I came home from babysitting my nephew tonight and, having recently fucked up my sleeping habits in true vacationary style, I was filled with that vague sleepless late-night energy that drives me to eat and watch bad TV. We currently receive this free, extremely amateurish, TV station. Since these TV people have no money and no advertisers (yet, or ever perhaps) they screen a hodge-podge of bizarre but free documentaries. These include grainy pieces about India, Asia and other 'exotica', rash Americans screaming about 9/11 conspiracies and communism, and (fairly regularly) a host of environmental escapades about pesticides, the ocean, veganism, and the slow erosion of life as we know it by our self-made armageddon.
So. I happened to watch the beginning of Earthlings. I've seen parts of it before and I've always been touched and impressed. I think it's extremely well constructed (both technically and ideologically). Of course I am appalled by its content and my own complicity in the many horrendous acts and industries it documents. Of course! That's the point.
I've been a pescitarian for about two years. This means that, although I don't eat beef, pork, chicken, ostrich, crocodile or human, I still eat heaps (even more so know that I've cut out the aforementioned) of tuna, cheese, eggs and milk, as well as all the animal derivatives that go into all our convenient modern food, supplemented by regular sushi feasts incoporating slamon, prawns and crab meat.
I would like to stop all that.
I would like to be as far removed from The Cove as possible.
I would happily isolate myself from the mindset of the men who picked up a homeless dog and put it into a garbage truck, while still very much alive, and crushed it to death (as seen in Earthlings).
I love my pets.
I want all life forms which feel pain and desire life, which enjoy freedom and seek companionship, which care for their young and are capable of befriending human animals, to be able to go about their existance to the best of their abilities without our need to confine, abuse, exploit and kill them, interfering with any of them.
Just as I would like other people to leave me to do the same.
Racism, sexism, homophobia, agism, classism, discrimination in all its forms, and speciesism: might is right, the Bible says it's okay, but, but, but, but, exscuses, exscuses, excuses, laziness, unwillingness to be self-critical or pro-active or revolutionary, failure to try.
Don't they say 'be the change you want to see in the world'.
06 July
I always wanted a winter-time anniversary to celebrate.
I will try.
I will make mistakes sometimes.
But I'm going to try.
I can smoke, I can drink, I can eat, breathe, converse, laugh. I can be myself. I have everything I need.
I have the earth, the moon, the stars in the sky.
The air I breathe.
I don't need fucking cheese.
Immediately after watching Earthlings I went to go and clean up in the kitchen.
I was about to clean the snackwich machine and, thinking about what I had just watched, I absentmindly picked a peace of grilled cheese of the snackwicher and put it in my mouth - and chewed. Ah. The irony and the hypocrisy. I realised what I was doing; spat the cheesy remnants into the sink and rinsed out my mouth like a potty-mouthed schoolkid would.
Like I said; mistakes will be made.
The wagon shall be fallen from.
A body and a conscience that is as light as she.
All I can do is try.
: )
