Dad has a contingency planned for everything

Jane: Dad, suppose I had actually had brain damage. What would you have done? Would you have still taken care of me?

Dad: We would have put you into the meat grinder, and then flushed you down the toilet.

life drawings from the san francisco zoo

 

This is a seal. See how fat it is? I just want to wrap it up in foil and bake it good.

 

These are Chacoan peccaries. Their heads are huge. They are so cute, they should be in a Miyazaki film.

 

 

on loneliness

There’s something about being indoors, and alone. Something about the walls refracts every pang of loneliness back at me, magnifying those first psychic emanations to an unbearable degree. I put up little dampeners, like photos of my friends. Poems I’ve received. Letters of gratitude. 

They don’t work very well. I have to go outside.

The rational explanation, I suppose, is that outside is more stimulating. Perhaps more importantly, some atavistic instinct forged in our evolutionary past seeks out sun and fresh air. I do believe this.

But what I feel to be the real explanation is that indoors, I am cut off from Spiritus Mundi. Indoors, insulated from the world, I can concentrate on a solipsistic existence. Outside? At the very least, if I do not pay attention to the world, a car will run me over. But the more romantic way to put it, is that there are no walls to bounce my own loneliness back at me. Instead, the sky dissipates them, and sends back sun and fresh air in their place. It is not a gift given in benevolence. I am not singled out. This is a gift that you, and I, and everyone else is entitled to. You lay claim to it by simply being aware of it, and taking it. As the sun casts a shadow behind you, and the air makes a current as you walk forward, you take your place–no more exalted than any other, nor more base, but certainly inalienable, irrevocable–in the eternal flux of this world.