So one Saturday in college we were walking through the Cornell Plantations, walking through this one huge field I think they used to rehabilitate horses and raise bees. It was all bare except for this one scraggly tree with a handmade rope swing hanging from it labeled “Piglet’s Swing”.

It had a bit of unworldly mojo to it. More so because it reminded us all of the tree from The Ring, which pretty much dates this anecdote. Even more so because we had a regular circuit - we’d walk from Risley to the Plantations, then we’d enter at this big lawn, take off our shoes, and walk across it up this hill to an ancient-looking tree. Then we’d follow a circuit of decorative gardens, cross a bouncing wooden suspension bridge across a babbling creek, and do a slight uphill woods segment. Then we’d come out into this field, spend 10 minutes or more crossing it, head on to the cliffside vista path, scramble down a scree slope and have wine and cheese and caviar by a stream, and then as the sun set we’d climb up, recross the field, and return across a golf course.

So this eerie field and this eerie tree would come two or three hours into the whole trip, which was right when the shrooms would be kicking in hard.

And you know the stereotype of people on psychedelics saying something really obvious as if it were really deep? I remember watching some deer bounding at the edge of the field, and birds flying through the air and delivering as a nugget of wisdom “it’s not the weekend for animals”.

But fuck you, it was deep. Like, I knew in theory that an animal’s life is just eating and trying not to be eaten. But the fact that that wasn’t just the dominant theme but the only and constant state of being from which there is no diversion, not only acknowledging but feeling and vicariously experiencing that as true.

And I spent time appreciating the things that flowed from that. Like, humans might for various contextual reasons have a fear of being caught having sex, but at least we can mate with our bonded partners on our own territory without maintaining a paranoid vigilance that something will take advantage of the distraction to eat us. You know, that’s nice. Next time you have sex appreciate that.

(Unless you’ve got a vore thing I guess.)

Also, in terms of thinking about how man first domesticated animals - yeah, I can totally see animals just taking the initiative to show up and stick around human settlements. As far as they were concerned, they were retiring.

I mean I guess later it turned into some mirror-image of midcentury lifetime employment - you spend years doing nothing taking a pension in feed and then at retirement instead of a gold watch you get killed and consumed.

In conclusion, the diametric of Fordism is cannibalistic slavery.