As I sit here on this chilly night with my dog, she lifts her head, her beady little eyes scanning me and the room like an x-ray machine, searching for the slightest morsel of food. She quickly bores of this and soon returns to feverishly sniffing her leg, a terrible habit which I am yet to address. When I watch this evil little creature go about the house cannot help but rem inis on an old obsession of mine. This obsession was no childish phase over a toy or a superhero, this was something quite different. It was a thing that consumed me, not a moment went by that I did not think about it. I was madly obsessed with animals. (no joke, it was bloody scary).
From a young age I was entranced by these furry creatures that appeared to have melded so smoothly in to our world. I suppose thats a bit of an understatement.. I lived and breathed animals. I stalked people’s pets, capturing cats in my backyard and attempting to almost brainwash them to think they were my own. It became an obsession and by about age 10 I could name almost every dog breed and have gone on to be able to identify a large amount of cat breeds for some reason. A I got older I began to mutate into an animal fueled monster, prancing around my backyard with possessed eyes attempting to grab birds, butterflies, spiders and even moths. I became crazy about insects, spending days on end teaching my friends how to catch bees (with bare hands). In fact it was quite common to see me walking in my typical pointless fashion with a bee in my hand, which would at some stage sting me-I would cry, vowing to never touch a bee-but alas do it all over again the next day.
I used my insects to scare people, they became my little army of evil creatures that I was able to use to my advantage. Spiders were my main weapon of choice, I discovered I could manipulate people by cornering them with a spider until I got exactly what it was I wanted, which was coincidentally for people to buy me more animals.. It never worked.
Despite becoming an expert at catching insects, I had little success in capturing the poor defenseless mammals in my garden and soon learn’t that I was going to have to become more resourceful if I wanted to acquire a fluffy pet. I would like to be dramatic and say I started sketching radical methods to catch the animals but I simply wasn’t that intelligently advanced as a young child. However, by one way or another, I worked out how to create booby traps, and dug holes in my garden which I covered with plant matter in a desperate attempt to trick mice and dare I say it rats into becoming part of my evil clan. I was particularly attracted to rodents during this period which I find horrifying as they are more revolting than than Beatrice’s pretzel hat.
Luckily I am now much older and have recovered from the animal obsession I experienced as a young boy. Almost with tears in my eyes I cancelled the several animal magazine subscriptions I used to receive, and with a heavy heart recently half-filled my recycle bin with more of the magazines that I had accumulated. I had simply reached rock bottom and had come to the conclusion that my addiction had to be addressed. It certainly wasn’t easy. Throwing all those magazines into the bin was like throwing old friends in the bin: they’ll probably die, and then you will get into shit when the authorities found out it was you that put them in there........ yeah.. that was probably the worst analogy I have made in my entire life. But, the moral of the story is, animals don’t really care about you, so if you put all your friends in the bin, you’ll have no one. So cherish your friends.. or i’ll find you and eat you.
..Ben...
