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think about it *both move real slow *both have their houses attached to their body *both eat leaves and stuff 
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Aug 8, 2016 23:19
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hermit crabs
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Aug 8, 2016 23:20
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Associate Christ
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snails are actually turtle larva
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Aug 8, 2016 23:21
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yeah
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Aug 8, 2016 23:21
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you can eat both of them
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Aug 8, 2016 23:21
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Could be that they're both from an agoraphobic common ancestor.
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Aug 8, 2016 23:22
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I'm beginning to think nooner isn't related to homo sapien
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Aug 8, 2016 23:22
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only by marriage
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Aug 8, 2016 23:22
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what about clams op
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Aug 8, 2016 23:23
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OctoberBlues posted:I'm beginning to think nooner isn't related to homo sapien 
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Aug 8, 2016 23:25
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symbolic posted:only by marriage The state of Oklahoma does not recognize this form of relation.
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Aug 8, 2016 23:25
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The turtles i had as a kid ate meat
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Aug 8, 2016 23:28
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Zzulu posted:The turtles i had as a kid ate meat That reminds me of a david sedaris story
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Aug 8, 2016 23:29
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i think so
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Aug 8, 2016 23:32
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OctoberBlues posted:That reminds me of a david sedaris story
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Aug 8, 2016 23:31
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i am retarded
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Aug 8, 2016 23:33
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What about hobos with the barrel with suspenders they wear? Meta-turtle?
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Aug 8, 2016 23:33
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is my dick and your anus related op? both have stuff come of out them both stink like poo poo why don't we put them together and find out?
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Aug 8, 2016 23:36
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a hole-y ghost posted:Well?? Tell us the story The thing about Hawaii, at least the part that is geared toward tourists, is that it’s exactly what it promises to be. Step off the plane and someone places a lei around your neck, as if it were something you had earned—an Olympic medal for sitting on your rear end. Raise a hand above your shoulder and, no matter where you are, a drink will appear: something served in a hollowed-out pineapple, or perhaps in a coconut that’s been sawed in half. Just like in the time before glasses! you think. Volcanic craters, waterfalls, and those immaculate beaches—shocking things when you’re coming from Europe. At the spot that Hugh and I go to in Normandy, you’ll find, in place of sand, speckled stones the size of potatoes. The water runs from glacial to heart attack and is tinted the color of iced tea. Then there’s all the stuff floating in it: not man-made garbage but sea garbage—scum and bits of plant life, all of it murky and rotten-smelling. The beaches in Hawaii look as if they’d been bleached; that’s how white the sand is. The water is warm—even in winter—and so clear that you can see not just your toes but the corns cleaving, barnacle-like, to the sides of them. On Maui, one November, Hugh and I went swimming, and turned to find a gigantic sea turtle coming up between us. As gentle as a cow she was, and with a cow’s dopey, almost lovesick expression on her face. That, to me, was worth the entire trip, worth my entire life, practically. For to witness majesty, to find yourself literally touched by it—isn’t that what we’ve all been waiting for? I had a similar experience a few years later, and again with Hugh. We were in Japan, walking through a