Husbandry

Yesterday, I deliberately chose a trashy vehicle like Lake Placid (99) so that I could ballyhoo it. What I really wanted to do was stop worrying about corroding the Quantum further and take a hot shower, springing a leak in Frank's former studio below me. Nelson is in it now, but I didn't. The shower stall is always dangerous; this chair always more difficult, so I carried a barbell in my chest while the Jaws reborn crocodile subverted expectations in a poorly generated computer graphic, and drowned a half ton grizzly. Other than that, though, the dialogue wasn't that bad, and it was really taking aim at the voracious fanaticism of humanity's environmental conscience. Betty White, by inference, is the super predator, once removed. That link might have been slightly sharper, perhaps, but Bill Pullman has the conspiratorial expression down, which makes him useful in these send ups, Platt was the funk, and Gleeson really doesn't like trophy hunting. What no audience really looks at too closely, unless they are a PETA zealot, is the industrialization of apex species. I am not a huge fan of the crocodilan family. My totem is the feline, and human extermination of these distresses. A farmer in Florida trying to save a sick gator is easy to mark as extraordinary, until we take stock of our own veterinary expenses. Clinical breeding and killing of hatchlings for export to China is no different than the mass slaughter of pigs, poultry, and cattle, but evolutionary nullification will invariably be the end result of all this, no matter how many genetic experts we manufacture who learn how to "imitate" ecosystems.

Does spastic have a solution? Yes. End medical treatment once biological viability goes awry. Terminate the disabled, even those with significant intellectual function, and set up a population control agency comprised of authorities according to which entities are the most stable and powerful, be it corporate or some vestige of nation-state. I personally do not think national identity is sustainable, though I grant China and Japan may hold out longer, because their norms predate western civilization.

I can poke a little fun of myself, and this mindset contravenes libertarian individualism, but that is already a foregone conclusion. I am serious that humanity needs to start looking at this in a larger context, now. We're a little egg in an "arm" of a big dust spiral, probably as rare, and unique, as creationists always believed. Space stations are all well and good, but incredibly difficult, and this won't be my problem, but what of my sister's great grandchildren, hmm?

Feline Neutering

The Wings of the Dove is perverse because it is a great novel.-- Dr. Carrol Cox, blinded with age

News items such as this allow me to understand death threats to those involved in animal husbandry, like the breeder in the article. I have a soft spot for shepherds, and despite my education and intelligence, it is difficult for me not to feel that this bastard should have been shot himself; it points to my dim view of omnivorous primates. Love the cats, but the nagging, hate the cats, aerial check on inner animal cruelty repression when mother wants to be left alone: my dead Joey, I ran into him by accident, layered onto the guilt of losing him due to urinary tract blockage, most he ever received was a bop on the nose when he broke a light bulb.

I found this article searching for a news item on the suicide death of an electrician in a domestic dispute who was a friend to my cousin, who is an arson squad investigator. Marie told me about it in order to lash out at me. She can't handle her sons. She can't handle me, nor the fact that her brother, with his MRSA, his dementia, should be living in Presby, or something similar, more than I.

This has taken me a few angry days. Kimmy woke me at 11:30 this morning to outrageous gas pains, but I maintained control, not always so lucky. I sent Billy an email with quotidian sentiments for his friend, even while realizing I do not give a flying fuck about him, his sick wife, (not entirely accurate, and more an indication of my frustration, always trying to rebuild my own social set with suitable candidates and feeling rebuffed here, subtly) his fucked up mother's screeching voice in my head, her denial about her situation, her eldest son's cold reality check about getting her placed in a facility, where confidence reigns that my aunt, shrieking like a fury, could find Kasem. 

All that I've endured, and an electrician with two children blows his brains out. Domestic discord. Read Madame Mauves. James had a discordant middle age note or two. What does family mean anymore if we're all eschewing obligation that normally come with familial ties? I lied to him about not telling my audience, but being darker than he knows? That's a race to the bottom of the glass.

A note on ecology and domestication

The aggregate for whom I am penny pimping AND NEED RESIDENTIAL AREA SUBSCRIBERS TO INCREASE MY COMMISSION (the residents of my building probably fall within Examiner's target range outside of sports actually but I have to weigh how much I'm willing to compromise my principles for ignorant Jesus spouting hypocrites) ran a story on Marius the giraffe-- or more correctly, the editorial team sent the aggregates who slave for them a link to search engine feeds. I briefly considered running with the head winds-- but my passions lean toward killing humans who kill cats and predators, not herd animals--it may also surprise you to learn I've never yet threatened an animal abuser, though it is tempting.

