Heading to Sea World this afternoon. Hoping to surprise Maria with a Dolphin Tour. She gave me a Walt Disney/Mickey Mouse pin that I love.  Maria will love the Dolphins. Orlando, as always, is a provocative and mystical place for me, incorporating many of the threads and ideas and experiences of my life. Orlando is the quintessential and mystical place of the American imagination, for better or worse. Orlando is an invented place, a corporate place, a place of imagination, wealth, poverty and loss, immigration and change, illusion and reality, an environmental catastrophe. A fun place.

– People often ask me if I miss the animals when I travel. Curiously, the answer is yes and no. I do not miss getting up early and walking and feeding the animals in sub-zero weather. I enjoy time off from them, and I consider it healthy. I’ve never had an animal suffer separation anxiety and neither do I, although I suffer from other things. Maria and I both miss having animals around us. We go visit the fish, the baby alligators, look at the birds. Animals, I see, ground me. Caring for them focuses my humanity, instincts of empathy, nurturing. I miss the experience of having animals around, so I see that I am seeking them out.  Maria feels the same way.

– Communism. Karl Marx wrote that capitalism was a system that created artificial need for profit. More than 90 per cent of the things Americans buy, eat or use are not really necessary, he said. As a result, there is enormous waste, environmental destruction and economic equity. He saw communism – to each according to need- as a more humane system, yet that surely did not seem to work out. Still, when you walk the convention floor, you see a lot of things for sale and on display that animals have never needed in their long history in the world. Pills for all sorts of emotional disorders, sophisticated scanning and diagnostic devices that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, complex health insurance systems, new chain veterinary medical centers,  hundreds of new and expensive tests and procedures. All in the name of progress and being humane, all involving profit. Marx would have had quite a time here.

– Animal mysticism. A vet asked me if I didn’t think my animals grieved for Rose and Orson when they died. I said I did not know. I do not believe animals have the vocabulary or narrative structure to imagine or conceive of grief the way we do. I remembered the Henry Beston quote I love and that many people often send me:

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

I do not know what animals think. I will never know. On to Sea World.