national forest in a snowstorm, when a monkey the height of a bar stool brushed against us. His fur was a dull silver, the color of dishwater, but he had this beet-red face, set in a serious, almost solemn expression. We saw it full on when he turned to briefly look at us. Then he shrugged and ambled off over a footbridge. “Jesus Christ!” I said. Because it was too much: the forest, the snowstorm, and now this. Monkeys were an attraction in that part of the country. We expected to see them at some point, but I thought they’d be fenced in. As with the sea turtle, part of the thrill was the feeling of being accepted, which is to say, not feared. It allowed you to think that you and this creature had a special relationship, a juvenile thought, but one that brings with it a definite comfort. Well, monkeys like me, I’d find myself thinking during the next few months, whenever I felt lonely or unappreciated. Just as, in the months following our trip to Hawaii, I thought of the sea turtle. With her, though, my feelings were a bit more complicated, and, instead of believing that we had bonded, I’d wonder that she could ever have forgiven me. The thing between me and sea turtles started in the late sixties, and involved my best friend from grade school, a boy I’ll call Shaun (some of the names in this story have been changed), who lived down the street from me in Raleigh. What brought us together was a love of nature, or, more specifically, of catching things, and unintentionally killing them. We started when I was in the fourth grade, which would have made me ten, I guess. It’s different for everyone, but at that age, though I couldn’t have said that I was gay, I knew that I was not like the other boys in my class or my Scout troop. While they welcomed male company, I shrank from it, dreaded it, feeling like someone forever trying to pass, someone who would eventually be found out, and be expelled from polite society. Is this how a normal boy would swing his arms? I’d ask myself, standing before the full-length mirror in my parents’ bedroom. Is this how he’d laugh? Is this what he would find funny? It was like doing an English accent. The more concentrated the attempt, the more self-conscious and unconvincing I became. With Shaun, though, I could almost be myself. This didn’t mean that we were alike, only that he wasn’t paying that much attention. Childhood, for him, seemed something to be endured, passed through like a tiresome stretch of road. Ahead of this was the good stuff, and, looking at him from time to time, at the way he had of staring off, of boring a hole into the horizon, you got the sense that he could not only imagine it but see it: this great, grownup life, waiting on the other side of sixteen. Apart from an interest in wildlife, the two of us shared an identity as transplants. My family was from the North, and the Taylors were from the Midwest. Shaun’s father, Hank, was a psychiatrist, and sometimes gave his boys and me tests, the type for which there were, he assured us, “no right answers.” He and his wife were younger than my parents, and they seemed it, not just in their dress but in their eclectic tastes—records by Donovan and Moby Grape shelved among the Schubert. Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read. In a neighborhood of stay-at-home moms, Shaun’s mother worked. A public-health nurse, she was the one you went to if you woke up with yellow eyes, or had jammed a piece of caramel corn too far into your ear. “Oh, you’re fine,” Jean would say, for that was what she wanted us to call her, not Mrs. Taylor. With her high cheekbones and ever so slightly turned-down mouth, she brought to mind a young Katharine Hepburn. Other mothers might be pretty, might, in their twenties or early thirties, pause at beauty, but Jean was clearly parked there for a lifetime. You’d see her in her flower bed, gardening gloves hanging from the waistband of her slacks like someone clawing to get out, and you just had to wish she was your mom instead. The Taylor children had inherited their mother’s good looks, especially Shaun. Even as a kid, he seemed at home in his skin—never cute, just handsome, blond hair like a curtain drawn over half his face. The eye that looked out from the uncurtained side was cornflower blue, and excelled at spotting wounded or vulnerable animals. While the other boys in our neighborhood played touch football in the street, Shaun and I searched the woods behind our houses. I drew the line at snakes, but anything else was brought home, and imprisoned in our ten-gallon aquariums. Lizards, toads, baby birds: they all got the same diet—raw hamburger meat—and, with few exceptions, they all died within a few weeks. “Menu-wise, it might not hurt you to branch out a little,” my mother once said, in reference to my captive luna moth. It was the size of a paperback novel, a beautiful mint green, but not much interested in ground chuck. “Maybe you could feed it some, I don’t know, flowers or something.” Like