Too many ellipses, eh?? I’ll, I’ll… I’ll show you too many ellipses (give em a minute, they don’t start up right away)…

De-extinction is theoretically defined as “the process of creating an organism which is – or greatly resembles – a member of an extinct species” (Martinelli et al., 423).  We can’t do it quite yet, but probably will be able to sometime soon (Richmond et al., 23).  Those arguing for de-extinction say it could do the world good by increasing “ecosystem function and stability” and even restore lost ecosystems (Richmond et al., 23)… many question whether it’s responsible to take the plunge, weighing the project’s resource intensity against its relative benefit… the fee’s exact size is hard to foretell, but it’s more than likely that, with the funding required to revive the top five de-extinction candidates, more than eight times as many living species could be successfully conserved (Bennet et al., 2017)… nevertheless, others like Richmond and company wonder if we owe restoration to species we’ve destroyed (23), while philosophers like Schlomo Cohen and his ilk question if it’s even possible to be indebted to something that no longer exists (169)… can a de-extinct entity even be considered a member of the species it would be classified as genetically, as suggested by de-extinction’s working definition, or is it rather a “bio-object” calling for an entirely novel designation (Martinelli et al., 2014)?  That’s a dumb thing to argue about (this was in here before that old guy said it in the documentary today in class I swear… plus why was he acting like he was in such a hot seat? That goofy host wasn’t really asking any hard hitting questions, anyways…)… semantics… I guess clarity is important to understanding… hell, I can understand that… we all want to be understood, understandably… but, a rose by any other name… I probably don’t have to cite that since it’s such a common saying… but it’s from some Shakespeare work I think… whatever… the University of California-Santa Barbra argues that de-extinction is a worthwhile endeavor so long as we follow guidelines that make for ecologically significant resurrections, rather than just arbitrarily bringing back species based on popular demand or something (Braum, 2016)… like by means of a Facebook poll of which of Lindsay Dodgson’s “25 animals scientists want to bring back from extinction” would be most badass to fling peanuts at in a zoo, for example (Dodgson, 2017)…  mammoth would probably win… that’s who I’d vote for, anyway. 

Hell, why not? All gripes are baseless in my eyes, aside from that resource intensity thing (Bennet et al., 2017)… and there’s plenty of do-nothing organizations out there we could de-fund in order to pay the mammoth dowry… like NASA… de-fund NASA until it’s just one guy, in a room, sitting on a stool, watching through a telescope for asteroids headed towards the earth… matter of fact, how much do stools cost these days?  Take his stool, too… hell… fire the guy and unload the telescope… if there was an asteroid coming I honestly don’t think I would want to know about it… anyways, Richmond and his comrades raise a good point… these creatures would, if commodified, generate a lot of money… potentially more than enough to pay their own way, with the spare revenue being put towards furthering conservation efforts for endangered creatures still treading terra firma (Richmond et al., 23). Likewise Braum thinks the upshot could awaken considerable collateral conservation attention and public support through media coverage and general interest (Braum, 2016)… plus there’s other ways to generate revenue from these blasted creatures, who, after all, owe their wretched re-existence to man and our science, aside from selling tickets (Richmond et al., 23)… or whatever else those jokers had in mind… potentially as, say, beasts of burden… mammoths are big and stout and there’s a lot of wood in the taiga… yoke a team of mammoths and drag timber, dense and resinous, from the far flung reaches of the frozen north previously inaccessible to man and his confounded machinery… we could level the boreal forests with routine simplicity… and then do… something… with the yield… like make cabinets… or paper… or pitch… or burn it in a big pile… hell, I don’t know… maybe shear their matted thatches of wild & fibrous wool…. scour it into downy compliance… spin fine yarn (“marl” would’ve been nice here but there isn’t consensus as to whether that word’s second definition as mottled yarn is applicable in noun form, or just as the adjective “marled”… I won’t take the chance… I’d hate to make myself a fool… and, on second thought, I like yarn better anyway… sounds very Anglo-Saxon… as does, marl, I guess…) to be woven into designer garments, priced at a premium… finer than cashmere… finer than angora, yet… and a damn sight better than alpaca or mohair… hell, how much would them Trump sons put up to hunt one of those brutes down?  