Animal Planet Producers Hate You

I've discussed Animal Planet programming before. The following 7 examples offer proof of the sadistic nature of the programmers:

Let’s say you’re a bartender or a cab driver or drug dealer or something, working the night shift. You come home exhausted and fall into bed. Since you aren’t interested in falling asleep to the lull of Proactive infomercials, you locate the remote and flip to the Animal Planet channel, since they play regular programming 24 hours a day.

You expect to drift off to a peaceful sleep quickly, but of course you have to get up to pee, because that’s just what happens when you finally relax enough to sleep. You figure you’ve got ten minutes, tops, before exhaustion claims your consciousness and you drift into sweet, sweet… Holy Mother of God! What the fuck is that hyena doing with its head up an elephant’s ass?

1.   Eating Giants

The Animal Planet wants to know if you’ve ever wondered what happens to animals after they die in the wild. Instead of telling us some pretty lie about Elephant Heaven they figured they’d show us in stomach turning detail the aftermath of death. Hyenas and insects and maggots and crocodiles feed on the dead elephant for your viewing pleasure. Since sleep is now out of your reach for the night, or maybe for the rest of your life, you don’t change the channel when the dead hippo episode comes on next.

For the love of God. You realize a number of things quite suddenly, really. First of all, you are watching this animal being eaten from the inside. Why in the name of everything sacred did they shove a camera inside of the carcass? How did they nominate the camera shover? Is that legal? 

You also realize that hyenas are probably the most disgusting animals to ever walk the earth. For some reason, they appear to enjoy smelling like dead things, or they simply like to cuddle with their meals before they tear into them. You aren’t even sad as you remember the clip that shows some maggots somehow move from the carcass of the elephant to feed on the anus of a hyena. Karma. 

You vomit and almost fall asleep. 

2.   American Stuffers

Having shown you what happens to dead animals in the wild, the Animal Planet offers this sweet reality show about a taxidermist in Arkansas who specializes in pets because you will never, ever want to leave a dead animal to nature.

This little jewel includes episode titles like “Keep Your Dead Animals Out of my Kitchen”, “How to Stuff a Chihuahua” and “The Woman with the Pet Raccoon”.

http://animal.discovery.com/tv-shows/american-stuffers/videos/freeze-dried-pets.htm

And this cute little clip, titled “Freeze Dried Pets” because there is no longer a God.

Since that fucking NONO commercial is on every other channel, you just keep watching Animal Planet, because fuck it, the last few shows have already consumed what you had of a soul and you come across…

3.   Monsters Inside Me

You don’t even attempt to contemplate what could have happened to those daytime puppy shows as you enter the world of parasites. Every episode features people who have been infected with one terrifying and disgusting parasite or another. You watch the shows titled, “Suicide Attackers”, “Feeding Frenzy” and “Cold Blooded Killers” to name a few, as the show explains the terrifyingly simple ways the victims acquired various parasites.

To feed your increasing paranoia, you watch cute little clips on the Animal Planet website called “Brittney Coughs up Worms” and “Attack of the Killer Pea” and the ever-popular “Brain Eating Parasite”. You decide you are never going outside again. Ever.

Now that you’ve quit your job and sealed your air vents to prevent air-born parasites from entering your home, the Animal Planet would like to introduce you to…

4.Infested

Well, that’s fun. Now that you are too paranoid to go outdoors and you wear a nose plug in the shower to keep the brain eating amoeba away, the Animal Planet has produced a t.v. show just to make you feel unsafe in the sanctity of your own home. No matter how many times you bleach everything, you can’t prevent an infestation of the various demons disguised as bugs and shit shown on Infested.

You watch as families across America battle all kinds of infestations, from raccoons to black widows, snakes, cockroaches, and bats. At some point during the bedbug episode, you find the strength to crawl out of the corner you’ve been rocking yourself in and fall into bed. Bedbugs are cool. If the Animal Planet is to be believed, bedbugs are probably the best thing that could ever happen to you.

