aksiokersa

I'm going through a phase. I ride my skateboard off shit I never should have attempted. I fall on my ass. A lot.

It feels good.

I feel like my whole life I've been trying to live safe and live right. But I'm over that. I'm not talking about fetishizing experience here - that would just be more mental masturbation, flagellation. And I'm not talking about pasting my ugly ol' heart on my sleeve and then beating the shit out of every person who innocently bumps into it. I'm talking about letting my gut run things for once.

I don't want anyone else's heart - who needs that kind of responsibility? Their heart is their job, no matter how in love we are.

I don't want anyone else's mind - that's honestly just too easy. I grow bored so quickly.

I want their guts.

One time I was called in to the anatomy lab to assist with the dissection of a male cougar that had been killed in traffic not 24 hours earlier. The law required a determination of his age and the cause of his death (routine procedure for all endangered species). The institution, her august aims, required that we parse his every substance.

With his giant mouth heaved by a ratchet gag and his tension-torqued legs awkwardly overwhelming the channeled steel table, he looked ordinary - the same meat I saw every day in that place. Same as the pile of human hands in the corner, waiting to be defleshed, same as the torso of that chimp lolling in the bucket for three years now, left by some researcher who grew bored with the body.

I am a zoo-archaeologist. I specialize in diversity. My canon is a ramshackle hodgepodge of species, who, because of their particular niche in the landscape or foodchain, I happen across while dusting through the strata of places once inhabited by man. I study man as an animal and animals as their ecological relationships. I look for what happens in the interstitial. I know little of the particular habits and needs of any one species. Usually, I can't even remember their individual taxonomic classifications.

And so I was assigned to dissect the cougar's gut, that ultimate intersection of geography and trophic level. The team working that day figured my background gave me the best chance at untangling the half-digested mess.

The techs had already opened up the chest cavitiy when I got there. His kitty reproductive organs had been shipped off to the Wildlife Services folks, who thought they might freeze his semen, just in case. Splayed from throat to perineum, chunks of opalescent skin pinned and clamped for our convenience, every piece of him was stretched wide. There was nothing to remind us that just hours before he'd been a symphony of fickle grace. There was no blood.

While discussion at the head of the table ooh'd and aah'd over his long whiskers, the broadness of his paws, I released bits of soft rabbit fur from the lining of his belly. I discovered the crumpled remains of a fawn's soft cranium and parts of a doe. I used the round-nosed tweezers, instead of the sharps, to gently pull three buckled pieces of metal from his purpling flesh - Airgun pellets. Not the kind used by kids with toys either. No wonder the animal had taken his chances and tried to cross that highway.

Bits of him were piling up quickly in the garbage cans at my feet as the team tore him apart: his dark black eyes, his long kinked tail, his flanks, and his round, rigid, shoulders.

But I examined his intestines methodically. Every broken wing, every tiny thing he'd shattered, I placed on a tray next to his prone, oozing body.

When I was finished, I stared for a long time at the frank, exact remains of his last few meals and the cougar became slowly more, and then more beautiful to me. He smelled like the dark, damp, forested places I'd never be brave enough to go. Brutality was his living and every piece and curve of his body pronounced that. He could never claim to be other than what he was.

I thought about the shiny nature photography of "Mountain Lions" I had seen. Big kittens backlit by sunsets. Animals as scenery.

I wondered how much I had missed in the world before.