Hopefully more than it costs to produce one… hell, the mind boggles… conservationists wouldn’t know what to do with all the auxiliary wampum… Let’s see here… what else are these comedians bellyaching about… next at bat: “Bio-objectification”—are created beings legitimate (Martinelli et al., 2014)?  Get a grip, they’re animals, for Christ’s sake… they can’t brood over the validity of their own existence… to do due diligence on this issue I suppose I’d have to address that dolphin that “scientists want to bring back”, according to Lindsay Dodgson (Dodgson, 2017)… I guess that thing, and get your grain of salt ready because I don’t have any evidence to support this, would probably need to understand how it fits into a relatively complex and task-oriented social group… relative to like, prairie dogs or something, that is… so it would have to be capable of some sort of rudimentary self-reflection… like I said, no evidence, of course, all just conjecture on my part… but either way, that wouldn’t be the pensive, introspective type of existential self-reflection… nothing like what we humans have got, for better or for worse… that dolphin, on the other hand… just so as long as its swimming around with its buddies in the water and catching fish… that thing would be experiencing the absolute height of dolphin existence, never slowing down to wonder how or why it got where it’s at... plenty more water for it to swim around in coming soon enough if this joint keeps getting hotter… finally freed after far too long in glacial caging… the ice caps aren’t so great…  so anyways I guess that bio-objectification business is probably just a case of humans making up stuff to contemplate and be conflicted about, for whatever reason we do such things… probably… I can’t claim to know what goes on in the minds of dolphins…   Schlomo Cohen, the last person on earth I’d like to be stuck on an elevator with, considers the cogency of restitutive justice, a common argument for de-extinction, and wonders whether it’s got the legs to cover beings belonging to species that are no longer existent which, therefore, can’t have any interests (Cohen, 169)… I mean, like… I guess… if you want to think about it that way… I can’t like… dismantle that argument, really… it’s just a question of how to define restitutive justice… the question of whether restitutive justice as a rule is like, measurable or tangible or whatever is… not my concern… and anyways does something, or rather the idea of something in this case I guess, not regain some sort of hypothetical interest if it can potentially be revived? Eh, whatever… not my problem… what do I care about the interests of the mammoth? What am I, his agent? Well, actually, I guess that is more or less the point of this writing assignment… ah, hell… at any rate Cohen’s arguments will probably just rattle around in the philosophical/ethical echo chamber until the end of time… a chance grumble or two might escape through the left ear of some poor sap writing a paper but alas, will be destined only to launch out the right before its seat has a chance to get warm… I guess the one accumulation of people that get me more worked up than like, the modern “philosopher” is like… white guys who are really into eastern religion… double it if they’ve got a ponytail… 

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I’ve got one class before yours… it starts at 10:05 and it ends at like… 11:30 or something… 11:20… so I get lunch real quick and then I sit in the atrium of Gambrel for like, hours… I walk from Assembly St. every day so I’m like… hell naw, not walking all the way home then back again… anyways the benches there are a lot more comfortable than those chairs at the Russell house… or that’s what I tell myself anyways… so that’s where I sit (and you know all this now because I explained it before class today… to some extent…)… and it’s really nice, it’s quiet and everything… classes start and classes let out and I’ll read and watch people walk by because when there’s lots of people walking by I can’t focus on the text, and it’s always different, all the time… it has to be… but it’s different in too many ways to worry about so I just call it the same… but anyways it’s pretty nice… probably a lot like passing time in Grand Central Station I’d imagine… only different… anyway, about half a timeslot before your class starts… they’re staggered, I guess… this eastern religion class, or some godforsaken class of that nature, that meets on the floor above lets out… every time the professor tries to hurry to his office or somewhere and every time he gets intercepted by this old guy in an electric blue pullover who’s trying to grasp the way and has a thousand questions… anyways, the professor is always conflicted as to whether he wants to try and shake this guy, which I’ve seen him attempt once, to absolutely no avail, and scurry to his office or