smorgasbord

This is the first real writing I have done so far. It will probably be lengthy, maybe entertaining. So before I start, let me set the stage.

I am sitting at Mom's spot at the dinner table. My writing buddy is on my left shoulder. His name is Riley. He is a male Rex rat. He is unusually large for a rat. His whiskers are very rexy and squiggle out all over his face. He has a white head spot and his fur is wiry. Every one always mentions how his balls are huge, the noted con of owning a male rat. They are roughly larger then his head, right below his tail. The pros of a male rat are their urine doesn't smell as strong, they don't pee as much and they are super chill. Female rats can't hold still and have to explore everything. Riley will sit on my shoulder for hours while I write. I will tell you if and when he moves.

I just grabbed my second to last beer from the fridge. It is called, "Purple Haze" a raspberry, wheat brew. I am still unsure of my feelings about the flavor. It isn't fruity despite the raspberries involved in the beer. It has a weak raspberry aftertaste (let it be known I was unaware of the silent "p" in raspberry till now) the wheat flavor is strong, perhaps too strong for the rasPberries. Beer is supposed to be imbibed along with food, but I have yet to find the food that cooperates with this flavor. That being said I don't dislike the flavor, hence the uncertain feelings. Perhaps by the last beer I will formulate an opinion. Then when someone asks, I can say, "Oh yeah, thats a great flavor. It goes well with..."

I spent the weekend at my grandma's cabin near Big Bear. My uncle Bo and I were under the cabin in the basement and removing dirt and preparing to pour concrete for a retaining wall. Uncle Bo looks a lot like me. He is a quarter of an inch taller than me at six foot five inches. He is thin, with a big nose and thick curly dark hair. He is my mom's brother. We always joke about who is taller every time we see each other at family get togethers, and someone grabs a ruler and double checks the difference while everyone else watches (roughly 20 people). And it usually goes:
"Well lets see..." Dad says.
"Make sure you flatten his fluffy hair, that doesn't count," says uncle Bo.
"Make sure you stand up straight, you are going to need every millimeter," I say.
"Looks like, a quarter of an inch in Bo's favor," Dad says.
"Ha!" Says uncle Bo.
"Damn," I say.
"Drink some more milk, small fry," says uncle Bo.
"Yeah, sure, try not to shrink as you get older. I still have a few more years to grow," I say.
"Looks like you will need them," uncle Bo says.

Thats usually how it goes. Anyway we were under the cabin removing rocks and dirt because whoever built it originally built half a retaining wall, and the other side has allowed the mountain to erode inside the basement and has also become a home for furry critters. In the passed, when it rains the mud flows into one of the bedrooms. So we were working to fix that.
It was difficult work because the ceiling was but 5ft 6in with major beams that were lower, meaning we hit our heads a lot. I spent all weekend under the cabin shoveling, jackhammering, and removing buckets of dirt. I was very tired and sore. Now my back is sore, my legs are sore and my arms are sore.

My brother Kevin just had a major surgery to correct his Pectus Excavatum (A chest depression caused by too much growth near the sternum). They cut him open, removed the excess cartilage, broke some ribs and wired it all back together so it looks normal, allowing him to breath a full amount with unrestricted lungs. So we were both moving around slowly today.

Yesterday I watched the last episode of "Planet Earth Diaries" which is, in my humble opinion, the greatest nature show ever conceived. They were talking about conservation, and endangered species. There is a species of Leopard near Siberia called the Amur Leopard. It is very cool looking. There are thirty cats left alive. As factories advance on their habitat, they loose their food, which is very important to a top predator in a frozen environment where food is already scarce. Also, poachers go after them for their testes, skin and teeth for use in Chinese medicines and trophy pieces.

I hate poachers. There are very few things I truly hate, because hate is such a strong word. But I hate poachers. They are the scum of the earth as far as I'm concerned. If they get mauled by a tiger or beaten by a gorilla or trampled by a elephant, while trying to steal tiger balls, gorilla meat or ivory, I cheer. There is a spot in the Congo jungle that has a big clearing to which many endangered and threatened animals go to drink. It would be the perfect place to poach. The WWF (not the world wrestling federation) the World Wildlife Fund pays people of the Congo to walk a perimeter around this little hot spot and shoot any poachers they find. They also collect snares and traps, some of which are still attached to animals. It's a powerful message, but it's an expensive proposition for a non profit organization. Make no mistake, these people of the Congo only do this for American dollars. When the WWF and other animal conservationist organizations went to the villages and said, "You have to save the elephants!" they were like, "We have people starving to death here, we don't care about elephants." Beyond that, elephants are like a three story tall rabbit. They knock down trees and fences and graze on lettuce in those neat rows, lettuce that is the only crop they have and if it gets eaten they have no money for next year, and no food for now. By the same token, those people have overstepped their boundaries by continually expanding into elephant habitat. What would I expect to happen if I expanded into elephant territory?