she knew. The best-caught creature belonged to Shaun’s younger brother, Chris, who’d found an injured flying squirrel and kept him, uncaged, in his bedroom. The thing was no bigger than a hamster, and when he glided from the top bunk to the dresser his body flattened out, making him look like an empty hand puppet. The only problem was the squirrel’s disposition, his one-track mind. You wanted him to cuddle, or to ride sentry on your shoulder, but he refused to relax. I’ve got to get out of here, you could sense him thinking, as he clawed, desperate and wild-eyed, at the windowpane, or tried to squeeze himself underneath the door. He made it out eventually, and though we all hoped he’d return for meals, and become a kind of part-time pet, he never did. Not long after the squirrel broke free, Jean took her boys and me for a weekend on the North Carolina coast. It was mid-October, the start of the sixth grade, and the water was too chilly to swim in. On the Sunday that we were to head back home, Shaun and I got up at dawn and took a walk with our nets. We were hunting for ghost crabs when, in the distance, we made out these creatures, moving blockily, like windup toys on an unsteady surface. On closer inspection, we saw that they were baby sea turtles, dozens of them, digging out from under the sand, and stumbling toward the ocean. An adult might have carried them into the surf, or held at bay the predatory gulls, but we were twelve, so while I scooped the baby turtles into a pile, Shaun ran back and got the trash cans from our hotel room. We might have walked off with the whole lot, but they seemed pretty miserable, jumbled atop one another. Thus, in the end, we took only ten, which meant five apiece. The great thing about the sea turtles, as opposed to, say, flying squirrels, was that they would grow exponentially—meaning, what, fifty, a hundred times their original size? When we got them, each one called to mind a plastic coin purse, the oval sort handed out by banks and car dealerships. Then there were the flippers and, of course, the heads, which were bald and beaky, like a newly hatched bird’s. Since the death of a traumatized mole pried from the mouth of our cat, Samantha, my aquarium had sat empty and was therefore ready for some new tenants. I filled it with a jug of ocean water that I’d brought from the beach, then threw in a conch shell and a couple of sand dollars, to make it more homey. The turtles swam the short distance from one end of the tank to the other, and then they batted at the glass with their flippers, unable to understand that this was it—the end of the road. What they needed, it seemed, was something to eat. “Mom, do we have any raw hamburger?” Looking back, you’d think that someone would have said something—sea turtles, for God’s sakes!—but maybe they weren’t endangered yet. Animal cruelty hadn’t been invented, either. The thought that a non-human being had physical feelings, let alone the wherewithal to lose hope, was outlandish and alien, like thinking that paper had relatives. Then, too, when it comes to eliciting empathy, it’s the back of the line for reptiles and amphibians, creatures with, face it, not much in the way of a personality. Even giving them names didn’t help, as playing with Shelly was no different from playing with Pokyhontus; “playing,” in this case, amounting to placing them on my desk and watching them toddle over the edge. It was good to know that in the house down the street Shaun’s turtles weren’t faring much better. The hamburger meat we’d put in our aquariums went uneaten, and within a short time it spoiled, and started stinking up our rooms. I emptied my tank, and in the absence of seawater I made my own, with plain old tap water and salt. “I’m not sure that that’s going to work,” my mother said. She was standing in my doorway with a cigarette in one hand and an ashtray in the other. Recent experiments with a home-frosting kit had dried out and broken her already brittle hair. What was left she’d covered with a scarf, a turquoise one, that looked great when she had a tan but not so great when she didn’t. “Doesn’t ocean water have nutrients in it or something?” “I dunno.” She looked at the turtles, unhappily dragging themselves across my bedspread. “Well, if you want to find out, I’m taking Lisa to the library this Saturday.” I’d hoped to spend my weekend outside, but then it rained, and my father hogged the TV for one of his football games. It was either go to the library or stay home and die of boredom, so I got into the car, groaning at the unfairness of it all. My mother dropped my sister and me downtown, and then she went to do some shopping, promising to return in a few hours. It wasn’t much to look at, our public library. I later learned that it used to be a department store, and that made sense: the floor-to-ceiling windows were right for mannequins, and you could easily imagine dress shirts where the encyclopedias were, wigs in place of the magazines. I remember that