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After wandering across five continents we were thirsty for booze. The Polar Bear Patio - a driving force in our meandering trek - turned out to be sadly barren, chairs upturned and courtyard chained off. "Oh, we don't serve alcohol until after May Two-Four," the young lady behind the counter at a nearby Harvey's explained. This represented a double-disappointment in the zoological adventures of Scutterk and Clemens, both because we are raging alcoholics and because we were at Harvey's.

We share a childhood memory of the zoo in which kids all around us feast on McDonald's while we glumly eat a homemade picnic on the grass, suffering healthiness and envy. That's the only recollection that persists twenty years later: the monkeys, the elephants, failed to impress significance upon us at that once-tender age. We can only remember that our families denied us the glory of the Happy Meal, ungrateful little bastards / bitches that we were. So, in part, returning to the bestial scene of the crime was to be a significant correction of past injustices, and we had planned to cram our faces with gross Big Macs. Revenge tastes like grade-D meatstuffs.

However, recollection and reality ultimately proved to be incompatible. Harvey's has ripped the lucrative whiny-kid-hates-animals market away from McDonald's in the lengthy interim, and to make matters worse May 2-4 was weeks away. Dreams denied across the board, time working against humankind.

Fiercely abandoning Harvey's, we crossed paths with a delightfully instructive posterboard on the behavioral science of geese. If their heads are up, they'd like you to keep your distance. If their heads are down, they're losing their patience! This made a lot of sense, as prior experience with geese has shown them to be fuckheads no matter where their heads are pointed. After pretending to be a goose and issuing each of these warnings in a vaguely Arnold Schwarzenegger-ish voice, we moved onwards. Two specimens of this apparently hyper-aggressive breed of asshole bird ominously flapped overhead.

Later, when we had grown tired of the antics of somersaulting spider-monkeys (they have prehensile tails which work as a fifth hand... AWESOME if they ever want to turn tricks in New York City), we headed for the exit. Beyond the unabashed shame of the Zoo Store, where you can buy Zoo Hats and Zoo Keychains and probably even Zoo Condoms, Green-Eyed Scutt spotted a bathroom. While she went to do girlie things, I noticed that a goose - presumably one of the ominous geese we had seen earlier, for narrative purposes - was stalking the grounds.

A young mother had wheeled her baby stroller up to the reprehensible bird and was angling for that perfect photo, a freeze-frame of happy little Susy plus wild denizen to be ooh-ed and aww-ed over on Facebook. Meanwhile the goose was in full 'I'm Losing My Patience' stance: neck rigid, eye evilly trained on the infant, hissing like Hellspawn. The child was understandably crying and yelling it up (our well-trained instincts, even from birth, are to avoid being pecked by asshole birds), but mom was well engrossed in the production of Memory. My own childhood McDonald's disappointment immediately paled in comparison to the trauma this kid would one day face, and I suspect the ensuing photo of squalling terror will only make things worse: "Look Suzie, this was from our first EVAR trip to the zoo!" / "Great mom, and now you know why I'm a prison guard with obsessive-compulsive disorder."

The icing on the cake was when Green-Eyed Scutt rejoined me and the goose immediately turned to terrorize us instead. Scutty let out a scream - the kind of spontaneous squeal I hear when slices of bread suddenly erupt skywards out of her toaster - and we inched past the furious avian, Keeping Our Distance. Who knows what would've happened if we hadn't learned how to interpret the complex, cryptic body language of geese? CARNAGE, that's what.

The zoo is no place for a young child with a healthy future.

Posted by Chris at 09:07 PM >> Commentations (2)