Thoroughly convinced that you can hear something munching through your brain and that the sound your fridge is making is actually a horde of black widow spiders searching for a way in, sleep eludes you and you can’t help but hear as the Animal Planet decides to fuck with your fragile psyche just a bit more with…

5.   Monsters in my Head

As you cower beneath the bedbug-infested covers, real people tell stories of being terrorized by demons and bugs and other things that are… well, just not human anyway.

After watching Sleeping with the Devil and also the Monsters of the Night episodes, you decide that sleeping is probably the worst idea ever. You sweep the room for mysterious shadows, demons and mosters while shoving amphetamines down your throat in  heart stopping quantities.

Must stay awake.

6.   Freak Encounters

A team of investigators sets out to discover various terrifying creatures. Did that say Mongolian Death Worm? What the fuck is wrong with these people? Who would look for that on purpose?

As the amphetamines eat through the fatigue and fear in your brain you realize that this a some kind of practical joke show. One of the unsuspecting investigators is being set up for a staged run in with a mythical creature.

You relax a little bit, tell yourself you never believed in Mongolian Death Worms any, and even laugh a little as the butt of the joke gets bleeped out repeatedly.

And then, as if the Animal Planet producers can somehow sense your waning paranoia, they throw this one at you,

7.   Killer Outbreaks

They’ve already shown you how a tiny parasite can kill you, now they assumed you want to know how they can also kill EVERYONE. They probably assume that you have some trust issues with the network by now, so they bring in the CDC to explain how a pandemic is waiting to strike anytime. 
Any. Time. To kill everyone. 

The show details real life outbreaks and the implications of new virus strains and as you tuck yourself back into your cozy rocking corner and order a gasmask off your laptop, you get to hear more than you ever wanted to know about Anthrax, SARS and even Salmonella.

Because.. Obviously. The producers have no souls. 

Walmart, Poverty, and the Square Root of Pie in America

Walmart is probably owned and operated by Satan. If not evil, certainly they are morally wrong for not paying their employees a livable wage. If claims that up to 80 percent of their employees receive food stamps are true, that means that over 1.1 million of them are on government assistance. 

If I hear one more “I work so welfare recipients don’t have to” statement, I’m going to fucking murder someone.

Lately there have been calls to raise the federal minimum wage. One government suggestion to raise minimum wage to $10 per hour over the next three years  just demonstrates how utterly out of touch the entire government is with the reality of life in America, regardless of political parties.

I’m certainly no economic expert over here, but there are just a few deeper considerations regarding poverty:

Poverty Thresholds Don’t Mean A Damn Thing

First of all, the current minimum wage of $7.25 allows a full time worker to earn several hundred dollars over the official annual poverty guidelines of $11,139. That would be sufficient if the official poverty guidelines meant a goddamn thing.

For example, Harlingen, Texas offers a cost of living 18 percent below the national average. However, a single worker would still need to earn at least $16,171 to cover basic necessities each year. That’s more than $5,000 above the official poverty threshold. Let me emphasize here that that is the cheapest cost of living in the nation, based on consumer price index reports.

The official poverty guidelines are calculated using an outdated form of 1960’s witchcraft, and loosely based on the idea that the average consumer spends one-third of his income on food, which is then multiplied by unicorn, added to the cost of coffee, divided by the square root of apple pie and then somehow manipulated to illustrate poverty level earnings. 

Since the original determination of apple pie flavored unicorn shit, the thresholds have been adjusted annually based on data from the consumer price index reports. The minimum wage is then determined by a completely unrelated formula. Meaning that someone says, “Hey, let’s raise the minimum wage to $X.”

That’s not to say the government is entirely unaware of the issue. A study released in September 2012 reveals a more accurate idea of the actual poverty threshold. For example, the official threshold of $23,283 for a family of four, when adjusted to include all costs of living, such as rent, mortgage, personal care, etc. was raised to $25,789 for homeowners with a mortgage and $25,101 for renters. 

Keep in mind that an entire one-fourth of this nation’s households have an income of $25,411 or below.