stick around and flex his knowledge of meditation and stuff to whoever might be listening… he usually sticks around and a sickening dialogue ensues… it’s really surreal to watch, how they say, as a fly on the wall… the lighting is weird and dim and sulfurous… like candlelight or something… and it feels a lot later than it actually is… hell, it stays early so late on the clock these days… stupid time-change… anyways, spatially, there’s lights between me and them, and lights behind them, but none above them… filament rather than fluorescent it’d seem… but probably fluorescent nonetheless… or some of both maybe… so, either way, their features are like, muted against and afore these incandescent bulbs and they look like a couple of tame little shadow puppets up there with only their heads and shoulders visible over the ledge… you can hear what they’re saying clear as a bell but can’t see their mouths moving well enough to match it up right… very theatrical… and very surreal… there’s no better word for it, so no sense trying… at this point it’s part of the ambiance of the atrium… I look forward to it because it’s familiar and predictable but sort of dread how corny and counterfeit it is bound to be… but at the same time, that’s part of the charm, I guess… I want to call bullshit on these clowns but I never do… obviously never will… I know when I’ve got a good thing going not to make any waves… the scene has meaning, or I’ve given it meaning, more or less… the way it plays out the same only different all the time and it doesn’t really agitate me or anything I guess… I just like to pretend I’ve got the energy to get riled about things… and hell, I can’t fault the old guy for trying… he’s doing just that… to fulfillment, I hope… hell, I guess those guys aren’t so bad after all… matter of fact, I wish that old guy nothing but the enlightenment he’s looking for (as it turned out the class lets out every bit of a full timeslot before yours starts… the guys started up at around 1:00 or so and gabbed on strong for a good hour… and the old guy’s striking blue article was a hat, not a pullover… maybe he’s got a blue pullover too… hell, I can’t remember… anyways the old guy today was lamenting how he just can’t seem to get it… it’s not clicking for him…  he got flustered and was tripping on his words and had to sit down and I could only see the top of his head now and he got out what he’d been trying to say all along which was that he could feel his mortality closing in and was terrified he wouldn’t get enlightenment before such a time… he was shook as hell and he sort of dropped out of frame and I couldn’t see him put his head in his hands but I know that’s what he must have done… hell… the human condition is a hell of a thing to watch sometimes… some human condition, eh?  And they’s some folks out there got it badder’n hell… I really hope that fella finds what he’s looking for…)… speaking of old guys I watched a TED talk on de-extinction, given by some senior citizen who has some affiliation with the effort… he stumbles onto the stage and wows the crowd with how passionate he is about this stuff well into his golden years… he indicates how close we are to grasping de-extinction by revealing just how easy it would be for his buddy Mike McGrew to put the nads of a falcon onto a common everyday domestic chicken (Brand, 11:22).  I really hope he never does it… As he nears the end of his presentation he gets all somber and his timbre gets measured… with misty eyes and a quivering bottom lip he assures us that it’s… gonna be ok… we will soon have the potential to bring these creatures “back to a world… that misses them” (Brand, 16:45)… I don’t know if you’d call that pathetic appeal but it was definitely pathetic… I don’t know, I should give the guy the benefit of the doubt… maybe he was like, not referring to the world, conglomerate, inanimate, but rather to like, certain systems that we’ve robbed of their keystones… I’m sure that’s what he meant, actually… still came across pretty pathetic, though. Hell, I suppose these people all make good points but… actually… to hell with them all… matter of fact, de-extinction sounds like it has a lot of moving parts and a lot of “hidden fees”, to employ a mobile cellular service provider term… probably used for a lot of other stuff by a lot of other people too… but that’s where I’ve heard it used… there’s this old story about a kid from some landlocked hellhole like Indiana or Iowa or something… anyways he flees that place, looking for something, some kind of meaning that it couldn’t give him, I’d imagine, and ends up in Miami somehow and finds work as a ship hand for this old charter boat captain… the first time he goes out on the ocean, out past the breakers from where you couldn’t see land no more, he looks around and sees nothing but water… he follows it with his eyes as far as they’ll see, all the way out to the horizon and when he turns around, hell if it isn’t right there behind him, too… he looks over and says to the old captain “hell Cap., that’s sure as hell a lot of water…”.  “Sure,” the captain, he says… “Sure it is.  But that’s only just the top of it”… anyways, that’s them hidden fees for ya… so why not implement the comparatively straightforward endeavor of protecting what we’ve got?  Our earth seems to have plenty going for it right now… unique enough in our solar system, what with its life and solitary moon… hell, our very own moon, reliable and resolute in its cyclic phases as it is lethargic and inert, has, for whatever reason, been the source of intrigue and inspiration for eons… and, not surprisingly, seeing as its so far away, you can’t always appreciate the moon altogether properly when you’re looking at, which even adds to the mystique I guess, and it was one such a time that I remember looking at it and I couldn’t see it very properly but I was looking at it anyway and not being inspired to think much of anything at all, much less anything meaningful or profound, and a wise man, very wise as a matter of fact, was looking at it at the same time in more or less the same place but in a very different way I guess because he says

What the hell’s that supposed to mean? He sure as hell said it like it meant something and it sure as hell ought to mean something, I feel… that was about a decade ago and I puzzle about it still from time to time, like right now, for instance… for whatever reason I do such things… and the only thing I can figure is that it doesn’t mean anything and that’s the point, like how they say about all that glitters… but it sure ought to mean something… I’ve always wanted to put it in a paper and I never have but this is as good a time as any and a whole hell of a lot better than most I guess, and I’ve got a feeling you’re a whole hell of a lot smarter than me and probably better at interpreting these sort of things so if you’ve got any insight as to any meaning that might be there I’d be glad to hear it… let me know and explain me through it because I really want that statement about the moon holding water to mean something, weather it ever had been intended by the soothsayer in the first place or not… I’d really like it to mean something… I’ve spent enough time wondering about it over the years, anyways… but how the hell could he make that claim?  If the moon wasn’t full of holes and could in fact hold water there’s every chance in the world it’d be terrible fishing… there’s no air… but he said it sure enough and he was then and still is a wise man, one of the wisest in my opinion… and anyways, de-extinction is the same… plenty wise men say it’ll be this way or that way or hold water or be good, and it’s sure as hell full of holes, but maybe it’ll hold water regardless like how a sponge does… maybe if it held water it’d be good… but what if it doesn’t and isn’t?  Who’s to lug the albatross, if not all of us?  And what difference does it make?  Who’s really to say how it’ll turn out at all?  It seems to me the earth is in a relatively stable state… the sun rises every day and I’ve got enough oxygen to breathe… so why focus on some suppositious absurdity which attaining *might* fix some things but more than likely it’ll just be more or less all the same after as it was before, just a little odder and a lot more complicated?  What if while we’re looking for some sort of meaning and fulfilment and self-realization through de-extinction that we get all caught up in the intoxicating possibilities and forget about what’s still around, like what happened to the baby in that movie Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996)?  Why not focus on protecting extant environments and their keystones (a “keystone” being a single species that has an array of “impacts on many others, often far beyond what might have been expected from a consideration of their biomass or abundance” [Simberloff, 254]), if present?  Hell, it seems like pulling teeth to get a species protected these days… especially if conventional science refuses to recognize its existence… the forests adjacent to our pacific coast, especially in the northwest, are vast… dark and impenetrable… when the hell will they get it?  When will the scientific community admit that “it’s not really that outlandish to think that a large, bipedal primate exists somewhere on earth that humans haven’t discovered because it’s intelligent enough to avoid being found” (Fox, 0:11)?  