Today on my way to work, Cycling to the metro station, I saw a bird on the side of the busy road. Its leg and possibly wing was hurt. It could hope around but it couldn't get up the curb.
I continued to cycle on. Didn't want to be late for work, after all.
This brief moment has really put a downer on the rest of my day. I feel as if it was a symbolic statement, announcing that I had finally become a callous, cold-hearted city dweller.
In previous years, when I saw a helpless animal, I would stop and do something. I might not always take a few hours off work, take it to a vet and see it through, sure. But I would certainly have at least stopped and lifted it off the side of the road and put into a bush or something.
This itself would have still consumed my thoughts: Would a cat eat it? Would it hop back to the road? Would a person kill it for fun? How is it going to survive anyway if it can't fly?
This time, however, I didn't even have the decency to do that. I just left it on the road and almost squeezed my eyes closed as I cycled on, convincing myself that it was going to die regardless, like that was some justification of inaction.
(At this moment, BTC just passed 30,000USD - nice)
What did life do to me to turn me into such a callous creature, I wonder?
City life has a way of completely segregating us from nature. We forget how to appreciate it, and we never learn of our inevitable dependence on it. A howling cat is about all we hear, a rat is all we see.
Pests, nuisances, things that need tot be eradicated.
I never got used to the people I've met over the years who have grown up in the city since birth. Their hatred of nature is unfathomable to me. A single bug, fly, or spider in the house is enough to scream to death and cry for emergency help.
I remember when I was single, trying out Tinder, the topic of not liking insects came up. The girl, having grown up in the city, demanded that I never even mention any such word in conversation ever again. Ant, Cockroach, Spider. If I dared even utter these words, she would block me.
I tried to defend my position by explaining that I grew up surrounded by them - I was immediately blocked.
Ok that's a pretty disturbing rendition by AI, but let's just go with it
By comparison, my sister would send me images of spiders in the corner of her room. She will have given it a name, and tracked his (her) progress and successes of catching flies. She saves bees by giving them a spoon of sugar water and rest them back to health.
The contrast is stark.
Anyway, as I cycled past this now presumably deceased bird, I noticed a school girl, no older than 8, walking past it, too. She gave it a brief glance, and went on her way to school. Barely a moment to consider it was even a living creature. To her, this moment was nothing. Just a dirty, diseased bird.
This has perhaps affected me even more than my own regretful behaviour. Are city kids all like this? In another culture, this would be considered psychopathic in nature.
We really have lost touch with the very nature that gave us our existence and continues to provide us with the food we eat and then escape from the city we truly need once in a while.
To me, this is a stern reminder that I need to get out of the city.
In the UK, cities are tiny, with London being about 10 million people (Jesus, it was 8 million last time I checked), it's many many times larger than the next biggest of 2.5 million (Birmingham).
Most cities are under a million people over there. What this means is, you can easily live in the countryside, while also being practically a bike ride away from the city centre.
Meanwhile, I live in the city centre, and I can travel for hours on trains in any direction, and I won't see a single patch of countryside. Continuing out of shanghai, the city sprawl continues, separated perhaps by 'fields' no larger than a typical house garden, scattered with trash, abandoned, glass-less windowed homes, and more concrete.
You generally have to travel so far across China that the trainlines mostly cease entirely and you have to get out and drive, before you get to see any genuine countryside. It'll take you the better part of a day in any direction (unless you go East into the lifeless, toxic dumping ground that is the sea).
I feel like this way of life is erasing my humanity. That child within me with a broad fascination for everything green is still in there, certainly. But it's more of a distant yearning than it is an actual part of me anymore.
This is perhaps why I was so easily able to ride on by a bird at risk of being squashed by a car. A life sacrificed just so I could get to work on time.
But there is a little more to it. I have, in previous years, attempted on numerous occasions to rescue cats I have found on the streets. Most of them ultimately ended in tragedy, and I can't help but blame myself in each case. People are quick to say it's not my fault, but it really was.
I was actively incompetent. For example, I had one cat I brought home, but since I had two of my own who were NOT happy about such visitors, and the fact it wouldn't stop meowing, I put the cat on my balcony. I thought it was a pretty good idea. It was summer, the weather was nice and dry, I covered the cage in blankets and water, it was safe.
It continued meowing for hours. By the next day when I was going to take it to the vets, it was no longer meowing, and by the time I was halfway to the vet in the taxi, it was dead.
It was only after the fact that I thought 'Oh, what if there are 24 hour emergency services?' - there were. I simply didn't think about it. I didn't analyse the cat's situation, I simply thought if it's meowing, it must have a lot of life in it. Not sure why I thought that.
Another example, quite simply, was a kitten completely malnourished. I took it home, took to the vets etc. They told me to feed it frequently etc, the usual. I also had to teach it to poop as its mother would do by licking its butt. I'd mimick it some other way, obviously...
But I didn't... because it was gross? Or maybe I though it didn't seem to do anything since it had no food inside it. Maybe both. I don't remember.
I do remember feeding it through a syringe, and thinking spatially, it's not possible to fit this much inside such a small kitty and I was going to burst its belly if it can't poop. So I fed it, but apparently not nearly enough. Back to the vet's it had lost even more weight and was too late to do anything about it.
Tears down my face, I signed the death warrant and watched the doctor inject its life away.
Only after this death did I think... What if I take him home and just do a better job at feeding it? How about I google it or ask for help? A second opinion?
Each of these failures (there were more) taught me something, not only about how to properly save a kitty, but how to avoid attempting rescue in the first place by sticking my head in sand and pretending I didn't see anything at all.
I couldn't bear being hurt anymore by my own ineptitude, so I simply detached myself from the idea completely.
And here we are today, following my own advice to a tee, cycling by suffering life, complaining about it online as a form of catharsis to allow myself to continue on with my day no longer burdened by the fact I have joined the rest of humanity as a soulless digital entity, standing by while the world around me crumbles into dust and plastic.
The news cycle continues to tell us of a mass shooting here, a war over there. I barely even stop my scrolling motion to read the headlines fully anymore.
Depressing art shamefully created by AI