 Walmart Will Continue to Make Record Profits

Even if we are using the supplemental, experimental poverty thresholds above, there aren’t a Hell of a lot of places a family of four can actually live based on that income.

I’ve heard the argument that minimum wage was never meant to be a livable wage. In theory it was a starting point for entry level jobs that people would advance from. That probably made sense when this country actually manufactured and produced shit. 

Walmart and similar corporations are going to continue to win, because for as much as we may be outraged and protest, we certainly aren’t going to boycott. With an entire fucking quarter of the nation’s households making $25,411 or less, the sad truth is that a whole bunch of Americans can’t afford to boycott Walmart. 

Ironically, the exploitation of the working poor is part of the reason Walmart is able to offer its famous low prices that the working poor need to live and feed their families.

Protests and boycotts are fine and well, but moral support for any cause tends to wane when there are hungry children involved.

Well played Wal-Mart. 

I Collect Broken People

Everyone has lost someone they loved. Everyone has had their heart broken.
When John* died though, it kind of broke my soul.

I have this memory of him in high school. It was one of those trust-building field trips, with all the ropes and games and shit.

And a climbing wall.

My most vivid memory from high school is watching John as he flew up that wall.
He made it look effortless, like he was immune to the laws of gravity.

He perched on the top of that wall and grinned down at the rest of us with his amazingly brilliant smile.

The sight of John smiling down at us so dominates my memory of that day that I don't even remember if anyone else even made it up to the top of the wall.
Myself included.

It wasn't the fact that John died that broke me. It was the horrifying way that he died. 

A passer-by found him passed out in the passenger seat of a pickup truck, just a block or two from the local hospital. He never regained consciousness, and he was removed from life support 10 days later.

Someone had reported that the vehicle was left in the parking lot by another man, who then got into a car that was driven by a woman and another man.
When they printed men and women, I'm assuming they meant people around the same age as John... 17, 18, maybe 19 years old.
Maybe not. I don't really know.

I can imagine they were just scared kids. I would assume there were some sort of criminal charges they would have faced if they'd taken John into the ER instead of leaving him alone to die in a parking lot just a couple hundred feet from an antidote.

Maybe they couldn't fathom having to explain to their parents why they were hanging out with a dude that was overdosing on heroin.
To them, I suppose, avoiding the questions and the parental scenes, must have been worth letting John die.

It could have happened anytime.
He could have overdosed and died alone in his room, or anywhere else when no one was around.

He didn't.

He overdosed with a group of friends that left him alone to die.
I have never been able to wrap my head around that.

I would like to say that I don't know anyone who does any illegal or dangerous drugs.

I wish I could say I've never seen anyone do too much of a potentially deadly substance.

 I'd like to say that I've never been around a person that was suicidal and crying out for help, in whatever fucked up way it happened to come out.

 I wish I could say I'd never seen someone hurt themselves or someone else.

I do.

I have.

I've been terrified to let someone fall asleep.

I've watched pupils dilate to almost nothing, and also grow so large that a person's iris seemingly disappeared.

I've poked and slapped and screamed.

I've taken away weapons and said all of the wrong things.

 I've cried and yelled and, sometimes, okay, often times, I've hit people.

I've made it perfectly clear that I am not afraid to call 911 for someone, anyone, even if it costs them their jobs or kids or whatever else they might think matters.

I don't know if there are some sort of charges that can be pressed if you are bringing someone in for an overdose, but I am not afraid of that either.

I have been terrified, angry, and fed up with people doing stupid shit over and over. I've absolutely wanted to quit on people.
 But then?

John's memory haunts me.

I picture him, alone in that truck.

He may have lived on life support for ten days, but essentially, he died alone.

I wonder if he was scared.

If he was lonely.

If he even knew what was happening to him.

I wonder if he knew how close he was to that hospital.

To life.

And I don't leave people alone.

*Names have been changed.