When apparent Sasquatch characteristics and recorded sightings are entered into the latest population distribution mapping software, members of its species are shown to inhabit the pacific coast from Alaska down through the Baja Peninsula (Lozier, et al., 1625)… hell, that population mapping thing is supposed to be facetious but I bet they never counted on someone being dumb enough to take it seriously… hell, I’m so dumb that I’ve even addressed the fact that its “tongue-in-cheek” and still take it seriously (Lozier, et al., 1626)… no really, I’m that dumb… any which way, a forest that size is bound to provide a range of ecosystem services, from resource provision and air & water filtration, to things as simple as much-needed recreation to weary businessmen (Smith, et al., 12)… and although predicting keystone status is by no means forthright, Sasquatch fits the bill as a large, low total biomass (guess that’s why we never see em, huh?), high trophic contact, top-dog style creature (Libralato et al., 168)… how dumb would we feel if we let Sasquatch go extinct before it ever achieved legitimate status as a scientifically recognized species? Really dumb is the answer… especially if its demise causes the entire North American pacific coast bioregion to go to all hell in a handbag… so I feel that we shouldn’t pursue de-extinction after all… but… then again… maybe de-extinction is just what we need… exciting, revitalizing scientific progress… improbable promises moving us forwards, towards something… as opposed to maintaining our current surroundings… something to keep pursuing, responsibly, of course, since the journey is the destination after all, or whatever… and the zoo is getting boring, anyways… when will they get something new that I’ve never seen before… not torn from some distant land, but rather from a distant time…  

Wow, well past 2,500 words already… it goes so by so fast… I hope I’ve like, provided an effective case for de-extinction… I mean, against de-extinction… or something… I can’t remember… but anyways it was pretty fun to write it out… I think I used to really like to write, but that was way back when I used to like most things, so it’s hard to say… but I think I used to, anyway… hell, I don’t remember… “Consistently hostile” wasn’t what I was going for with the previous submissions, so I hope it didn’t come across disrespectful towards you or anything because I respect you, it’s just that I more or less wish I didn’t care about completing classwork but I sort of do care, more or less, and I’m pretty burnt out on writing essays and stuff at this point in my schooling career, so whenever I’m cornered and made to write, stuff like this is all I’ve got left to give… anyways glad that stuff came through “endearing” even so (thanks to all those ellipses, I’d wager… that’s how come I doubled down here with this one…)… I’ll put that on my résumé as like, one of my good qualities or something… I’m supposed put that kind of stuff on a résumé I think… hell, the attention capturing aspect is easy… of a résumé, that is… I’ll use that “word art” feature… that’s what I’ll do… guarantee nobody else does it… well… maybe I won’t, after all, since I just looked at the current version of “word art” and it sucks… it used to be way cooler back in the day… it used to rule… now it’s boring… damn… but that’s the way it goes, I reckon… there’s a line in the well-hated Hemingway novel Across the River and into the Trees  about how this wine Valpolicella is no “gran vin and bottling it and putting years on it only adds sediment” (Hemingway, 123)… if it was me saying that I’d have peppered in some commas and ellipses, but...  Wish I’d known then that’d be the way years would treat “word art” (well résumé day’s over and done so that stuff’s stale now… hell…)… but then again there’s another saying about how nostalgia can turn bile into ambrosia or something… anyways that’ll put me way past that 2.5K word count reserve… but… all that moon talk a couple pages back reminded me of how the old timers used to say about how when the moons out and the clouds gone it often feel like the blanket been stolen… or something along those lines… and it’s a nice little bucolic saying with great local appeal and it sounds real nice in Blythewood or Pontiac or Elgin or any of those places… but it played well enough in my head this one night I was in Philadelphia… biggest city I ever been in, that I can remember… early November, 2015… me and this character I had gone up there to see were walking through the unfamiliar (to me) metropolitan sprawl to get to this house party she’d promised would be fun and it was sure as hell a November night in the northeast and it was clear and the moon was out and it sure as hell felt like the blanket been stolen… we walked past open bar fronts and people congregated and laughed in the soft & warm light inside and it was like something off television… it was a strange place for me to be but it was more or less nice and I almost started to wish that we wouldn’t get where we were going since I’ve never much been one for parties but eventually we got there and it was a townhouse like all the rest… the only thing different was the numbers on the door… anyways we went in and it was a house party alright… normal stuff… everybody chattered and the bassline off Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend” gave