January 26, 2016

"Quite a lot of being a badger consisted simply in allowing the wood to do to us what it did to a badger..."

"... being there when it rained; keeping badgers’ hours; letting bluebells brush your face instead of your boots."
... I learned to like that burrow... the shape of the window on the sunlit world that was the tunnel’s end; the exuberant spectrum of smells as I crawled up through a cervix of earth and leaf mould and out, panting from the effort. It was OK to lie in the dark, surrounded by the scratching and humming and thrashing of animals that would one day eat me.

24 comments:

jr565 said...

The honey badger. He don't give a shit.

rehajm said...

Too fruity.

YoungHegelian said...

Oh, for the halycon days when writers at the Guardian simply wanted to eat the rich & sing the praises of regimes that murdered millions of their own citizens. But, now, now....

Now, we get the ramblings of some guy who doesn't understand that he just doesn't have the biological equipment of a badger, and that, well, it's a problem. Just because he wants to eat worms & burrow doesn't make him a badger anymore than running very fast down the A1 makes him a car.

This guy really needs a good shrink.

George M. Spencer said...

Kafka got there first with his short story "The Burrow."

tim maguire said...

What does the fox say?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jofNR_WkoCE

Hagar said...

What is needed here is a really large dachshund.

ddh said...

We live in a time when parody is impossible.

TosaGuy said...
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TosaGuy said...
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TosaGuy said...

Better badger stuff created by people on drugs: https://youtu.be/EIyixC9NsLI

Peter said...

"Now, we get the ramblings of some guy who doesn't understand that he just doesn't have the biological equipment of a badger"

Isn't transspecies the next step after transgender? So perhaps you don't have the right equipment, is that supposed to matter?

buwaya said...

If he wants to be a badger, doesn't he have a right to be a badger? And have the public pay for the drugs and surgery to achieve his proper identity?
What makes transgender manias more privileged than trans-species manias? I bet that for every transgender person there is at least one furry.
I ran into some dozens of furries on the Embarcadero Sunday. I don't think I've ever seen such a crowd of TG people, and this is San Francisco.

madAsHell said...

I don't understand the furry fascination.

JCC said...

"...when parody is impossible."

I did indeed think this was Monty Python or something. The photo of a man in a hat lurking, waiting to strike, behind a fallen tree, reinforced this impression.

But no, this fellow seems to be serious. Quite amazing. And then he wrote a book about it. Can a college course be far behind? Then a degree path, teaching positions, an endowed chair...

Coming soon: a reality show.

And a sex tape.

Michael K said...

When I made my first trip to England in 1977, the most popular BBC TV program in the evening after about 9 PM was called "Badger Watch" and was ll there was on TV. It is apparently still on. I can't imagine anything more dull.

Michael said...

I could understand if it were a Wisconsin thing.

virgil xenophon said...

ddh and JCC are across the finish line in a dead heat to win the thread..

BarrySanders20 said...
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Fernandinande said...

And Tom, who is profoundly dyslexic and therefore gifted with a dazzlingly holistic, intimately relational view of the world, is, I’d guess, far closer to being a badger than I am.

Tom eats dead rats and releases an unpleasant musk.

JCC said...

@ Fernandiande -

Did I spell that right?

Dyslexia = intimate relational view of the world? Perhaps this means he is following the injunction of Matthew, "let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth", as a coping mechanism, certainly needed in one who eats dead rats I would think, although I also would propose the correct term would then be bipolar perhaps, not dyslexic.

Marc in Eugene said...

Why isn't that fellow being investigated for the abuse of his son? I used to be a foster care provider here and can guarantee to you that if someone in Lane County took his profoundly dyslexic son out to burrow through badger dirt &c &c the DHS would be on the case fifteen minutes after learning about it.

Nothing at the Guardian much surprises me any longer.

jr565 said...

it is not less crazy thinking you are the wrong gender than thinking you are the wrong species.

Anthony said...

I just seriously don't get it.

mikee said...

I have met a badger or two, and feel the author never really understood, nor tried to emulate, the intrinsic nature of these violent, rapacious, indestructible predators.