crow
tattoos a dagger on his wrist as a promise to himself
monkey
masquerades behind a veneer of nonsense
crow
every day
monkey
pranks and prances
crow
his veins are overflowed with ink; the daggers overlap; each one a reference to a reference
worm
inches hourly towards redemption’s nearest neighbor
monkey
sings and dances
pigeon
but what about people who say blue birds and red birds don’t mate?
I don’t know about blue birds and red birds; my crows are green and my pigeons are usually yellow. But I do remember what this pigeon is talking about.
In 10th grade, my favorite teacher (she’s dead now, but I got to hug her one last time at my step-grandmother’s funeral in Chaffee, MO, shortly before that happened) led our English class through some kind of critical-thinking / equality / civil rights / anti-racism unit — I do not actually remember what it was called; so many ignorantly hyperinflated terms have come and gone and come back even more perverted since then. But it was called something, and it was unabashedly liberal, and at the time it seemed like a just provisioning of obviously correct beliefs. We had Reagan and space shuttles and actual books, and “computers” were things about which you could have an opinion that didn’t really matter. “Democracy” was a thing that just was, you didn’t even really have to have an opinion about it (cf. what’s water). And Nazis were still the badguys. Hell, so was Russia — excuse me, the Soviet Union. And obviously we still had racism and rednecks and horrible fatnecked ignorant bootlickers and rule followers and smug rich kids and all of that — but they weren’t the official seal of the United States at that time. Did I mention Reagan? Yeah, but he was still a former actor who had just become President; he wasn’t yet the talk-radioed symbol of the wanton destruction of the postwar consensus. But I am blathering about things I barely understand. I was in 10th grade, for fuck’s sake. I understood that I was cool because I had tried marijuana and that girl over there probably hadn’t. Had she? Whatever. I wrote poetry, for fuck’s sake.
Part of the unit involved a kind of Socratic back and forth, whereby Mrs. S would guilelessly ask questions from the viewpoint of a classic, stereotypical, easily-identified 50s-style racist. Why should black people and white people be allowed to get married? Softballs like that. I don’t know, there was probably more subtlety involved, but I only remember the broad strokes. As I said, to me this was like being quizzed on basic addition in advanced algebra class. Everybody knew this stuff, didn’t they? And we always would, right, because it would get even more obvious over time, right? It was just what we understood, as a people now, right? We were more advanced than those ignorant savages, right? There’s no way we would go backwards into this kind of spiteful bullshit, right?
Anyway.
This was one of the “advanced” questions, I suppose: “But,” Mrs. S protested, in full puffed-up barbarian role-play mode, “Red birds don’t mate with blue birds. So it’s not natural, right?”
“They’re different species,” I countered with a that’s-obvious scoff.
Years later, a friend of a friend, one of the pagans I’m sure we’ll eventually hear more from in these posts, cracked up all out of proportion, just laughed and laughed for some reason when Masterson Rat asked Brooke Shields if she believed in interspecies dating. But that’s ... different?
Anyway. I heard on a podcast today that AI “general intelligence” is going to lead not to the recreation of humans in digital form, but to a whole ’nother species. So I guess we’ll have to revisit this question yet again in a few years. Me, I wouldn’t marry no chatbot. I seen what they’re like as teenagers, and I don’t trust ’em. They’re even worse than teenage human boys, and that’s setting the bar pretty damn low.
Anyway. Stay in school, kids. Go to college. Throw the frisbee on the quad. If there’s any humanities courses left, maybe take a couple. Let me know how that goes, will ya?
It doesn’t help that the programs the White House seems most interested in targeting are found in the humanities. (Atlantic)
If the humanities were irrelevant, they wouldn’t care, right? If all this shit were as obvious as 10th-grade me was frictionlessly taught to believe it is?
monkey
nods sagaciously; hurls poo at the walls of the enclosure