Goddamn I Miss You

I didn’t want to go. I couldn’t not go. I had no desire to see my friend Terry laid in his coffin, but I felt that I owed him at least one more visit. One last chance to say goodbye and  apologize for dropping the ball. 

I hadn’t seen him in six months or so. I hadn’t even called him. The thought that dominates my drive to the funeral home. I’m so sorry Terry. I guess I dropped the fucking ball on this one.

The only comfort I can find from my own guilt is that , Terry, of all people, would have understood my neglect. Of all of the people in my life, that old man knew me the best.

His daughter saw me come in and came to stand in front of the coffin with me. She rubbed my back. Comforting me, when I should have been comforting her.

“You know, he loved you so much.” She told me, and all I could do was nod. As hard as I tried to hold them back, tears fell anyway. I looked at him in the coffin; so yellow, so much thinner than the last time I had seen him.

I don’t blame anyone but Terry for his death. The man drank Jack Daniel’s like it was water. He was the definition of an alcoholic, and we all knew it. I contributed to his alcoholism, going so far as to bring him pints of Jack when he was out of money. Terry was in a stage of alcoholism that necessitated drinking. If he had stopped drinking, cold turkey, he would have died.

I stared at the pictures of him in his youth and wondered, behind those smiles, was he as tortured as he was when I knew him? 
They had put a picture of him and I on the board, from my wedding. I remembered how he had agonized over what gift to buy us.  
I looked at the Purple Heart medal and the flag draping the coffin and I wondered if his family knew of his demons. I am wondering, right now, if I should send the letters that he wrote to me from jail. Would he have wanted them to know about the things that he did, that he saw? In this day and age, his family surely knows that he suffered from PTSD. But do they know why?

People were all full of concern and advice when Art was in Iraq. Many of them kept assuring me that he was going to be okay, that he would be home soon. All that did was remind me that he was gone; that there was a fairly decent chance that he wasn’t going to be okay.

All Terry had to say was, “You hear from that Marine, Krissy?” I would answer, and that would be the end of the conversation. Terry knew that I had a hard time processing anything deeper. It helped me more than any amount of reassurance I received from anyone else.

When Art came home, Terry was in jail. We wrote to each other. I tried to remain upbeat, but there was a mountain of shit at home that I couldn’t deal with.

 I wrote to Terry about all of the problems; all of the doubts and anger between Art and I.

I couldn’t relate to Art, couldn’t understand where he was in his mind. And even though Art and Terry rarely spoke, Terry could.

Terry wrote of his own demons, the times that he withdrew. He warned me that this sort of depression may be seasonal and to pay attention to the time of year that Art withdrew from the world. He said that his own depression was at it’s worst during April and May. He told me that Art may need to seek professional help, or he may be okay on his own. He urged me to stay patient – to a point.

In one letter Terry explained to me:
 “I once killed a kid with an E-tool.(A kind of small shovel.) I see that kid’s face all of the time.”  He went on to explain that he pretended that it didn’t bother him for a long time, because he didn’t want to seem weak. In Vietnam, he explained, it happened all of the time. He never spoke of it, because while it was big deal, he felt that it shouldn’t have been.

There are more horrific scenes that filled his mind when all was quiet. He drank to still them. He drank to sleep. He drank to function. He made no attempt to deny the fact that he was an alcoholic.

Terry made it home from Vietnam, when so many of the Marines that he served with did not. His mind and his soul, however, never came all of the way home. More often than not, I suspect, his mind was still there. Replaying moments that he regretted, and also the ones he didn’t regret, but could never forget.

Am I sorry that he is gone now? Not entirely. I will miss him and I love him. I find comfort in the fact that finally, all of him has made it home. In death, this man can find the peace that eluded him so often in life.

Silently, I took a moment to thank him for being my friend, and for knowing , always, exactly what I needed to hear from him. I also apologized for not calling when I should have and for not making the time to come and see him. Before I left, I wished him peace, and told him I love him.

In the car, I find myself wishing that I had told him, while he was alive, just how much he meant to me, and how much he did for me. For that regret, there is no comfort.