Pet Scientists

The convention hall was swarming with pet scientists. The latest discoveries and epiphanies of pet science rumbled through the crowded hall, and I absorbed it (I stood frozen)--a sort of background radiation all the pet scientists of the world produce. A mumble mumble like a slow stock market. I looked at my shoes and noticed one was untied. I worried about the future of pet science. The venerable past of pet science. Not my untied shoe. Why do I always do that? I was clearly intimidated by all these pet scientists gathered here in this daunting, semi-professional manner. Just think of all the bullfights occurring quietly between the various cubicles. The literature of pet science. The prophets of it. The libraries filled with it. Pet science is not Friend-a-Vision. My mother called me today and berated me. She reminded me that I too could have chosen Pet Science when I was in college. But I had opted for the much easier Friend-a-Vision, which was then still considered an academic field of repute. I had no idea it would go down in flames just like Freudianism. She had ended the conversation like a lawyer. I looked at my college textbooks on Friend-a-Vision gathering dust in one corner. They were being used to support a goldfish bowl. The goldfish was neurotic because vibrations from street traffic reached his bowl. He only achieved goldfish satori between the hours of two and four a.m., when the traffic on the street in front of my dwelling largely ceased. I went home after the Pet Science convention. I had only spoken to one Pet Scientist and that was to ask where the bathroom was. He had analyzed my single communication with the typically comprehensive and condescending methodology of your typical Pet Scientist, with the usual amount of somewhat nasal self-regard. After that, I had decided not to avail myself of the bathroom. It had been semantically tainted in my eyes. So I went home. And in the middle of the night a commercial kept repeating. It was advising the unemployed and the unpedigreed to pursue a degree in Pet Science at a nearby pseudo-college. The commercial consisted mostly of testimonials by former deadbeats (each surrounded by a plethora of healthy, slightly pudgy children) who are alleged graduates of the Pet Science program at the ersatz college. The children of the newly graduated Pet Scientist tumbled out of boxy backyard playground structures made from real cedar wood like juju beans of hope onto the healthy grass of a large yard. There was tiny white print at the bottom of the screen that was probably a disclaimer discussing suicide risk and telling you that your degree in Pet Science would not guarantee that you would not end up refreshing a salad bar somewhere after graduation, but I'm not sure. I couldn't read it. My vision, like many other things, was going. I slid out one of my Friend-a-Vision textbooks from the stack supporting the bowl of the paranoid goldfish and it felt like removing a vertebra from somebody's spine. Then I lay back on my bed and opened it, and began doodling inside. I drew funny features on the faces of some of the Pet Scientists inside. They had actually been apostles of Friend-a-Vision at the time of their appearance in the dated textbook that lay open on my knobby, unpedigreed knees. But they had seen the light. Those graduates. The light of Pet Science. I looked at the goldfish bowl. The goldfish looked shorter, more unpedigreed. The night looked longer. Sleep looked more scientific. At least Pet Science hadn't seized that terrain yet. Or so I thought. I was soon to learn how horribly wrong I was.