Millennials and Other Things that Shouldn’t Exist

Recently, on the subway, I saw a man get on, carefully attach his own strap to the hold-bar and hold onto that for stability. He didn’t take one of the many empty seats because, everyone knows that germs can crawl right through pants and into one’s anus. After that, it’s anything goes, for Mr. Germ. The man, in my opinion, is right to be terrified of what the rest of us manage to ignore. But, what DID bug me was that the same man had two large arm tattoos. My guess is, when he decided to become a germophobe, he grandfathered in Hepatitis. In short, he was a non sequitur and should never have existed and maybe he didn’t. Seems like he was just taken out of the box and aimed at my train.

But, the world is chock-full of things that really shouldn’t be: I speak, of course, about alligator farms. When I was a kid, my father was in the Navy. Navy folks got four weeks vacation a year. Often, since we lived in Florida, my father would just take two weeks, load us in the station wagon and just stop where we felt like. Sometimes it would be at a “tourist trap”… although Florida doesn’t use tourist traps anymore. It simply kills tourists humanely with poison, gun violence or Miami…

Some of these tourist traps were “alligator farms”. Alligator farms were essentially zoos which held, at their center, a great big pile of alligators. To this day, I swear that they simply found the gators, built a fence around them and then put up a sign. Peripheral to the alligators were various refugee animals that had probably wandered in off of the highway. Oh, and a chicken that would dance when you put a quarter into its aquarium home. I tremble at what Skinner-esque terrors that chicken must have been trained with…

At some point during our visit, my brother, ignoring the “For God’s Sake DON’T Touch this Donkey” signs, tried to touch the donkey. The donkey, whose primary job seemed to be enforcing that sign, managed to bite and hold onto my brother’s upper arm; his screams were legendary. My dad applied his unique philosophy that any problem can be punched to death, given enough time. He rained shock and awe on the donkey. After three or four good punches, the donkey let go and my brother had yet another interesting story to tell…

But, to be honest, punching donkeys was not that unusual back in my day. It was a very different world… probably would seem like the old west to millennials. At the Jacksonville Zoo, we fed the animals… any animal that would eat what we gave it. People would bring marshmallows to feed the bear and the bear WOULD DO TRICKS to get more people to throw food. Yes, in my day zoo animals WORKED for a living… I used to save my peanuts to give to the giraffes. Imagine a seven year old holding up a peanut and a giraffe slowly bending over to take it with its gray tongue. I avoided the monkeys, because you never knew whether they were going to grab a peanut or try to pull you into its cage. I strongly suspect that some of the monkeys on display were simply children who’d been pulled in and slowly turned feral… but I can prove nothing…

It was crazy: Vietnam vets mixing with Thalidamide babies mixing with war protesters and NO premise was too far out for television. We had genies, witches, wealthy hillbillies and talking cars. Nearly one out of every three adult males had slept with at least ONE of the Manson girls. And, with the Cold War, we all knew that we could be dead at any time… in seconds. We were the bad-asses of the twentieth century…

And, germs were the LEAST of our worries…