“
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me—the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods—
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house—, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,—
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, seperate, in the evening…
“Literature for me is not merely the best part of life; it is itself the form of life, which has no other form.” — Harold Bloom
“I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails.” — John Green (via faleste)
(via simplekitty)
“Either we heal as a team or we die as individuals.”
— Al Pacino
Any Given Sunday
“Love is about compromises, Zorak. Compromising your future to the City Council of Bethesda, MD.” — Tad Ghostal
“Always
I am not jealous
of what came before me.
Come with a man
on your shoulders,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,
come like a river
full of drowned men
which flows down to the wild sea,
to the eternal surf, to time.
Bring them all
to where I am waiting for you;
we shall always be alone,
we shall always be you and I
alone on earth
to start our life.
”
— Pablo Neruda
“I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.”
— Wallace Stevens
“However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” — Stanley Kubrick (link)
There are 11 giant pandas in the United States. And they are all assholes. Seriously, fuck those guys. There are like 3,000 pandas in the world and they’re all dicks. Every. Single. One. Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes with me knows that my hatred for the black-and-white culm guzzler runs deep. But no one seems to get why I’ve devoted a special part of my heart for the seething blackness I feel for the panda.
So, you want facts? I’ll give you fucking facts:
1. Pandas are hilariously bad at sex (and parenting).
Do you remember your first time? I don’t. It’s not that it was bad, it’s just that we were young and virgins and my memory only holds on to things that lasted longer than 30 seconds. But you know what’s sadder than that? Panda sex.
Pandas just don’t know how to have sex. Every other animal inherently knows how to reproduce. They might be bad at it, but they know what to do. Pandas? Nope. We have to show them panda porn (zookeepers call it ‘a demonstration’) just to help them learn. It’s probably big, hairy 80s porn, too.
If they had showed a demonstration at my middle school, it would have started a full-on orgy. What the fuck did pandas do before VHS? Oh, yeah, slowly die off.
Male pandas are also deadbeat dads. I bet you didn’t know that. In the wild, when pandas mate (if they can figure it the fuck out), the male panda doesn’t just kick the female out of bed and call her taxi. He kicks her out of the bamboo forest. She’s forced to go on her own, working in a garment factory and sending money to the innkeepers who are taking care of her baby.
She can’t even turn to prostitution when she ultimately loses her job at the garment factory for having an illegitimate child because PANDAS SUCK AT SEX.
2. Great camouflage, dicknose.
Okay, so we all know pandas are cute. They look like little burglars. But there is a reason burglars don’t show up in black and white stripes and a mask when they steal your flatscreen - it gives them the fuck away. Pandas live in western China, surrounded by rocks and bamboo and all sorts of greenness. Do they camouflage themselves? Fuck no. They’re too busy eating bamboo to worry about survival.
3. They eat bamboo.
The first fact that anyone will tell you about pandas is that they eat bamboo. The say it’s fucking distinctive. Guess what - they’re horribly inefficient at processing it. They’re herbivores with a carnivore’s digestive tract. Yeah, they’re fucking vegans. Because of that, they have to eat 40 - 80 lbs of bamboo EVERY DAY just to stay alive. Not only that, they have to keep their digestive system mostly full at all times or else they get really sick and die. That’s distinctive.
I want to meet that first brilliant panda who doubled-down on bamboo. It’s been millions of years and they still haven’t evolved to digest it right. It’s like not worrying about global climate change because we’ll eventually evolve into mermaids. Dumbass.
4. Even other bears think they’re jackasses.
While now classified as Ursidae (that’s bears, motherfucker), for years we couldn’t tell if they were raccoons or bears. Yeah, we had to discover DNA before we could tell you what they were. That’s when we found out something fascinating and oddly telling: they’re living fossils. A long time ago pandas stayed on their evolutionary path and every other bear went on another. If all of your friends evolve their fucking DNA to get away from you, you are an asshole.
Even other pandas thing pandas are assholes. They’re solitary, which I guess I would be too if I had to denude an entire forest of bamboo every day just to have enough energy to avoid a slight incline. They also aggressively defend their territory. By ‘aggressively’ I mean ‘piss on rocks and stuff’ and by ‘territory’ I mean ‘shitty patch of bamboo in a misty, wet mountain range.’
You know what else is misty, wet and filled with green shit? Ireland. You know who else are assholes? The Irish. But at least we’re only assholes when drunk on whisky - which we invented. What has the panda invented? Nothing, that’s what.
5. Pandas are trophy wives.
Pandas are hideously expensive to keep. Keeping a panda in captivity costs five times more than next expensive animal, the elephant. Five times more and they don’t even make cool trumpeting sounds or use their ears to fly. They’re $2 million a year - each - to lease from China. We don’t even own them. Plus $600,000 a year more if they produce a cub (which has to go back to China when it turns three). Did I mention you have to have two bears, because apparently they get lonely. There’s a zoo filled with animals and they get lonely. Anti-social jerks.
Oh, and they need an entourage. Pandas take like 4 full-time zookeepers to manage them. $4 million a year in fees to the Chinese, $600k in zookeeper salaries and $400k in food and facilities. I could date Anne Hatheway for less than that AND put her up in a very nice castle and I wouldn’t have to end up in prison for securities fraud. I bet she’d even dress in a sexy panda outfit.
That’s just how much it takes to keep a panda in captivity. If you reallocated all the money used on conservation efforts, you’d easily have more than the GDP of dozens of countries. That money could be better put to use on something noble and enriching for everyone, like keeping the cast of “The Jersey Shore” off television.
6. Pandas are assholes.
I know, it’s a tautolgy. Deal with it. What kind of jackass gets prime spot in every zoo they’re in and refuses to show up for work. I’ve been to the National Zoo dozens of times in my life. Do you know how many times I’ve seen a panda? None. Not a single fucking time. Ling Ling and Hsing Hsing grew up and died just miles from me and I never saw them. I’ve met more members of Queensryche than I’ve seen giant pandas.
If I ate 12 hours of day and didn’t show up for work, I’d be on the street in an instant. In all my life, I’ve never seen a panda standing in the line at a soup kitchen or outside the liquor store at 8 a.m. Where is the justice, I ask you? Obama!
Did you know that per animal, pandas attack more people than tigers or Charlie Sheen? A single panda in a Chinese zoo attacked visitors 3 times. If I attacked vistors at a zoo even once, I’d go to jail. But the panda? No, he’s too fucking cute for prison. Texas has put people to death for less than that. Hell, they’d execute a baby if it taught evolution at daycare. I guess that’s why Texas doesn’t have any pandas.
So, yeah. Assholes. I rest my fucking case.