Human nature

by RAF KATIGBAK

You know what? Fuck it. I’ve had enough of this town. Walking downtown, it’s just a barrage of dust and noise from constant construction, crappy dance music blaring from souped-up Acuras and Boston Chiefs sitting on the Stogies terrasse catcalling any female with just a centimetre of exposed skin. On the Plateau, it’s doe-eyed froshlettes with thin headbands stumbling around after a night of having their best friend hold their hair while they hurl after a few too many Cement Mixer shots. Heck, in the East-End, getting a drink of water has become an ordeal since that main broke under Pie-IX. Montreal is all weird weather, weird people and weird times. I’m out of here, and I know exactly where I want to go and what I want to do:

I’m heading to the highlands of Ethiopia, where Erta Ale, the longest erupting volcano (over 100 years) helped create the surrounding mountain range. I’m going to become a Gelada baboon and travel in packs 600 strong and sustain myself solely on grass.

Either that, or I’m moving to Deer Cave in Borneo to become one of 3 million wrinkle-lipped bats navigating by sonar and adding my guano to the 100-metre high mound below. Or maybe I’ll be a Texan cave salamander, and rock my freaky eyeless translucence, creeping around in a cave hundreds of metres below the surface. Or perhaps I’ll become a snow goose and make the long journey to breed in the Arctic tundra, protecting my hatchlings from wily Arctic foxes.

Is this a good time to mention my addiction to nature documentaries? It’s been about three weeks that I can’t get enough of them. Specifically, I’m talking about the mind-blowing BBC series Planet Earth.

I’m hooked. It’s gotten to the point where there is nothing I’d rather do than hunker down and learn about the weird mating rituals of Bactrian desert camels (the females do a kind of booty drop, then slap their poonts with their tails).

Unfortunately, my contact with humans is now suffering. I was in New York a few weeks ago, in my hotel room, sitting in front of my laptop watching a seal try to escape a great white shark by using its superior turning abilities to leap over and around the massive eating machine—on the table was an invitation to a high-profile Fashion Week party, two tickets to an exclusive indie-rock secret show in Brooklyn, and a phone number/note scribbled on a napkin from a really cute Swedish girl I had met the night before, inviting me out for a few drinks in the Lower East Side. But none of that mattered; all I cared about was watching seal and shark locked in an epic slow-motion battle that has replayed itself since their species existed. It’s kind of fucked me up. I can’t even have a normal conversation with my friends without bringing up some obscure nature factoid.

“Hey Raf, did you hear about Suzy and Steve? They totally broke up last week; apparently he was cheating on her. Tragic, man.”

“Yeah that blows. I tell you, if they were French angelfish, this wouldn’t happen; they mate for life. But then again, they could never be French angelfish because those two eat meat and French angelfish feed on sponges, algae, bryozoans, zoantharians, gorgonians and tunicates...”

“Riiiiight. Um, I gotta go...”

What is it about nature docs that gives me such a spiritual boner (beyond the obvious fact that it’s the most mind-expanding stoner experience since watching Wizard of Oz and playing Dark Side of the Moon simultaneously)? Is it the idea that, as important as we think we are, we really are just little specks in this hugely diverse world? Is it the underlying tragedy that while our lives amount to just nanofarts in the planet’s history, we’re totally fucking it all up?

Whoa, am I getting too heavy? Sorry, maybe I’ve gone too deep. Not deep like Lechuguilla-cave-which-is-193-kilometres-long-and-500-metres-deep-and-contains-whole-chambers-filled-with-the-most-astonishing-crystals-including-some-a-staggering-six-metres-long-deep. But still pretty deep.

Maybe these docs give me some kind of connection to nature that 100 of my naked yoga-lates retreats and weekend new-age crystal shamanistic drum circles could never provide. Maybe, like so many people feeling trapped in the city, I feel like escaping to a place that is far simpler, where all you care about is finding water, finding food, and meeting a nice girl who’ll lower her backside and slap her hoo-haa with her tail.

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca