That’s right. Your favorite semi-weekly blog segment is back. IT’S WEIRD THURSDAY!

You’ll notice that last week there was no Weird Thursday. That’s because last Thursday was already weird enough.

YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID, LAST THURSDAY.

But this Thursday needs a little bit of weirdness to it. Let’s see if Wikipedia can help out with that. And here…we…go!

Ah! A loach! I could write about any number of things for this one.

I mean, the first thing that popped into my head is my own loach, Damian. Damian is a kuhli loach. He is also the spawn of Satan (hence the name). Here’s a picture, not of Damian, because if I were to try to take a picture of him he would put a curse on my soul and cast me into the fiery pits of hell, but of another kuhli loach, name: unkown. Let’s call it Tim.

Aren’t they just the baddest looking mother fuckers around? So cool. Damian’s super reclusive, so the only time we ever get to see him is when I clean out the tank. They also perfer to live in groups of three or more. It makes me sad that we only have one, but a 5 gallon tank can only hold so many fish, you know. Maybe one day when I have my 50 gallon tank with 25 white clouds I can have a bunch of kuhlis, too. Then they’ll all gang up on me and open up a portal to hell and bring upon the second coming of their dark lord and savior.

But the thing that I’d like to write about is conservation. Wikipedia has a nifty feature where when you look up an animal, it tells you its conservation status, from ‘least concern’ to ‘extinct’. The mongoose and kuhli loach are both ‘least concern’ species, meaning that barring some massive ecological catastrophe, they’ll be fine for some time. But I would still like to talk about conservation and humanity’s effect on the environment.

For the last two months, the swath of land next to my apartment building has been torn to shit. Tree trimmers, bulldozers, and giant earth movers have all had their way with the land, leaving nothing but tiny patches of trees and a moonscape. It’s also happening across the highway. As long as I can remember, a family owned this patch of land and grazed cattle on it. They sold it to a local grocery store chain and now…ugh. You can see where I’m going with this.

It’s disgusting, really, to see your home and the nature around it be ripped up and replaced by fast food chains, gyms, and apartment complexes. One of the reasons I live where I do is because yes, it’s close to the city, but it’s still in a part of town that hasn’t been developed to shit. I’d hoped it would stay that way, but I guess I was too naive. (Yes, I do realize that I, myself, am part of the problem. I’m not denying that.)

Whenever I see this blatant disrespect for nature, I can’t help but think about the animals that call that area home. The deer don’t seem to mind the construction, but when the bulldozers were taking down the trees in the first week, we saw countless hawks fly over our building, more than we’d ever seen in the two years we’ve lived there. I can’t help but think that their homes were destroyed and they were moving away somewhere else.

What about the other animals? The lizards? The snakes? The armadillos that used to come into our backyard and tear up our lawn? Sure they were a minor annoyance, but they lived there, too. They were fun to watch, and… I dunno. It just makes me sad. And those trees. Those poor, poor trees. Can you imagine how long they’d been there? What they’d lived through and how much they’d seen?

I really wish that humanity could just fucking stop. Just for a second. Before you sign the papers to tear down a forest, just think to yourself: do we really need another Wendy’s? Walgreens? CVS? Do we? Do we really need another L.A. Fitness when there’s a fucking gym right outside?

My answer to these questions would be a staunch “No”, but I don’t think that a majority of people agree with me. Animals die because of our actions. Things that our ancestors saw and experienced will now never be seen again because of the greed and constant unnecessary expansion of our society.

Can you tell this really bothers me?

Can you?

Because it does.

We should be more conscious of our footprint. We should think more about our actions. Because we’re not a separate species living on Earth. We’re part of it. We’re seven billion parts of an even larger whole. Let’s try to keep that whole as much in tact as we can, yeah?