Hurting Animals

I would not necessarily call myself an animal lover. Sure, I like them and all. Dogs especially (not scary dogs though, like fuckin' Cujo.) and while I am a vegetarian, it is predominately for health/dietary preferences and not really because I'm against the idea of eating animals (I mean, I guess I am against the idea of eating animals, but it's just not top of the list for why I don't eat'm, y'know?) I've had pets in the past and I liked them very much, especially Molson, a beagle who lived for 14ish years, and Bear, a shitzu that now resides on a farm somewhere and has changed it's name to Princess (uhg.)

Anyway, I was hanging out at a friend's place the other day, and he recently started dating this girl who worked in a pet store. He had two cats the last time i saw him, but now he has those same two cats, like a million snakes and two of THESE:



Sugar Gliders! Anyway, the dude's girlfriend was all like, 'man, pick them up and play with them' and i was all like 'no way' and then the sugar gliders were all like '-a terrifying sound impossible to type-' and i was like 'jesus christ!'

I also wasn't too keen to hold on to the snakes, even though loved to pick up snakes at the cottage when I was a kid and throw them at my sister. Inevitably, I was accused of being afraid of animals. But that's not the case, dudes!

The truth is that I am afraid of my own amazing strength. While I am not an animal lover, I take no pleasure in the pain or death of living things. Seeing a helpless animal shivering in pain has been scientifically proven to to be the most heart breaking thing in the world, next to a child blowing out the candles on a birthday cake alone in a room because no one showed up to his party. I would not be able to take it if I accidentally broke the snake or pulled a Lenny from Of Mice and Men on the sugar glider. Who knows what Hulk-like creature lurks under this Bruce Banner physique?



I guess that's why I like dogs. It is pretty hard to accidentally hurt a dog. You'd pretty much have to do it on purpose, in which case you are a monster. Unless you are my brother, who recently stepped on his puppy and broke it's leg.



Don't worry, everyone, he feels terrible.

Mold

Mold freaks me the fuck out.

Mold is not unlike a tiny world that grows anywhere it damn well pleases. Mold has no regard for what it may grow on or whom it may poison. It is just this living parasite that envelops prey, feeding off of it until there is nothing left to eat, growing until it can grow no more, unstoppable and inherently dangerous.

Imagine if you will, a tree. Now this tree has roots that dig into the earth so that it can collect water and nutrients from the soil. The tree takes up a certain amount of space, some trees growing very big, but the tree has a limit to how far it will go. It will not take up all the soil.

Now picture a tree that has roots that go fucking everywhere! Now imagine other trees popping up from those roots and like some bushes and shrubs and shit, just popping up everywhere. Boom, tree pops up in the middle of your kitchen! Whooosh, shrub in the bedroom! Soon it is a world of greenery and the humans can do nothing to appease the horrible tree monster as it wants nothing other than to take over everything.

That's what mold does, but on a smaller scale.

Did you know that people can get mold on there bodies? I was once a told a completely unverifiable story about a guy who never toweled off after a shower. He just got out of the shower and whipped his clothes on and then, I guess, sat there is kind of wet clothes for a bit? I don't know. Anyway, he got yeast infection on his chest from it! GROSS! (On a some what related note, do not google image search 'yeast infection on chest' unless you never want to have a boner again.)

Now, I know what you're saying, most mold is harmless, just throw out your fruit when it gets moldy, why are you keeping fruit around long enough for it to get moldy etc. But it's not just food mold! Moisture mold is the real scary mold because you don't even know that it is there! Any of you fuckers that live in a building that is over ten years old, chances are somewhere in that building there is a downright insane amount of mold inside some walls. Seriously, knock down a wall, you'll find mold.

