Order
I capital-h hate killing things. I hate killing small things, hate killing big things, hate killing things that are nuisances. I can sometimes make exceptions for flies and mosquitoes, but not always. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” is the only refrain I can come up with if I have to get rid of a spider from our bedroom. And right there, I wrote ‘get rid of’, preferring the euphemism to the reality—I killed a little piece of life that never did anything to me.
I hate to see old buildings torn down. I’m always straightening piles, tightening screws, touching up, wiping off, oiling, polishing. I physically react when I see clear-cutting of the rainforest, the enduring tree chopped down for transient finances. Most boys run around pulling up grass, breaking walls, throwing rocks at windows. I was always looking to build and maintain.
Years ago in my immunology class, I was the only one in my group who was able to wrangle our lab mice. I had to take a lancet and pierce the mice at the neck, so we could take blood samples for antibody measurements. Their scapulas felt like the fine edge of a guitar pick, and they squeaked when pricked. It wasn’t a nervousness that I felt, like when your stomach clenches before a big speech — this was different, like a deep, clawing, despair. Puncturing their skin, feeling the membrane stretch before the desmosomes gave way, made me feel atrocious. The pointlessness of our ersatz research (simply to confirm what the textbooks already told us) made it even more awful. If such a thing was a means to an end, if mice were being poked and injected for a greater good in medicine, I would understand. After all, the mice went about their business and kept living after we got blood samples. At the end of the semester, it was time for them to be killed with gas—I made someone else do it. I left the classroom and looked out the window at an early spring day, trying not to imagine what it’s like to die.
The other day I saw a video that was mostly lovely — a man had taken a GoPro high definition video camera on a sport tuna fishing trip. He modified it to work underwater, and captured breathtaking video of a pod of dolphins swimming with the boat. But there’s a few seconds at the beginning of the video, before the underwater shots begin. The men are standing on the boat, one steering, others watching their lines, and one gets annoyed because a tuna is flopping around on the deck. Now, keep in mind this is a pretty big fish, so flopping around really can create a commotion. The guy grabs a heavy, blunt, bat-like thing, and casually beats the fish into a bloody pulp. I don’t know, maybe I’m overly sensitive, but I just really really did not like seeing that. I don’t even like writing about it right now; it doesn’t feel cathartic at all to revisit how I felt.
I think it’s that I love to see things working like they’re supposed to. A crown fits on a tooth, a stove heats a pan evenly, a tree puts down roots and gives shade, an animal twitches or swims or pounces or sprints. I love to see things working, and I have a hard time when I feel like I’m undoing that.