The issues are complicated, as it seems only rich white Americans care about conserving animals and not people. Which is rather pompous of us to go to places where these animals live and tell struggling people that we care more about their animals than we do about them. The only way they would care is if we give them money. Which is why China has a Panda Bear protection agency, and a tiger protection agency. So it becomes necessary to talk about a "Sphere of ethics."

Philosophy is the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence. Ethics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the rightness and wrongness of actions. Within ethics there is a sphere of ethics. Everyone has one, and they are unique to the individual. A sphere of ethics is a bubble of things people care about. If something isn't inside someone's sphere off ethics they don't really care.

Inside my sphere of ethics I include endangered animals. Thats a huge sphere obviously. Blue Whales and Snow Leopards, Golden Toads and Nile Ibis, Elephants and Rhinos. I couldn't imagine personally harming any of these creatures. In China and Japan they like shark fin soup, so you get that by catching sharks in nets and cutting all their fins off (while they are still alive) and tossing the whole shark back finless (while they are still alive). Those sharks are in my sphere of ethics. Farm raised crocodiles are not in my sphere of ethics because they have a better life than their wild counterparts and they are harvested for their skin for fashion like in The Matrix. They feed them well, wait for them to reach full size than kill them by injection. That can take 20 years or more. If someone does the same thing to a wild Nile Crocodile it makes me mad, those wild crocs are in my sphere of ethics.

Does that sound heartless? I want to feel the same about Beef, but I like steak too much. I try to rationalize by saying they are raised specifically for that purpose, no wild species is being depleted, and as long as they are treated fairly I turn a blind eye. Likewise I care very little for the many starving communities around the world, when compared to their endangered animals. Why is that? Do I hate humanity and what it's done to this planet? (yes) And do I take it out, so to speak, on those people? I don't know. What I do know is I care more about The Blue Whale population than the poor whaling villages on the Chinese coast. I care more about the Black Rhinoceros than the struggling farmers growing food inside fences within the ever shrinking habitat of the Rhino. And it goes on and on.

So the most important question becomes, "So what?" I care about some animals. Do they care that I think about them? Of course not. Does it matter to Whaling companies that I find them atrocious? Of course not, they don't care. I don't have much money to pass out to save animals, so I don't. Which animal do I want to save? If I can only save one, which one? Tigers? Elephants? Rhinos? Brazilian Fungus Slugs? Do you save the most majestic, or the most important for the ecosystem? I have a better idea.

Why do these animals get hunted? Why do Elephants get shot in the face and their tusks sawed off? Why do Rhinos get their horns sawed off? Why do Snow Leopards get skinned? Because some ASSHOLE somewhere wants it, and will pay a LOT of money for it. Like 30k dollars for a Rhino horn. So what I do is I write about it to open your eyes. And if I find one of those ASSHOLES or someone unclear whether the behavior is ok or not, I make it very clear for them. If those people didn't exist, these animals would have no reason to be shot for their parts. You can shoot poachers all day, but the market is so high for these parts, that any body can and will step forward to replace the recently dead poacher. But if you destroy the market, poachers become useless and are hunted into extinction themselves--no less than what they deserve surely. So that is what I do. Find those people and change their mind, or write about it so if you find those people you can change their mind.

Like Kevin's Doctor said, "Treat the cause of the problem not the symptoms." The cause is the people who will pay a lot for endangered animal parts...Who has the money to buy expensive animal parts like Tiger Balls, Elephant Ivory, Rhino Horns and White Crocodile Skin? Rich Americans. Find them, change their mind. Or my personal favorite, put them in a room with an angry tiger.

Commencement

I went to see Yalie and Howard graduate. It was a hot day and I went with their friends, most of which had seen the ceremony 4 times already and were speaking lines before the speaker did. It was funny to me because they enunciated and stressed the same words as the speaker did before he did.

