Don’t be sad I know you will

Don’t give up until

photo credit: dan murrell Jr

Things at Animal Madness Inc have been so hectic of late I forgot to mention that I’m doing a reading this afternoon: Sunday, April 28th at 1:30pm at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Admission is free and you’ll be able to wander through everyone’s studios and eat lunch in the Mess Hall as today is open house.

This may be my only outing from the little cave that’s dissertation writing for a while, so come on out and say hi.

Happy 4/20 Internet

In your honor, I interviewed veterinarian Andrew Springer Browne for the The New Inquiry’s “Weed” issue. Check it.

Here’s a teaser:

“Can cats get stoned?

Cats tend to be more fastidious than dogs so they don’t usually eat things that make them sick…although I once removed a large ball of hair bands from a cat’s stomach.

But I have seen a cat high. There was catnip involved, not weed. And whether or not that cat was tripping, it was obviously in a state of bliss. Have you seen or heard of any other animals getting stoned accidentally or on purpose? Say fish, parrots, horses or any other animal that might be around weed… and us?

Nope.”

Read on.

Or purchase a pipe shaped like a turtle.

Horses at Midnight Without a Moon

– Jack Gilbert

Horses waiting to give rides in Cartagena, Colombia. Photo: Ex_Magician

“A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks?

…He won’t say. His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose leaf, and blown.

…People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience–even of silence–by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t “attack” anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”

Annie Dillard, from Living Like Weasels

photos from top: weasel by WildPlaces; weasel dragging hare by Jerry Bohnsack.

I spent the last week at TEDActive in Palm Springs, CA, courtesy of the TED Fellows program. It was awesome. All of my favorite talks aren’t online yet–notably Richard Turere on protecting his family’s cattle from lions, and Nassim Assefi‘s lesson on how to ululate. But the following three are and they’re great.

Photo at top: Reggie Watts at TEDActive 2013, TED.

[dogs and boys can treat you like trash. and dogs do love trash]

dogs and boys can treat you like trash.   and dogs do love trash
to nuzzle their muzzles.    they slather with tongues that smell like their nuts

but the boys are fickle when they lick you.  they stick you with twigs
and roll you over like roaches.    then off with another:  those sluts

with their asses so tight you couldn’t get them to budge for a turd
so unlike the dogs:  who will turn in a circle showing & showing their butts

a dog on a leash:  a friend in the world.  he’ll crawl into bed on all fours
and curl up at your toes.    he’ll give you his nose.    he’ll slobber on cuts

a dog is not fragile; he’s fixed.    but a boy:  cannot give you his love
he closes his eyes to your kisses.    he hisses.    a boy is a putz

with a sponge for a brain.   and a mop for a heart:  he’ll soak up your love
if you let him and leave you as dry as a cork.     he’ll punch out your guts

when a boy goes away:  to another boy’s arms.    what else can you do
but lie down with the dogs.   with the hounds with the curs.    with the mutts

D. A. Powell

more.

All images from the Library of Congress online image archive.

TONIGHT

At the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio

Covenant premiere and discussion, 7pm.

Michael Mercil, farmer Jeff Dickinson, and I will discuss farm animals, and us, after the film.

**

And nice piece about the film in the Columbus Dispatch…that mentions the pet chicken Michael once tried to keep hidden in his highschool locker.

Claude and Alice Monet, Piazza San Marco, Venice.

“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”

–C.S. Lewis

Also, birds found to have emotional reactions to song.

Photo: Guardian UK