Playing with Dead Animals
Before I go on and share part of my life from behind that great glass house, I must say first of all, that I am not a morbid person, nor someone who harbors sociopathic tendencies.
Since I was a little kid, I have been facinated with things. Things include blocks, dirt, sandboxes, books, animals, and PBS. I was rather a strange child growing up.
When I was 3 or 4, my mother always brings up stories and pictures of me playing aorund at the beach. This, so far seems like a normal and happy childhood memory… Well, my childhood beach memory also included the collection of dead white beach crabs. I was facinated with the dead little critters as the washed up on the shore. When I had collected a bucket full of stinky dead crabs, I would take them to my sand castle I built and use the small dead stinky crabs as castle guards, peasents, king and queen, and general inhabitants.
Yes, one of the family’s favorite Jen-memories is of my nightmarish-Mr. Roger’s-land-of-imagination dead crab castle.
The dead animal obsession did not end with dead crabs, no…it progressed to me poking at dead washed-up jellyfish, peering at dead earthworms after a rainstorm, and even scrutinizing the dead mice my cat would bring home.
Perhaps this wonderment made me a strange child, but it was nothing compared to the pinnacle of my childhood weirdness after a particular PBS national geographic show.
This PBS show in question was none other than one about the Mayans. If you aren’t already familiar with the ancient mayans, let me bring you up-to-date. They weren’t always the happy south american natives who were pretty industrial. They had a darker side…they sacrificed humans for the harvest. The sacrificing wasn’t just some simple ceremony…it was grusomely detailed. It involved taking out the heart of the victim, draining out their blood, rolling them down the temple steps with the eventual cutting off of their head. The head would then be placed on a big stick. Yummy.
Knowing my childhood weirdness…it probably wouldn’t surprise you about what I did next…
After the PBS show, I made a bee-line to my barbie dolls. I took them out to the sandbox in the backyard and laid them in the sand. I then went to under the orange tree in the backyard and collected some sticks.
When I returned to the sandbox, I decapitated all the barbie dolls. 
After all the heads were piled into a neat little heap, I took the sticks and put the sticks in the sand with a head on top of each stick. To me, I was just recreating the mayan sacrifice. Again…I was a strange child…but it all make perfect sense to me. Hey…all I was doing, was what PBS showed me…
Well, I guess my mom didn’t share my viewpoint. When she saw my mayan recreation in the sandbox, she wore a strange look on her face and asked me what I was doing.
Of course I answered that I was using my barbies as the mayan sacrificial victims like I saw on PBS after Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street.
My mom wrinkled her brow, and I guess decided that I was just being “special”, but…the barbie heads had to come down. I was very disappointed, but I trusted mom when she said that the neighbors probably wouldn’t understand my recreation of a historical event…
Don’t worry, now as an adult, I am past my poking of dead animals and recreations of historical death scenes…
Then again, I am a neuroscience major, and I still do my fair share of dissecting…of dead animals…
Hmmm…:dubious:
So, for all you parents out there…don’t worry about all that violence on tv… Be careful about sandboxes, barbie dolls, dead fish, and most of all…PBS.
