100 DAYS OF QUEER HORROR 19 - ZOO

100 DAYS OF QUEER HORROR 19 - ZOO

When you work at a zoo, you kill more things than you keep alive.

I entered the rat room: shelves with rat-filled wire cages containing a hundred rats each from floor to ceiling. The room stank of piss and death. Thousands screeching, clawing and gnawing  each other's guts out. I put on a welding glove and shoved my arm into the cage, feeling their dull bites and scratches as I'd grabbed one or two rats by the tail.

I bashed them against the floor with a crunch and a squeak, then take them to the reticulated python — a 22-foot long, 200-pound serpent as wide as a basketball hoop. The snake needed the rats while they were still warm. We would've fed it live rats, but the rats might have bitten or scratched it, so...

Eventually, it started taking 11 rats to feed the beast, so we started feeding him pigs about the size of basset hounds instead.

We put a live one in the tank; the python ignored it. So we put two pigs inside of a non-operating freezer and let them suffocate to death. It took  a couple hours. Then we put them in the tank. Still... nothing.

Finally, skinned the rats, dropped their skinless bleeding bodies into a crushing machine for the slurry we used to feed the crocs, and draped the  skins over the pig corpses.

With its forked tongue,  the serpent smelled his familiar meal and slithered over, swallowing it whole.

This is what the children never see.

THE GREAT UNFRIENDING #7

(2/8/14) Brooke Krystosek: I'm pretty sure she had some helpful administrative job at Columbia University's Writing Division (and for that I thank her... if she in fact did). But I haven't heard anything about her since. She's apparently in a relationship but doesn't say with who. Her last few updates have been relatively benign, uninteresting comments about birthdays and trips separated by months of silence.

It's weird. My first few deletions were easy. I just un-friended the people who I never chatted with but who nonetheless kept popping up on my chat list. For today's deletion (and from now on, I assume), I'll have to look at my actual list of friends and then decide whether or not to get rid of them based on their profile and my memory of our shared past.

In several instances, I have written prospective deletees and asked who they were, only to learn that they changed their names because of marriage or some new creative identity. In many instances, I have looked over someone's profile and felt sad that they seem to have such an awesome life (they do roller derby, dress up as Legend of Zelda characters for Halloween, work at interesting sounding media companies and post music I've never heard). I feel like I've been missing out. Like deleting them would be like throwing out a book, a book that had I taken the time, I would have gained some important insights or enjoyment from.

QUEER HORROR DAY #20 - FLOWERS

Cry for the flowers of Nigeria. Our lands are bereft of their blossoms and where color once bloomed now dry dirt and red dust cracked in the sun. Gone too are the seeds carrying the promise of a second spring, their buds trampled and beaten down by those who long for endless summer reign.

Now, you shall not see wildflowers here, not the jubilant Marigold nor even the mourning Lily. Their time has passed, their beauty a memory. Now as summer cracks hot against our homes and sky, brick and metal rule and ever shall.

In the restless nights since the solstice, now heavy with the steps of men, one stays attuned for the midnight knock, the clatter of chains and thudding bats as a queer dies clobbered in the streets. The shouts of men, screaming women. Bodies in jail.

These are our cruel gardeners, these believers who would pull these flowers from their beds like the most foul and calous of weeds, and kill our orchid even before its fruits can hang from the vine. So too do we hang, our heads in shame, our souls in tears.

THE GREAT UNFRIENDING #3

(2/4/14) Deleting people from my digital world does give me some petty God-like pleasures. But moreso, it has made me wonder what I really value in people. Who do I let into my little world? I've been thinking of people in terms of how much love or respect I have for them, their geographic and emotional distance, what they offer me in terms of support, advice or job prospects. Whether they have hot friends, whether we share some bonding memory that I will never want to delete, how amusing they are (the weird honest ones are the best). "We define ourselves by the ties we keep," as sociology professor Bartt Dredge used to say. So based on my profile, who the hell am I?

THE GREAT UNFRIENDING #9

(2/15/14) A few notes…

1) Looking for new deletions has been unpleasant since I only started this as a way to clear strangers out from my news feed. Now that they are gone, combing my “friends list” for people to delete goes beyond my original purpose. So while I will continue to delete people from time-to-time, The Great Unfriending will now also contain thoughts like this and stories of how I came to friend those most important to me.

2) A friend of mine worried that my project may inadvertently hurt the feelings of the people I’m unfriending since my wall is public. Even though I have tried to praise these folks by explaining why I first friended them to begin with, all future TGU posts will be “friends only.” I declined my pal’s suggestion to use pseudonyms for all my un-friends though. The non-anonymity is important, I think.

3) I’ve already been de-friended by one over-reactive, charming, and hunky acquaintance who wanted to “spare himself the drama.” I wrote him saying that I was surprised that he’d run from something that made him feel uncomfortable. No response. I’ve also been surprised by the very few people who suggested that I merely hide people from appearing in my news feed rather than deleting them. Why would I do such a thing? To needlessly keep up the appearance of compulsory politeness? To ensure that they can keep receiving my updates in a weird sort of exhibitionism? To keep up my friend count? Odd.