It was sad to me though. After all this class time and writing and stressing and parties it comes to an end. Just like that, over. Yalie moves to France, I may never see her again. Howard doesn't know what to do or where to go and is hard to get a hold of. I was asking myself what it would be like to bring it all to an end and have a graduation or as they call it "commencement ceremony." (Commence what? The rest of life? Working? Seems lofty and unrealistic to me. Like a, "This is the first day of the rest of your life," which is something I heard Satan says when you go to hell. The phrase has universal application I suppose, but its one of those things that doesn't truly say anything, but people smile and nod in response anyway. Like, any day above ground is a good day, or any landing you can walk away from is a good one, or this is the beginning of the end.) I got derailed...it was interesting to see Yalie and Howard act after graduation. It matched my thoughts of what I thought I would be like. This apprehensive, overly (fake) happy and smiley and thanking everyone for everything, even strangers. There are small moments of clarity though, in which I saw the indecision in their eyes. I can only guess what they were thinking/feeling. Yalie countered it with sunglasses, Howard with lots of flowers and happy laughs and smiles. Isn't it supposed to be fun? It felt like everyone ignored the fact that it was coming to an end, and just enjoyed the moment. A sort of unwritten, unspoken law that everyone knows and enacts on "this day of joy."

I just wonder why.

Finals Terminated.

So much to write and so little time! Finals are done, finally, graciously. I had a pet emergency around the time the final was due, so I wrote an excuse hoping she will accept my late submission. Hopefully she will because she likes me.

I hate excuses. But I find that during finals I am not quite myself. I blamed it on a family pet that had to be put down. It is quite a sad story that naturally pulls at the heart strings. People envision a dog, a cat or horse maybe, if they know me maybe an iguana or python, but this time it was a rat. Loo's rat. Her name was Sierra. She was white with a black patch over her eye like a pirate. She had a mammary tumor that was terminal, and apparently that gets into their bones eventually and makes them fail.

I was doing my ultimate final revision when my brother ran to get me, said that Sierra was freaking out. When I got there she was squealing and biting the ground ravenously. I thought she had caught rabies or something. The other two rats Patches and Bandida came down to help her out but they didn't know how. I looked from a different angle and saw that her foot was stuck. I tried to reach in to help her but she snapped at me. So I pulled the other rats out, carried the cage outside, dismantled it and saw that she had twisted around so many times that she had a compound fracture. I donned my bro's welding gloves (very thick leather) and grabbed her, she bit me as I knew she would, and I untwisted her three times to get her straight. But it wouldn't come out. It was stuck in a hole wide enough to press on her Achilles tendon, and the underside of her toes. So I reached underneath and pushed her foot back through. She squealed and hopped away on one foot.

I grabbed her by the scruff of the neck to take the weight off her foot and she started cleaning her face and chattering her teeth. A strange gesture, but I have heard of cats puring as they die. So this little rat, 2 years old, rescued and inbred, with a mammary tumor and a compound fracture was at the end of her luck. I took her to the vet to have her put down. But on the way there I gave her all the bad stuff that they love that you're not supposed to feed em. Like cheese and chocolate and stuff.


I have to go to work but I wanted to get to the pet aspect and rat misconceptions. The pet stores inbreed them cause its cheaper, and they have all sorts of problems. If it's with dogs they call it a puppy mill, if it's with rats they don't call it anything because no body cares. I care. And I have a lot of animals and rats are great. They are cleaner then cats, social and like to be held. They can be trained and do cute things all the time like cleaning their whiskers or combing their hair. I have two rats, two brothers that are from a breeder and not a pet store so they are like a purebred dog, healthy distinct etc. Riley and Mijit (he was the runt of the litter) And they sit on my shoulder when I write. Riley will sit forever, Mijit only half an hour. I usually write with Riley on my shoulder and reach up to scratch him when I get stumped. Sometimes I ask him where I made a mistake or read it to him and ask what he thinks.

Love your animals like your family, or don't bother having any.

~To Family

I have arrived

After Erin's urging I started yet another blog, this one will have to be different some how. I think I will freewrite here and post my stuff, the others are places to think, places to explain, places to tell. Each blog goes to fit the audience I suppose. There isn't a system to any of it. I just think that if I write about the word "swoon" being from the 15th century and one of the oldest words I know that my Myspace blog readers would object: "This is lame where are the cars!?" But here I can do that cause this is the place for like-minded bibliophiles. I feel like I have to be o my best behavior here, it feels so official, so professional. Like I am so special-- I have this fancy officious blog layout--when in reality I clicked 3 boxes and typed my email and password in (It said my password was strong, I thought, "Well thank you Blogspot/Blogger!").

So, in an officious page I have arrived with final revisions looming, pressing, while I sign on here and create a blog. I know, I know, how studious of me. Now I am off to waste time in some other manner. Cheers!