Can I tell you a Secret?

I always end up wanting Chick-fil-A on Sundays and I know I’m not alone. Like man, how dare another greed stricken capitalistic American enterprise use so called ‘religious practices’ as a marketing tactic that impedes on my rights to filleted chicken breasts? No way you’re gonna convince me that your moral integrity and spirituality is worth more than my craving for an All-American deep-fried hyper-processed meal. I just got back from Brazil and I’m so tired of pao de queijo and meat on a stick but man oh man would I love a pastel right now.

It doesn't even matter ‘cause my car’s in the shop. I ran over a deer and it shredded my whole engine cover, what an inconvenience. I was driving home at 2 am, after being DD for some drunk friends. You know me, always saving the day.

I wish someone would save me.

I’ve always wanted a snake but apparently they can grow to eat pretty large rodents and my veins crawl every time I drive by roadkill. I called the road commission and they said they would go and remove the corpse but should I have given him a proper send off? With flowers and a service and a repast and even a limo, a real Detroit funeral. You know I might even pull up wearing a brand new mink coat and some white stick ivory buffs to lay my baby to rest. No offense though.

I wouldn’t do that because then his family might come looking for me like I did something wrong. I didn’t kill it, I didn't hurt it ‘cause it was already dead. Or did I? How can I be so sure it didn't feel all 3,500 pounds of metal in my car scrape over its body? But holy sh*t that was a huge deer man.

I just killed an ant that was crawling behind my monitor and slowly fixated on the fact that even ants have families to go home to at night. I watched his brother mourn. Not that I’m assuming pronouns. But another ant came up seconds later and ran in frantic circles around the remains of his crushed body in a way that was so human it almost made me tear up.

What makes pain human? Who am I to characterize his grief as mine? Maybe he feels way more than me and I’m so frail that I use my insecurities to fuel my internal superiority complex over him. Or maybe it’s just an ant. But that would make me the judge, jury and executioner.

Wait, the executioner sounds too much like a killer and I promise you I didn’t hurt that deer. I wouldn’t hurt a mouse! But I would feed them to my pet snake if it meant I had a companion. Do you think I hurt the deer? Tell me the truth!

I swear it was already dead, it was just laid out in the middle of the pitch black freeway and I barely had time to slow down. Someone must’ve clipped it before me. Go blame them!

Flat tire the next day, was that my karma?

Did I hurt the deer? I swear I didn’t mean to, I promise that I'll slow down next time. 

I can barely see my journal, I need some sun in my writing room. I would get up and open the blinds but then you might see that sometimes I wack gnats onto the window sill instead of setting them free outside. And if you looked hard enough you’d see the ant traps I set when I returned from abroad and saw that they had rudely invited themselves in. I bought the expensive kind that feeds them the slow poison that they take back to annihilate their colony.

But I wouldn’t hurt a fly I swear. I really don't mean to be disregarding. I just enjoy my personal space, why can’t they respect that? Acting as if I came in and built my crib on top of theirs. 

As if I bulldozed over their limp bodies at 70 miles an hour in a big black chunk of metal blasting Ivan Cornejo because it reminded me of my last trip.

I like the double decker buses in South America because the view up top always makes me feel larger than life. I wonder why I don’t see them in the U.S. considering how much we like to supersize everything. When I was in Peru I rode at the very front on the top floor and it felt like I was on a self-driving cloud. The instant fatalities of the bugs hitting the windshield reminded me of my car back home, except the bus seems to be out of wiper fluid and these bugs had dried out so well I'm convinced they're still there to this day. I don’t drive a Tesla but my wipers do well against the bugs and so my oppression back home is autonomous.

They instantly cleanse the guilt I foster for robbing the life of another in the name of my own minor convenience. And though I’m pretty sure I'm not lying about not hurting the deer, I know I’ve been conditioned to view the defenseless as discard. My grandma died on September 10th. Would it be any different if she was stampeded by a herd of deer on the 11th?

It would. And I guess that just exposes my belief that humanity surpasses all other forms of life in importance. Except my veins still shiver every time I drive by roadkill and I still refuse to own any pets except ones who can’t express love, like snakes.

But what does the inability to love even mean? I guess that depends on who’s asking.