There's a Ferret in My Room

As I was doing my evening exercises (I do push-ups and sit-ups every night before I take a shower and go to bed), I spied a ferret underneath one of the endtables in my bedroom. Mind you it's just a likeness of one, probably scuplted from clay, but it is lifesize and--dare I say?--cute. I do daresay cute because it reminds me of simpler days, days when it was just me and my wife and our knick-knacks, this cute little ferret being one of them. You see, when you have kids your knick-knacks kind of either get broken or overcrowded with the inundation of their knick-knacks--otherwise known as toys--and you end up either storing them in the garage or attic or (and I just had one last week) selling them at a yard sale to collect dust in someone else's house.

So I see this ferret and it takes me back to the time that I first saw it--before the kids, before the rise of our current crisis. I remember thinking none too highly of it and trying to convince my wife to display it in a discreet place--like underneath an endtable or something. What an ass I was back then. It's because I would do things like that that we are now on the brink of divorce--but I am getting ahead of myself.

So I see this ferret and it also takes me back to the time I was reading a National Geographic and I saw a small picture if a beautiful, pristine valley somewhere near Afghanistan. I contemplated this picture for quite a few seconds before reading the caption, which to my extreme dismay read something like, "This valley has been the site of countless battles for centuries because it is sacred to such and such people." I remember feeling very sorry for the Earth, specifically for the trees and the grass and the water in that valley. "How can you own water?" Leopold Bloom asks in Ulysses. Native Americans ask the same thing about the land on which it flows, and of the sky under which it both precipitates and flows. I think of the Gulf Coast. What a huge tragedy for us as human beings. But in the grand scheme of things, this is what the Earth does. We are just pilgrims here for such a brief blink of an eye. Floods and fires and quakes were here millennia before we got here and they will continue for millennia long after we're gone. People say, "We'll be back," as if they have a claim to this tract of land the ocean has bequeathed to us. Unfortunately for us, the ocean says the exact same thing. But I am ahead of myself--again.

So I see this ferret and it also takes me back to the time when I was driving to work one morning and I was looking out across the fields and beyond to the trees and I thought of David Young's poem "Plato and the Fall." It begins, "Socrates says that trees have nothing to teach us. And with that, the fall begins, the human fall from grace. A fall the trees could, of course, teach us about." We think we're so goddamn important that we do this and do that, fence this in and wall this out, block me in and force you out. What are we doing to each other? Why are we so conceited, so selfish, so pompous, so full of ourselves to the point that we not only say Fuck you to the Earth but Fuck you to each other and in the process of all this Fuck youing we kill that which sustains us, that which we are here for, that which we need but that which we also deny ourselves. God help us. Jesus Christ please help us. What the fuck are you waiting for? Again, I am ahead of myself.

So I see this ferret and it takes me back to a time when my wife and I were kinder to each other. Of course we were not perfect toward each other, but we were definitely kinder and more loving then than we are now. The ferret intimates to my mind a beautiful woman who would tell me that she loves me and sleep with me at night, who would joke around with me and walk with me in the park, who would tell me about her day while she was sucking my dick. The ferret intimates to my mind a purer world without human contamination. Things were fine with my wife and I before we started to get so wrapped up in ourselves that we forgot about the other, just as things were fine with the Earth until we started to get so wrapped up in ourselves that we forgot about it. Then one day your wife comes home and tells you she's leaving and your world comes crashing down, just as the Earth one day tells you it's still spinning and your world comes crashing down.

There's a ferret in my room, and he's not nearly as cute as he appears to be.