all the cats are dying.
gizi's cat just died. it was just a kitten really, but it apparently had a weak heart. she brought it in to get fixed and the poor thing couldn't handle the anesthesia. the day after i found out about gizi's cat, wayne told me that his 14 year old cat just died the night before. it was probably just as well because tip was suffering so much from cancer, but he was by far one of the best cats i've ever had a chance to meet. i'm going to miss him a lot.
i never really had any pets growing up. i don't think i can imagine the kind of stress involved when a pet dies, especially one that's been around for as long as tip. my dad had animals around the house, but that was different. he was always trying to figure out how to raise animals as product, which was a strange thing to have to be involved in when you're a kid in the black hole of los angeles suburbia.
dad grew up on a chicken farm in a small filipino village in pampanga and the formative years of his life involved feeding, raising and slaughtering chickens. he has these horrific stories of grabbing chickens from the coop, slitting their throats, draining the blood and then throwing the carcass into a huge growing pile right next to him. he had to make sure to save the blood for the chinese neighbors down the street so they could use it for a dessert dish. after all the chickens were slaughtered and plucked, he would go door-to-door to deliver the chicken carcasses to all the families in the village. my mom says that for the first ten years of their marriage, he never ate chicken.
one day, before i had learned these sordid details of my father's past, i came home and there were baby chicks in our backyard. mind you, this is a backyard in the uber-suburban mall-infested san fernando valley, not some small village in the philippines. we had a pool, swingset, lemon trees and a gazebo in our backyard and there wasn't a farm anywhere near us for miles. smack dab in the center of our middle-class surroundings, my dad had built a makeshift coop out of chicken wire and pvc. prior to that day i don't think i had ever seen chicken wire actually used for chickens.
man, those chicks were cute. it was hard to imagine that these adorable little peeps would grow up to be the bizarre looking adults that are chickens. i have to admit that i fell in love.
every day i would come home from school and made sure that the little fuzzballs had water and food and it wasn't that long until they grew up to look like big, ugly fowl. i gave them names and hung out with them in the backyard while i did homework or whatever other trouble i was making. they might have been weird looking, but they were pets i could call my own and i loved every funny smelling chicken feather on them.
one day i came home from school and little sister was all freaked out.
"grandpa killed the chickens!!!" exclaimed dawn. it was scary to see how she was so excited to have witnessed the bloody event. "he cut off its head with the machete and it ran all around the backyard with blood spurting out of its neck! then it stopped running."
that was a little bit more information than i needed. dawn went on to tell me that our dad had already plucked the chicken and was getting it ready for their big 15th wedding anniversary party they were going to have the next day.
my chickens.
nobody told me that i was raising food! i sulked during the entire party and made a point of telling all the guests about how they had just eaten my pets. did they taste good with ketchup? 'cause i wouldn't know because i'm not some kind of pet-eating horrible person like they were. i heard that my grandpa lopped off their heads with a machete. there sure was a lot of blood. horrified guest after horrified guest was told about my tales of woe. my parents didn't think it was cute.
the next anti-peta adventure that my dad tried after the grand chicken experiment was raising angora rabbits. in another attempt to trick me into taking care of them, he bought half a dozen of them as babies and put them in the backyard. if i thought that the baby chicks were cute fuzzballs, that was nothing compared to the absolutely adorable tribble-like baby rabbits. i was designated to help take care of the future sweaters, but my heart just wasn't into it. i managed to make sure that they were fed and had water, but i refused to try to develop any sort of relationship with them. whenever i looked into their cage, all i could think of was women's clothing.
the san fernando valley can get pretty hot in the summers. temperatures can typically reach 110 on a smoggy valley summer day and it's generally a pretty unhealthy environment to be in. it's even unhealthier if you're a long-haired rabbit in someone's backyard. although i never witnessed it, my dad told me that they had died of heat exposure. yech.
i probably shouldn't even mention the desert tortoise... or the other time when my dad thought it might be a good idea to raise a goat so he wouldn't have to mow the lawn... naw... that's a totally different story.
anyway, someday i'd really like to own a pet. i won't use it for food or sweaters or chores or anything. i'd just take care of it and make sure that it doesn't bite anybody.
simple pleasures, you know?
all words (c) filmfatale industries 2000