I worked in Disaster Restoration for a period of time, which was not as glamorous as it sounds. It involved cleaning up floods/fires/wind damaged things etc. Most often, it was a simple flood, like the basement just flooded or something. Sometimes they flooded with poop and poo-water. In many cases, the insurance companies covering the jobs took their sweet sweet time to give the go ahead to let us finish the job once the disaster itself was taken care off. So sometimes these soggy basements, soaked in poo-water, would just sit there for a month or so. Let me tell you: I've seen things that change a man. Poo-mold related things. And if there is one thing that my boss drilled into my head it was that that stuff will kill you.

It's caused by a leaky pipe or heating or poor weather proofing or any number of normal everyday shit like taking a shower. All that steam and moisture you make when you are taking a shower, it's seeping into the walls and getting all moldy and someday you're going to be carrying a big box and you'll trip and fall and put a big hole in the wall and all the little dormant mold spores are going to burst out like a Glade air freshener and you are going to breath them in and die and then you'll be like 'so that's why Jake was afraid of mold.'

Spiders Laying Eggs In My Tummy, Their Babies Hatching And Crawling Out Of My Mouth

Mother once told me this story about my cousin Jason.

Jason, who is 16 years my senior, was out playing catch with my Uncle Gord in their backyard when he started having terrible stomach cramps. They kept getting worse, so Uncle Gord took Jason to the hospital where they performed an x-ray and found a small pocket of something in his stomach. This pocket, originally thought to be a growth of sorts, turned out to be spider eggs. A spider had crawled into his stomach and laid it's eggs. He was to have his body cut open so that the eggs could be removed. However, while they were operating the spider eggs hatched and started crawling all through the place. Obviously that's where I stopped listening.

Now, clearly this story is not true. I've heard many variations of this story over my short years on this earth and the fact that my cousin didn't kill himself after he had spiders crawling out of an open wound in his stomach, the only reasonable reaction to such a thing, pretty much confirms that my mother was simply trying to scare me. I only wish I could remember to what end.

As it stands, Mother told me this story at an impressionable age. Often when I'm out playing in a park with my friends I will get a flash in my head of myself keeling over in tummy pain until spiders start flooding out of my mouth or burst a hole in my stomach and start pouring out there.

I think this somewhat overlaps with the marsupial frog thing. Living things coming out of other living things is down right terrifying. I also just right now made the connection between this and my lack of comfort around human babies. I thought I just didn't like babies because they cry and poop a lot. Maybe it is because they are a living thing that not that long ago came out of another living thing. And also that they poop and cry a lot.

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haha, in searching for pictures of this post, the first google result that came up was this, this kind of goes in hand with the mouse thing a few posts down: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Do_spiders_crawl_in_your_mouth_at_night

Food Tampering

THE END OF INNOCENCE

When I was a child I found a Mars Bar in my mailbox. It was somewhere around the end of June, probably just after school had ended. I was all like, "yeah! Free chocolate bar! I'm 7 years old! This is the best day of my life!" But, being a kid, I was an idiot. Finding a chocolate bar without having done anything to deserve it triggered whatever semblance of Christian guilt I still had at this point. I had to run it by my Mother.

She snatched the chocolate from my hand and proceeded to kill my innocence. No longer was the world a gloriously large playground full of wonder, mountains of amazement around every corner...not after the tale Mother weaved. She informed me of the evil that lurks in this life. She said that there are people in the world that only want to see you harm. They want to hurt you at any chance they get, and they will use the things you love to get at you. You'll never see it coming until it is too late, because they look, if you even see them at all, just like regular people. The monsters of my childhood were no longer giant, green one-eyed brutes but people. People, just like me that sometimes put poison in candy to get kids to eat it.

Shocked, destroyed even, I sought comfort in the closest thing that could provide, which unfortunately was still that same chocolate bar. I had yet to fully comprehend what Mother was telling me. "It doesn't look like anyone opened it. Why can't I just eat it?"

"Someone could have put poison in a needle like at the hospital and injected it through the wrapper and you'd never know!" She placed the chocolate bar on top of the fridge, knowing that if she were to simply throw it out, I would pick it out of the garbage and tempt this new invisible enemy. Mother poured me a glass of milk and I chugged it down. "Now go outside and play."