I take issue with Marc Bekoff, however. Was it cruel to kill a healthy two year old male who properly belonged on the African savanna? Yes. Ever see a lion take a wild giraffe down? That is cruel as well, whether or not the bolt gun is more humane than asphyxiation through curved fangs. I doubt either is pleasant in the shift from life to carcass, just as my death at the hands of 

a. an abusive paraprofessional
b. phlegm in my pulmonary tissue
c. other, primarily related to pressure sores and anxiety in developmental aging

will not be pleasant. Evolution is brutal; humans have done a great deal to both mitigate and prove this unfortunate fact, and the optimist belief that we can divorce existence from the brutality ranging from the cellular levels of consumption through orcas hunting blue whales, is too much hubris, even if transhumanism is all but ushered in upon us. I'll be happy to take the bolt gun off of the Danish. When I am ready perhaps an inner city banger will do the honor. It appeals to me more than sleep potions or bullets. I was tremendously angry at Wallace for his suicide, which was odd for a couple of reasons. Before he hung himself, I only read of his novel in passing and had no idea who Wallace was; investigation pissed me off, because he was, and had, everything I had hoped for myself. Humanist marriage, talent, students, fans, for Christ's sake, as well as the intuitive ability to use the immersion of disability in his work to offer a searing and penetrating perspective, and the genius greaseball fucking  hangs himself because he is in pain. I'm evidently not finished being really mad at a complete stranger whose work is nearly a virtuoso display of anguish. It should have been me instead, this is what my heart cries. I am still here, in this fucking provincial n---* shanty backwater where I was born in the fucking best of it public fucking housing system because its other units are pestering boils of post traumatic stress. 

I am still here, and I should have never come back.

Hantavirus

For hypothetical PETA Partisans, The Black Marble engages the emotional interest. It takes a conceit I was trained to attend, the destruction of animal human bonding, cf, a more crew cut Martin Sheen killing Foster child star's hamster, Mel Gibson's dog killed by an archer in Road Warrior, the cat mutilation in Never Talk to Strangers, and turns it into the central conflict. Wambaugh had the nerve to focus a real slice of life vice on cruelty to animals, and I had a difficult time not uttering death threats at Harry Dean Stanton in a thirty year old film where James Woods looks fresh out of the performing arts-- but this film represents mature original comedies of which place viewers like myself on starvation diets, because they simply aren't made any more. Independent films, with few exceptions, spin their story arcs under the same burden of fragmented expectation. Harold Becker had the courage to allow his actors to be flawed human beings. Even Stanton's Skinner is traumatized by taking out his hatred on hyper terriers.

Most pet owners don't look too closely at the guilt of having faux children. I do; it is at once the ultimate form of narcissism we hold up for ironic exaggeration, and painfully appreciated at the same time. Eschew human children and become an immersible zealot. Favorite swine, favorite whale (orca is scary!), favorite carnivore.

If we really wanted to do a favor to other species, we'd engage in wiser palliative treatments, breed less, and restore habitat.

I have mentioned my senile uncle repeatedly. In the last two years he has has heart surgeries, hernia corrections, bladder surgery, and this week it is a new adventure under the knife; the sole reason I do not spar with my father's sister over this insane Nascar race she runs with bad health and medical model brutality is because I never had a vested interest in Joe and don't have the right. Try having your entire life circumscribed by orthopedic medicine as a curiosity, and maybe my argument for human dignity might not seem so misanthropic. 

Blazing Counterfactuals

It may have been Friday evening, Little Vincento, now hiding in the catty-corner cabinet he likes, unexpectedly leapt onto my scarred shoulder, which, for those of you who recall, was the result of a hair fire in 2005 when I struck a match to light a last morning cigarette that might have conversely been my last morning had I not been such a shoddy housekeeper. He was all over me with rump bumps and head rubs and kisses. "Fuck that mom," he seemed to say, "you still love me and you're not giving me up, and you know it." Even if mother descends into dwindling resource insanity, well, then I do not know.

I was greatly influenced by the books of James Herriot growing up, which shows that sentimentality about animals has been a force in the Western Hemisphere for a long time, but also that men are surprisingly good chroniclers of feline stories. There were a number of such authors in the seventies, but amid this swirling empathy, and its decadent indulgence, there remains the issue of primate abuse to our domesticated species. Some of it by accident, as in my case with power chair mishaps, some of it due to mental defect, stress, aggression, which an observer might be able to find a shared identity, even if we do not cross those lines, but even I have lines, and we have had at least two instances of dogs set on fire in the Philadelphia region, and this is what I wrote in the comments section that did not deploy because I lack an FB account:

I can enter into a great deal of the triggers that motivate negative human behavior, but not this, and the sad fact is, animal torturers usually graduate into human torturers and murderers, and our justice system fails, in the first instance, to intervene early enough, with appropriate penalties and treatments. Not catching these perpetrators leaves us all in danger.

But, taking off my freelance cap, if these motherfuckers are caught, fry them. Deliberately doing this to an animal is beyond the pale, and when human wiring goes off like this, it needs to be eliminated.