Extremely Huge Voluntary Insemination Devices

It's late, and this has to be more cursory than maybe I'd like it to be. I have to teach in the morning, my 8am class depends on me to be awake and energetic because it's hard for them to be, most of them. Poor things (cf. Sontag: if you're in the class, you'll get the joke.)

Anyway, the long and short of it is this: Chuck and I went to Busch Gardens for his birthday. We don't do roller coasters, only the zoo and gardens part. Chuck takes endless pictures and dreams of a time when he can turn everything into a neat tropical paradise with naturalized orchids and neat beds of coleus and heliconia (my God, the plant has its own website). He also studies the water features, dreaming of the day when he can stop slaving for McKesson and get on with his real work: pushing water around the yard.

After two abortive attempts to get on the Stanleyville Express and head out to the faux-Serengeti (this is the real one), we decided to confine ourselves to the faux-Nairobi (ditto) and environs, and just watch the animals we like best. I beelined for the elephants, who are in a new habitat as part of the Rhino Rally ride.

We got there at feeding time, which was excellent, because that meant there were keepers there I could grill. The keeper closest to me was leaning on the fence, trying to trample down some dork from Long Island (note the messed up design of the official site: I'm just saying) asking things about whether zoo goers try to worship the elephants because in some countries you know they worship rats, yessirree, rats. He saw it on television.

And Christ knows she's thinking, save me from the idiots, at least the elephants are smarter than this bozo, when up trundles Idiot Girl with her questions about carnivorous elephants (don't know if you can follow this link. If not, I'll post the whole exchange somehow).

After Bozo and Idiot Girl, I figure I must have been a dream, because at least I knew what elephants ate and wasn't rasping off her eardrums with my accent.

So when I could wedge my way into the conversation, I wondered, in conversation-stopping detail, about what happened to the dead elephants. I wondered, out loud and specificially, if they were fed to the tigers. Or if the dead gazelles were. What about, say, the rabbits or equally prolific animals at the zoo? Was there culling?

Come to find out they get Aramark just like the rest of us. Only the animal kind.

My questions led the keeper to opine about Mim the elephant who died recently, then to tell me in detail which elephants were dominant in the herd, then to opine that there were no bull elephants at Busch Gardens (this with a description of early elephant musth, caused by the culling of older males in wild populations). Then she told me they were doing a breeding program there trying to inseminate four of the elephants.

So of course I asked how, I mean if you're a zoo, do you just get everyone naked, set out a barrel of zoo-juice (hay saturated with grain alcohol) and wait for the magic?

I knew that most cows are artificially inseminated these days because cattle mating can be dangerous (thank you to my long years at UWW and Clemson for this information). I wondered if elephants were equally -- challenged.

Apparently, they can be.

The keeper then described the process and apparatus.

Yes, she said, the handlers (and I presume the elephants themselves) preferred actual mating. But they had a -- tool -- which allowed

(graphic content follows)

doctors to do both a vaginal and a rectal exam simultaneously, while inseminating the animal.

She said, I'm nearly quoting here, "we don't use harnesses or chains or straps or anything to restrain the animal. She can go ahead and mount or not. It's totally voluntary."

Which made me wonder about a lot of stuff, and I'm sure you're wondering too. But I didn't know how to ask, short of saying, "um, can I WATCH?" which is really what I wanted to do, just so I could get everything straight in my head -- the mechanics of it and all -- and see the Tool itself. It must look like something out of Elephant Adam and Eve.

So then I got to wondering how many D batteries it took. Or if it needed a car battery. Or if the insemination room had TVs with pay-per-view, or if elephants were at all visual in their lusts --

Can you imagine?

Me too.

The Harley class

Tomorrow night I start my Harley training, as Chuck calls it.

I'm going to Newnan, to the Great South Harley Davidson store , for two nights and two days, and they are going to teach me how to ride.

I had to buy gloves and boots for this so that if I fell off, I wouldn't end up with gravel buried in my knuckles or a broken ankle. At Pilates last night, Dennis, who has a motorcycle of some variety (it's white) told me that everyone falls off, and I should expect to lay the cycle down at some point. His wife said, "just try to get your foot out from under it."

I am not a physically brave person. I'm doing this because it seems interesting, I can write about it, and frankly because it scares me. I don't want to fall. I hate falling. And I have been assured that I will absolutely fall. Thus, I have to go fall.

My friend Martha, when I told her months ago that I intended to learn to ride, was horrified. She works as a chaplain in the trauma center at Tampa General Hospital. She told me stories. The way doctors call the bikes murdercycles, the helmets are brainbuckets, the whole thing. It was sweet. It reminded me of my father, sort of: he used to cut out articles in the newspaper about mutilated bodies got that way from being thrown off speeding cycles or mashed under the wheels of some behemoth truck or having skidded across half a mile of pavement right out of their clothes. He cut out every one he could find. Sent them to my older brother Karl (search hipchen at this site). Who owned and rode a bike for who knows how many years, has a scooter now, my mother says a bike too, but Karl doesn't say that.

Anyway, all this newspaper stuff kept me off bikes mostly. I rode with my cousins once in a meadow I think, when we were kids, dirt bikes. The only other time I rode was on the back of a bike driven by a math professor at IIT-Kanpur last spring. It was my only way home: Chitra was sick; it was a long walk. The math professor had a bike. I hopped on, no helmet, in a skirt, behind a stranger. And I really liked it.

We didn't fall.

