I’m afraid the rabbits were my idea

A lifetime of snap decisions and rage has come back to haunt me, I am afraid.

When you read this, please remember. It was the 1970s. We did things differently back then. People actually thought Jimmy Page worshipped the devil and was handed inspiration simply by saying a backwards anti-prayer. People thought Kiss were a real band. If you told someone that you had a magic crystal in your pants that kept Catholics from seeing into your aura, they’d believe you and want to know where they could get one. People believed that UFOs, magicians and clairvoyants were the real McCoy–as in, dude, that’s totally the truth and my cousin Rufus, he was doing a magic trick, and the aliens took him into their spaceship and made him tell them that, in the future, we’re all going to live in mansions on the moon. Truckers were king, as evidenced by that song I can’t remember. Television jiggled. It was all just a badly dressed, nylon catsuit sort of hazy nightmare.

One of my jobs back then was to help deliver riot control vehicles to less-than-savory regimes. Father entrusted me to go with this fellow that he put in charge of the program, named Peej, I believe, and I used to really despise those trips. Father’s other ship at the time, the cargo transport vessel The Captain Auslunderaachenpepperkorn, was boring and slow. It sunk in 1981–deliberately. I sold it to help make a coral reef where there didn’t need to be one.

Anyway, we took twenty riot control scooper vehicles–that is, a basic bread truck-style riot control vehicle with the basic armor package and the patented Rogers Defence Corporation Protester Scooper cage mounted on the front–to the regime of one Ferdinand Marcos. I believe he was the president for life of Thailand, or perhaps Borneo. Philippines? Not sure. We sailed into port one rainy afternoon and offloaded our cargo. It was then that I decided to venture into the cutthroat world of rabbit’s foot trading.

In the 1970s, every single, solitary American citizen carried a rabbit’s foot and kept two or three at home for good luck.

Show up with one nowadays and someone will charge you with a hate crime. It’s no secret–the Democratic Party set out to destroy the rabbit’s foot manufacturing industry because of dirty money that was being spent by the makers of those stupid and annoying little troll dolls. Ugh! No one cool had one of those! If you had a troll dangling from your GTO key, people would either think you had your chick’s car or you were a major asswipe, in the vernacular.

This charming practice was a given, though. A given. You had your GTO car key, with your lucky rabbit’s foot and your picture of your girl, and they were fastened together with a carabiner clip. That was how everyone knew you were cool, you see. Lame-o’s carried a flashlight and their mommy’s picture. You had to be cool, otherwise, you were a turd or an asswipe, or, even worse, a femmy little fucking asswipe turdball. You could be a jerkwad, provided you had money. Being a jerkwad was okay then, but if your dad lost all of his money, that made you a douchebag and a wimpass, and you didn’t want that to happen. Pardon my French, I’m just telling you how it was.

Anyway, we were empty of our cargo, we were getting ready to sail back to Long Beach and wait for the next shipment to go out, and someone struck up a conversation with a very agitated fellow. It seemed that the owner of a large rabbit farm was bankrupt, and wished to sell his flocks or whatever of rabbits to a fellow in Argentina for a fairly steep price. Argentina was going through a rough time, and the beef industry was suffering. The average Argentine loved meat, couldn’t afford beef, but would definitely eat rabbit meat. Peej thought it was a terrible idea, but what the hell? I wasn’t about to sail back home empty handed. This was a great way to pocket a little loot, ship some rabbits to Argentina, and still make it back to Long Beach, California.

What I didn’t know was that the Strait of Magellan is largely impassable at certain times of the year, so we had to abandon our attempts to sail to Argentina. And, what I also didn’t know, was that it would take a month and a half to even accomplish this task, and we only had two weeks to get back to Long Beach. And what I really, really didn’t know was that forty thousand rabbits will drive you out of your mind after fifteen minutes on a ship.

The chattering and the eating and the rattling of the cages drove us all batty within a week. We struggled to get to the Strait and then, when we turned back, we were beside ourselves. We were running low on staples, I was running out of earplugs, and the crew was miserable. When we turned back to head towards the nearest land, we realized that we had to get rid of the rabbits somehow. If we sailed due north from where we were stopped, we could have dumped the rabbits in the Galapogos Islands. However, that would have landed us in a bit of trouble. Plus, we didn’t think we could make it.

Peej went to the nautical maps, and came up with a stunning choice.

Macquarie Island.

So, in just a little more than a week, we turned back from the Strait of Magellan and sailed to Macquarie Island. This was at full speed, mind you.

What reassured us, was that it was green, it was covered with all kinds of animal life, and forty thousand rabbits? Perfect fit. Perfect fit.

Sadly, this has turned out to be a bit of a problem:

It seemed like a good idea at the time: Remove all the feral cats from a famous Australian island to save the native seabirds.British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology.

But the decision to eradicate the felines from Macquarie island allowed the rabbit population to explode and, in turn, destroy much of its fragile vegetation that birds depend on for cover, researchers said Tuesday.

Removing the cats from Macquarie “caused environmental devastation” that will cost authorities 24 million Australian dollars (US$16.2 million) to remedy, Dana Bergstrom of the Australian Antarctic Division and her colleagues wrote in the

“Our study shows that between 2000 and 2007, there has been widespread ecosystem devastation and decades of conservation effort compromised,” Bergstrom said in a statement.

The unintended consequences of the cat-removal project show the dangers of meddling with an ecosystem – even with the best of intentions, the study said.

I did not know that the Aussies put kitty cats there to eat all of my abandoned rabbits. It’s not like forty thousand caged rabbits would adversely affect the biosphere of an isolated island in the south Pacific ocean, right? Someone must have had a gripe about it, hence the cats. It probably made sense at the time, but I’ll let you in on a little secret–the Australians are the stupidest people on the planet. Everything they do is stupid. They would use a shotgun and a bolo knife to open a can of tuna and would lose three fingers in the process. They really are that dumb. Plus, they’re drunk all the time. The only thing that sustains the population of Australia is beer. Otherwise, those nincompoops would be humping dingoes behind dumpsters.

Had I bonded with any of the rabbits, or realized that I was abandoning a small fortune in rabbit’s foot trinkets, I probably would have been sad on the day when we broke open the cages and threw the rabbits onto the shore from the extended gangplank of  The Captain Auslunderaachenpepperkorn. Have you ever seen a grown man throw a rabbit with one hand and drink a Margarita with the other? That’s me! The truth was, you had to be drunk in order to stand the smell. It was a fateful day. I think Jimmy Carter got elected President on that day. I don’t know. I’ve never understood the International Date Line. Why should I? I have people to take care of that crap for me.