the soundscape a backbone… after a few minutes I realized the track must be playing on repeat… the owner of the townhouse (not handicapped) presided over the party from a wheelchair with empty bottles taped to the spokes and some horrifying & crass Philadelphian perched on his lap… normal stuff, I guess… this was all well and good but, a couple feet to one side, the woman I’d attended with was getting woozier by the minute on account of she was sick with what I’d come to know in a couple days’ time as some mutant Philadelphia strain of strep throat, and she’d tried to quell it with a dozen or so cough drops… them big scary red mentholated bastards what come in the rectangular tin… you know the ones… and it’d only make sense that she’d have turned all that menthol & corn syrup into souse with clear liquor… when she became too out of sorts to hang we sought council with the wheelchair man and asked if he had any more low-slung low-key type accommodations… he assured us he did and, rising from his mount, led us to a door heavy on its hinges and dripping with locks… obvious recent additions… the door opened and a set of stairs went down to a cement and cinder block basement and there was a little open spot with a few lawn chairs and a path leading to an open back wall with a washer and dryer but aside from that it was all water… bottled water… stacked up taller than me… what the hell… now that I think about it and do some hasty math it was probably like… tens of thousands of bottles of water… what the hell… I froze in my tracks and look back at the guy and he doesn’t look at me but at his water… “You want to know about all the water, I guess...”… I wanted very much to know about the water… the guy’s eyes get all hazy and distant and he starts to recount his tale… it was a month or so ago and he was up in his townhouse with all the blinds drawn watching the news in a state of mind great for coming up with big ideas… storm of the millennium is coming, no doubt… if you were here in Columbia you’ll recall the flooding… so the guy hatches a plan to drain his savings on bulk-buy bottled water… the grid would buckle under the weight of this storm and he would become some sort of neighborhood water-lord on top of a Dasani throne handing out potable bottles in exchange for money and heirlooms and gold and whatever else… his eyes weren’t too distant or hazy anymore & would’ve scared a hungry lion off a zebra carcass… but he claimed not to be bitter about the storm not dismantling all of mankind’s progress because he knew the water plan was a gamble… he left us there in his aqua fortress and I yelled to my friend’s roommate to bring down a few glasses of ice and we tore through the saranwrap to get to some of them battery bottles and cracked em open… we talked a while and then the roommate, a thespian, put on a bizarre show with some impressive space-work utilizing the weird channels in the stacks of bottled water… the lights poured down through them and it was something like being deep down in a glacial crevasse, I’d imagine… I laughed at the show… it was nice and I started to wish we wouldn’t have to leave but my friend was obviously not feeling good enough to enjoy it so I offered to walk her back home and we would call it a night… we climbed the stairs and I could hear that Markie had gained a mysterious momentum… nearly every attendee had crammed into the den and the music video was playing on the big television now and everybody’s voice rose to the chorus and we stood in a doorway and watched everybody sway rhythmically and sing and we enjoyed the central heating for a few more seconds until we took off back home… we passed the now closed bar-fronts with them nice lights still on and folks still mingling on the other side of the glass… cut across strange streets and through stranger alleys… I didn’t mind getting where we were going this time… pot of coffee and some television and we tried to shake off the Philly chill & menthol rust and it was nice, anyway… it was really nice and not at all like the blanket been stolen… not pertinent to anything in this paper really but nice anyway… I always thought that would make a decent story about all the bottles of water, which is what this story was supposed to be about, but I’ve never got a chance to say it or write it or anything but I’ve always wanted to, and now I have, so that’s one less thing to think about… it’s not as good as I thought it’d be now that I wrote it all out and it doesn’t have a moral or anything… I was watching that television show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia yesterday and the twins were singing the Biz Markie track and I thought about that party and the song and remembered how I’d thought it would make a nice story… wasn’t the moon talk earlier in the paper that made me think of it at all… just felt a need to sort of tie it in I guess… anyways…