I couldn't make it past the end of the drive way. Twenty minutes ago I was just a kid, the summer had just started and the world was mine. But this new information had changed that. People are evil, and this world belonged to them. I was being hunted, my new life boiled down to being prey simply trying to evade capture. I stayed close to home that day, climbing the tree in my front yard like a watch tower. This new shade of grey tinted the rest of the neighborhood. The world beyond that, where people became even more faceless, was too frightening to imagine.

I AM A GUARDIAN

I'm cautious about what I eat. To me, it is common sense: do not eat found food. Recently, however, this fear has come under scrutiny from friends. Me and two friends were on the TTC after spending a night watching movies at another friend's apartment. My friends had both been smoking pot, but I had not been. We get on at Union Station and sit down on a relatively empty car. To my left I spot a box of Lindt Dark Chocolate, those 70% cocoa bars. Like, I'm talking a

box. One of those special gift packs, probably a value of 25 dollars (those things ain't cheap!) One of my friends on the TTC with me is vegan and therefore is limited in her consumption of chocolate bars. These, she can eat. So the excitement of finding chocolate mixed with being kind of stoned, obviously, she wanted to crack them open right there and eat them.

But I stopped her, imparting the wisdom Mother imparted to me.

She's not buying it. The box clearly has not been opened and it would be a safe bet that someone simply dropped the box as they were leaving the train. But I know how much evil lurks in this world and that is not a bet I am willing to take. I toss the box back down to the end of the train, and my other friend (who was also stoned, and I'm not convinced he would have resisted the temptation had I not been there) convinces her that I am right. She's upset, but I just chock it up to her being stoned, and that sober minds will prevail.

WRONG!

Fastforward a few days and the rest of our friends know this story and they're all calling me the idiot for passing up an opportunity to consume such valuable chocolate! Turns out that I have lost this debate by like 8-1. All I can say to that is: YOU PEOPLE ARE INSANE!

Honestly, it seems like a fundamental piece of common sense that one does not eat food found on the floor. Especially if that floor is the floor of a TTC subway. I mean, I saw a dude taking a shit on the subway before. It seems like a pretty reasonable conclusion that I do not want to eat food from that same place, even if just from a hygienic standpoint. Add that to the fact that you have no idea what the packages origins are, and that right there, friend, is you entering the danger zone. I'm honestly a little concerned about my friends and their willingness to eat tampered, poisoned food.

But I guess that's just me. I guess I'm the only one who cares that some stranger has probably stuck a poison needle through the box of those chocolates. Does no one remember the Tylenol Tampering case in Chicago, 1982? Or that baby food tampering deal in Southern California in like, 1990, or something? Or more recently and closer to home, that crazy guy who soaked bread in antifreeze and then scattered pieces of it around the dog park in High Park in the summer of 2009? Seriously, what if that guy had decided to do the same with Lindt 70% Cocoa Chocolate bars?

CONCLUSION

Think of it mathematically. Food you prepare yourself has an almost 0% chance of being tampered with (you could have a Jekyll/Hyde thing going on, with one trying to murder the other, but unlikely.) This risk increases with the amount of packaged foods you introduce into your daily consumption, but grocery stores are generally a safe zone in that they have security and cycle through product enough and have tracking measures that packaged food in and of itself is probably safe if bought from the grocery store. This security is at once removed once it leaves the grocery store and is placed on the floor of the TTC (or a comparable location) because it had to get there by some means outside of the grocery industry (probably some evil dickhead) and the chances of it being tampered with becoming infinitely higher. INFINITELY!

Make fun, if you must. Call me paranoid, call me insane, call me whatever you will. I'm not eating any goddamn floor food, and I'm checking every package I buy for needle marks. This is a completely legitimate and reasonable fear, and one that will probably save my life at least twice.

Just sayin'.