I'm hoping that I like riding by myself, and that I can get a bike to take to and from school to save gas and be a more careful consumer. Which is boring. So maybe what I mean is that I want that plus the cachet of a bike. The math prof was tough in her salwar kameez on her unmuffled old Triumph in the middle of the night, screaming past the peacocks and pariah dogs, dust kicked up everywhere. The bicyclists tinkled horns we couldn't hear, though we saw the riders with their hands on the bells. Her hair blew back in my face and smelled of cumin and cooking and the night was impossibly dark and tasted clean and good and fast.

Birds and windows

This morning, between printing off copies of essays I need to edit for a/b:Auto/Biography Studies, which thanks to John Underwood will have a new website this week, and making myself a bowl of raisin bran (and trying to keep it from the cat), I hear a thud at the front door. Blue barks, then points at something on the stoop.

Yellow breasted, black billed, about four inches long. On its back, twitching. With the cats out.

It's a pine warbler. I pick it up, hold it for a while trying to find a place to set it so it won't get eaten while it shakes off its stupor. I lay it in the mulch under the rosemary bush. It blends in so well with the pine straw and chipped wood I can hardly see it. From the window I watch it as best as I can, given how the pattern of its feathers shifts it into and out of sight from moment to moment. Right now it's sitting up a little better, breathing more steadily, blinking and looking around. I think it's going to be okay.

When I heard it, I thought it was a ruby-throated hummingbird (this, by the way, is a decent link to birding blogs if you're into them). We have about half a dozen fighting over the feeders out there, and sometimes they're so intense they forget about everything, hit the windows, roll around like angry siblings on the walk. It's crazy. They're desperate, of course, trying to get fat enough to fly to Mexico in a month.

I heard a pileated woodpecker in the neighbor's dead slash pine while I was holding the warbler; also a hawk of some sort. The brown thrasher and the rest of the birds we get at the grain feeders were all huddled under the underbrush, I could see them waiting and watching, one eye on me, one eye on the sky with the hawk hung in it like a hank of black wool.

It might rain today. The air feels heavy and still, like something's about to happen.

Wow, I have a new forum. Thanks, Kate.

My dog hates the books I read. The grey dog, I mean. The red dog doesn't much care what I read. He isn't really a critic so much of books. He's more into who comes within a mile or so of the house. Mostly he hates these people.

I was reading Agate Nesaule's Woman in Amber, had gotten to the part where her mother had insisted they weren't going from the DP camp to Brazil (which essentially condemned Nesaule's father to digging ditches beside the gold-paved streets of America), when Aleksondra Hultquist called to see if we were still in Georgia and wanted to go to dinner. We were -- more on that in a second -- and did. I left the book on the table. We came home. Confetti. Ollie, the grey dog, is part whatever, part catahoula, all cuddly and sweet and absolutely ashamed of having shredded something about the Holocaust in particular, by a friend of a friend, in extra particular. He isn't to be blamed, honestly.

It must have been the texture of the paper.

(Chuck says hello.)

This morning I woke up worried about Ponya the elephant. She's at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, which is about to be hit, again, by a hurricane. She's the only elephant I've ever touched and she was okay with this, or at least got extra carrots or something because she behaved well and didn't step on me (or the other twelve people with hands on her flank at the time). I don't know that I would be okay with such a thing. Perhaps the carrots really help, or maybe she's secretly really cuddly, only so big that laps are impossible. So appreciates whatever she can get.

Hurricane Gustav is headed for NO again, and I can't really think about what's going to happen for very long. I went there a year ago this fall, to Long Beach to visit Countryside Roses (check out their pages on Hurricane Katrina), and was -- I don't even know what the word is -- something like stunned, shocked, impressed, horrified, something in that matrix -- by the way the place still looked. Like a disaster area, still, despite years of work by the residents and folks who came to help.

And by the obvious trauma the people there were still feeling. So I'm worried about Lisa and her friend Bob, who we met and who was wearing a shirt still stained with Katrina crud (which I discover is both the yuck and the respiratory problems it gives you). And of course the roses, the pets, the people we met there. A couple of weeks ago, we were worried about our own house in St. Pete and the path of Fay -- our renter had a mandatory evac notice, but all he got was a lot of rain. Sort of like the summer of 2004. We were there for the four hurricanes that passed over us, and in 2005 when Katrina and Ivan passed by us.

Which is all to say that Chuck and I were planning to go to FL for Labor Day, but I didn't get my promotion app done until mid-Friday, and then there's Gustav chugging in, with Hanna not far behind. So we'll get down there later, I imagine, if it's still there.

[Really we want to see Cameron, who owns Cameron Hair. If you're ever in St. Pete and can't wait to have your hair done, Cameron's the guy. After the fiasco at Indulge here in town, I'll make the 8 1/2 hour drive next time and all the times after that, too.]

[My mother is also in that area, too.]

I'm hoping I know how to post this, and can go back now to my low-tech life, reading Nancy Mairs' Remembering the Bonehouse -- I'm almost at the bottom of a stack of books I bought right after this year's IABA conference. I always make an enormous list of things that sound fascinating, but this year I actually went home and bought them. Haven't had but one disappointment: Nancy Reagan's My Turn, which just proved to me all over again how little I liked her OR her husband. She can't write at all (or hire a ghost writer who can, or maybe identify one who can, probably more likely) and she has the most horrifying ideas about life -- what hers means beyond catering to men and disliking her children until they agreed with her is seemingly beyond her. Can't remember who said I should read it because it would be interesting. That person was wrong.

These books are safely out of the way of Ollie, who's now curled up on the ottoman, asleep.

Interesting thing, blogs. I wonder how they keep from being boring, or if they are, to other people. I find Nick McRae's blog really interesting, and have read Kate's, of course, and a couple others --

How do you sign off? I guess like this.