Shark Toilet, Shark Totem

by in Death, Dreams, Education, God, Humor, Inner Turmoil, Meditation, Memory, Pop Culture, shark dreams and tagged , | Leave a comment

SharkToilet

This shark toilet is so grotesque that I feel obligated to balance the horror with a little spirituality.

If you’re obsessed with sharks like I am, you might have wondered why they manifest in your dreams, plague your waking thoughts and perhaps even haunt your toilet.

Check out this fascinating discussion about shark symbolism.

It may inspire you to start a new religion.

Writers on Animals

by in Animal Rights, Animal Welfare, Education, Environment, Uncategorized, Writing and tagged | 2 Comments

I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self contained;
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied-not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is responsible or industrious over the whole earth.”
― Walt Whitman

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

–Henry Besot

I love things made out of animals. It’s just so funny to think of someone saying, “I need a letter opener. I guess I’ll have to kill a deer.
–David Sedaris

Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?”

―D.H. Lawrence  Women in Love

 

He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.
―Gabriel Garcia Marquez   Love in the Time of Cholera

When I consider that the nobler animal have been exterminated here – the cougar, the panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, dear, the beaver, the turkey and so forth and so forth, I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country… Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature I am conversing with? As if I were to study a tribe of Indians that had lost all it’s warriors…I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.Unknown
―Henry David Thoreau  The Journal 1837-1861

Animals never worry about Heaven or Hell. neither do I. maybe that’s why we get along.
― Charles Bukowski   The Last Night of the Earth Poems

The Path of Playing Cards (Or the Gospel of Salty Junk)

by in Art, Dreams, God, Humor, Meditation, Memory, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

On Tuesday afternoon, walking to the parking garage after work I passed a perpetually trash-strewn patch of plants and stopped to free a Macy’s bag impaled on a  thorny branch. Grumbling with fatigue, heat and misanthropy, I snatched the bag and tossed it in a trash can, not feeling quite self-righteous enough to recycle. 

In the trash barrel, I noticed a tiny card from a children’s game. Delighted, I snatched this vintage treasure from the bland refuse that surrounded it. The illustration showed a fisherman hauling a net of blurry colored trash from the edge of an unseen sea. I found the title vaguely obscene: Salty Junk. I couldn’t imagine where the hell this old sod had come from. All I thought of was a haunting story I’d read in the New York Times about the debris field left by the Malaysian plane that crashed in the Ukriane, how the writer reconstructed passenger stories through objects: Bali guidebooks, passports and a scattered deck of children’s playing cards. 

I tried to engineer a reverse synchronicity in my mind to make the discovery feel inevitable. Hadn’t I just been thinking of how I’d make all of these entries into a book?  Hadn’t I just been thinking, how much I’d actually enjoyed cleaning the little piles of dead balloons and tar balls off the beach, especially when my friends came with me? Could the universe, my throbbing narcissism insisted, maybe be acknowledging me for my own modest harvests of salty junk? 

My love for piles of free and abandoned things aside, I don’t know why this little card had the force of revelation to me. I dug through the can, but found no other tiny red cards among the Subway wrappers and coffee cups.

The Wednesday walk to my car was similarly uneventful. But today, past the trash can where the concrete sidewalk curves up the hill, I found another tiny red card  face down on the ground. I turned it over as if awaiting a revelation from the Tarot. There she was: Wacky Witch like some emissary from childhood classrooms dressed up for the New England fall, the green faced dime-store hag with cat, owl and cauldron, her leering face somewhere between a comic strip and a tribal mask.  I scanned the brush for more cards, but found nothing. To what scattered and abandoned game these old icons belong I will never know. But I sensed their odd, intermittent path was something I was meant to follow. 

saltyjunkWackyWitch

The Circus is Over (If You Want It)

by in Uncategorized and tagged , , | 2 Comments

The Chik-Fil-A cows danced, but no one seemed to be having much fun outside the Citizens Arena in Ontario, California. The costumed shills gyrated, goofed and sauntered in that exaggerated “Keep on Truckin’ ” stride almost universally adopted by all mascots and theme park characters.

 Chik-Fil-A, the proud sponsor of Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey Circus, had also erected a towering inflatable cow complete with rainbow wig near the ticket booth. I wondered about that wig. Was it all part of the “whackiness” of Chik-Fil-A’s campaign (a cow nervously recommends that people eat chicken instead of beef, ha ha), or an acidly ironic nod to the gay community?

 Aside from a couple flair-ups, one involving a vociferous woman wearing a sweatshirt featuring a bald eagle flying above the word “Alaska” who said, “NO, I DON’T WANT ANY LITERATURE. I DIDN’T COME TO THE CIRCUS TO SEE THIS SHIT,” the afternoon had a strangely muted, solemn and even desperate feeling. Maybe it was my projection, or maybe it’s just because parenthood is hard work, but many of the adults looked lost and tired. While some of the kids, too young to read, pointed at the signs and said, “We’re going to see tigers!” others looked rather solemnly at the images of downed, shocked and bull-hooked elephants.

 I felt sorry for these kids. The little girls in their pink ballerina skirts, magic wands clutched in their hands, made me think of the human longing for transcendence, our lust for the extraordinary. Who wouldn’t, regardless of their age, desire something beyond the bland landscape of business parks and box stores of corporate-sponsored arenas? For these children with their fairy sparkle shoes or super hero t-shirts, seeing a tiger jump through a hoop of fire might mean feeling the distance between fantasy and reality shrink just a bit.

 But kids also respond very powerfully to the truth.

 The most persuasive activist of the day was a child. Danielle was ten, I think. She wore elephant-patterned leggings and carried a red construction paper sign. On one side a circus elephant with a broken spirit languished in a muddy pen. On the reverse an adorable baby elephant, giant ears spread, galloped through the African landscape, trunk held aloft.  “Take some information,” Danielle said gently, but firmly, passing out flyers to families,  “Did you know that they hurt the elephants?” Some kids looked up at her with wonder, others kept their eyes focused on the ground.

 Maybe I still had some leftover optimism after the San Diego screening of “Cowspiracy,” at which the filmmakers said with a kind of quiet confidence, “This (meaning factory farming) is ending.” I feel the same way about animal circuses. Even if “ending” means decades, the Chik-Fil-A cows couldn’t dance fast enough to convince me that anyone at the Citizens Arena truly believed that anything about this kind of outmoded spectacle felt remotely magical to anyone.    

circus

Under The Boat

by in Apex Shark Expeditions, Cage Diving, Diving, Shark Behavior, Shark Sighting, South Africa, white sharks | 2 Comments

Nice views here of two white sharks, one with a lovely speckled sort of pattern on the tail. I love how they simply disappear into the green. I also love how the divers in the cage keep their feet off the bottom of the cage. There is a weird sensation of suddenly not having legs when one is deposited in the cage, followed by a desire to keep track of one’s legs as much as possible.

 

(Thanks again to Peter E.) 

My Very First Shark Breach

by in Apex Shark Expeditions, Environment, God, Marine Conservation and tagged , , | Leave a comment

Okay, first off thanks again to Peter Eisenhauer for shooting, editing and sharing these great videos of a truly magical time in South Africa.

Please excuse my orgiastic screams. This was the first shark breach I ever saw so I got a little carried away. After a few more breaches, I was able to tame my insanity into manageable sighs of awe.