#idgaf i mostly just liked the aesthetic of those places anyway

[hearthoof]

why is it considered extremist to be anti-zoo and anti-aquarium...?

i wish i could like zoos and aquariums. i have fond memories of both those places.

they exploit animals though. i dont like that. i dont like how they exploit, harm, kill, and treat animals like property. i'd rather those animals be in sanctuaries or in the wild (if possible because obviously it's not possible for all animals to be returned to the wild I KNOW!)

i miss the fun of aquariums and zoos but i care about the lives of animals more than the entertainment of humans.

[awed-frog]

It’s not that exciting, really - I just get irritable and disappointed when I witness something that’s weird enough not to be completely plausible and yet so boring that even if this should turn out to be a supernatural event, who the fuck cares, uh? Nobody, that’s who. Like, this one time I saw two ladies I’m pretty sure were shifters, but they weren’t really doing anything worth mentioning (I stood there and watched them for a while, but they just seemed lost and also there was a siren in my lizard brain going DANGER DANGER, so I finally drew the curtains tight and hid under the bed), and this other time a drunk werelady walked down my street but she just barked at some cars before disappearing?, and that’s almost worse than nothing happening at all. And as for Apricot Man - long story short, I hate working around people but this stupid heatwave has forced me from my house, and the closest liveable option around here is the Physics Library, so here I am, minding my own business and trying to ignore how I’m surrounded by smug, unfriendly books I have zero chances to ever read or understand, when this fucking guy walks right in and sits right next to me and why do people do that? Why? He’s got a whole fucking library, and it’s mostly fucking empty, because it’s August and normal people happily wandered off to any place that’s not this one, but nope - he’s got to come here and he’s got to sit here and this is the third day in a row he’s done that and seriously what the hell?

(My boyfriend pointed out it’s likely I’m the intruder - that poor Apricot Man always sits there and now he’s suddenly forced to share his living space with me - to which I answered that a) nice try, b) the common law in this country is to stay the fuck away from one another whenever possible and c) this desk is not the Magical Desk of Destiny carved out of the Blessèd Yggdrasil Itself or anything like that, so you literally lose nothing if you sit somewhere else and d) I got here first, anyway, because I’ve been here since ass o’clock in the morning and he normally comes in after six and also e) Apricot Man is clearly a cryptid, which means it’s his God-given duty to blend into the landscape and trying to pass as human so as to not alert hunters to the presence of a nest.)

So, yeah, here I am, minding my own business and doing honest, grown-up work when this guy rolls in - literally rolls in: he’s got these 90s skates I haven’t seen in twenty-fuck years (God, I’m ancient) and it’s just not practical, let me tell you that, questionable choice right there, because he’s almost seven feet tall and with those things, Jesus, every. single. time. he moves he’s got to duck or risk being beheaded by doors and shelves - but never mind that, he rolls in and sits down next to me disregarding the fact the library is basically a post zombie apocalypse wasteland of nothing at all and it’s just me and this desperate smol student two rooms down and that’s it, turns a computer on, and then proceeds to pile about three pounds of apricots in the empty space between us (and they’re not even in season anymore, so this is not some ‘his mom’s got a tree and what is he supposed to do, poor guy’ situation - this is a deliberate and expensive and horrifying choice on his part). And on top of everything else - I mean, we’re all allowed to do our own thing and yay for self-determination and the illusion of free will, but something else that’s just nope about him is that he’s got long, unkempt hair and it’s not clear what his deal is - if he’s got no running water at home, if he’s not washing it out of some political reason, if he’s actively going for some kind of mossy hay aesthetic, who knows - also I did a double take on the first day because he looks like he’s not wearing any pants? Which? What? And as it turns out, he is wearing pants, but he’s wearing something that’s two inches away from being a jeans thong, so when he’s rolling around his t-shirt covers it completely, you know?, and all you see if you’re sitting down is six feet of bony, hairy legs moving around seemingly on their bloody own and you’re lazily, vaguely wondering what’s missing until you realize you were fully expecting to see a swinging free-range penis doing its own thing there in the middle and swish swish swish and wheeee? But whatever, it’s hot and I’m fine with that, who cares - what I’m less fine with, to be honest, is that the entire time he’s here, the only reason he feels the need to sit at this precise desk for three hours every night is to check out mattresses on eBay? 

(Mattresses. On eBay.)

And he’ll do that, he’ll scroll down one page, then another, and then he’ll start on those fucking apricots - I’m seriously doing my best not to notice here because I’m polite like that, also I’m working and I’ve got two novels to finish and an urgent deadline and watching people is not really my thing, but fuck - you know those egg-eating snakes, how they open their jaws wide and just gobble up that white and shiny and juicy egg whole, shell and all, ‘cause they’re snakes, right, and that’s what they do and bless their little snouts? Well, this is how Apricot Man eats his apricots. Swear to God. Instead of halving them like any reasonable person would (if you don’t halve your apricots, don’t even try to defend or justify your poor life choices, idgaf), he pops them in his mouth, one after the other, and I’m pretty sure he swallows them whole, stones and all? It’s seriously disturbing how he does that, and how focused and relentless he is - like, I’m sitting here and adding yet another irregular verb to my list of doom and all I can hear is this gulping noise - glop, glop, glop - and after those three hours he’s been allotted out his magical cage are up, that’s it, all the apricots are gone, there’s no stones anywhere, maybe he’s bought a mattress, or two, or twenty, who even knows - he turns the computer off, tightens his skates, and off he rolls.

You see how that’s not normal? And yet so peculiarly uninteresting that yeah, maybe this guy is some kind of mage or a shifter or a gull stuck in a human body, but who cares? Who the fuck cares? This is not the kind of magic I signed up for. These are not the monsters I need in my life. 

(Jesus Christ - a fruit-swallowing mattress enthusiast? These are the cryptids we’re stuck with? Most cursed timeline indeed.)

So, anyway, the only difference today is that he rolled in carrying a melon and a tub of yoghurt that was easily the size of a paint bucket (and yeah, maybe it was paint, who even knows) and then proceeded to eat that entire thing with a teaspoon and I don’t even know where he bought it, okay, because I remember I once needed an insane amount of yoghurt for some Christmas recipe and as it turns out, shops just don’t sell buckets of the stuff because what we’ve built here is a normal and God-fearing and civilized society and also we’re fully human and fuck off.

But the melon - the melon is still there.

Fuck.

I was determined to pull an all-nighter if necessary, to sit here and force him to actually dislocate his jaw to swallow that thing whole so I can have irrefutable proof that people who’ve got no sense of personal space actually do belong to a different species, but sadly that’s not happening because - unlike him - I’m human and I have human things to do and I don’t care, in any case - I don’t want this, I demand better - dragons and selkies and morally ambiguous fae princes - I don’t care about this melon eating monstrosity - he can have his Very Special desk and I hope he’ll find a mattress long enough for his bug legs and soon he’ll be gone, anyway - there must be a migrating pattern for things like him, I’m sure of it, and maybe I can help him out - start a conversation and tell him South Africa is now growing avocadoes the size of a bloody coconut and watch his transparent eyes light up, poor guy.

(Imagine the stone inside those things.

The dream.)