choice: endure constraint and more indignity, or convince Final Exit to help me euthanize myself.