in the basement there were two rest rooms, one marked “Men” and the other marked “Gentleman.” Inside each was a toilet, a sink, and a paper-towel dispenser, meaning that whichever you chose you got pretty much the same treatment. Thus, it came down to how you saw yourself: as regular, or fancy. On the day I went to research turtles, I saw myself as fancy, and so I opened the door marked “Gentleman.” What happened next happened very quickly. Two men, both black, turned their heads in my direction. One was standing with his pants and underwear pulled down past his knees, and as he bent to yank them up the other man, who’d been kneeling before him, and who also had his pants lowered, covered his face with his hand, and let out a little cry. “Oh,” I told them. “I’m sorry.” I backed, shaken, out of the room, and just as the door had closed behind me it swung open again. Then the pair spilled out, that flying-squirrel look in their eyes. The stairs were at the end of a short hall, and they took them two at a time, the slower man turning his head, just briefly, and looking at me as if I held a gun. When I saw that he was afraid of me, I felt powerful. Then I wondered how I might use that power. My first instinct was to tell on them—not because I wanted the two punished but because I would have liked the attention. “Are you all right?” the librarian would have asked. “And these were Negroes, you say? Quick, somebody, get this young man a glass of water or, better yet, a Coke. Would you like a Coke while we wait for the police?” And, in my feeblest voice, I would have said, “Yes.” Then again, it could so easily backfire. The men were doing something indecent, and recognizing it as such meant that I had an eye for it. That I, too, was suspect. And wasn’t I? In the end, I told no one. Not even Lisa. “So did you find out what kind of turtles they are?” my mother asked as we climbed back into the car. “Sea turtles,” I told her. “Well, we know that.” “No, I mean, that’s what they’re called, ‘sea turtles.’ “ “And what do they eat?” I looked out the rain-streaked window. “Hamburger.” My mother sighed. “Have it your way.” It took a few weeks for my first turtle to die. The water in the tank had again grown murky with spoiled, uneaten beef, but there was something else as well, something I couldn’t begin to identify. The smell that developed in the days after Halloween, this deep, swampy funk, was enough to make your eyes water. It was as if the turtles’ very souls were rotting, yet still they gathered in the corner of their tank, determined to find the sea. At night, I would hear their flippers against the glass, and think about the Negroes in the Gentleman’s room, wondering what would become of them—what, by extension, would become of me? Would I, too, have to live on the run? Afraid of even a twelve-year-old? One Friday in early November, my father paid a rare visit to my room. In his hand was a glass of gin, his standard, after-work cocktail, mixed with a little water, and garnished with a lemon peel. I normally liked the smell of it, but today the aquarium won. He regarded it briefly and, wincing at the stench, removed two tickets from his jacket pocket. “They’re for a game,” he told me. “A game?” “Football,” he said. “I thought we could go tomorrow afternoon.” “But tomorrow I have to write a report.” “Write it on Sunday.” I’d never expressed any interest in football. Never played it with the kids on the street, never watched it on TV, never touched the helmet I’d received the previous Christmas. “Why not take Lisa?” I asked. “Because you’re my son, that’s why.” I looked at the holocaust taking place in my aquarium. “Do I have to?” If I were to go to a game today, I’d certainly find something to enjoy: the food, the noise, the fans marked up with paint. It would be an experience. At the time, though, it threw me into a panic. Which team am I supposed to care about? I asked myself as we settled into our seats. How am I supposed to react if somebody scores a point? The thing about sports, at least for guys, is that nobody ever defines the rules, not even in gym class. Asking what a penalty means is like asking who Jesus was. It’s one of those things you’re just supposed to know, and if you don’t there’s something seriously wrong with you. Two of the popular boys from my school were standing against a railing a few rows ahead of us, and when I stupidly pointed them out to my father he told me to go and say hello to them. How to explain that looking at them, even from this distance, was pushing it. Addressing them, it followed, was completely out of the question. People had their places, and to not understand that, to act in violation of it, demoted you from a nature nut to something even lower, a complete untouchable, basically. “That’s all right,” I said. “They don’t really know who I am.” “Aw, baloney. Go over and talk to them.” “No, really.” “Do you want me to drag you over there?” As I dug in, I thought of the turtles. All they’d ever wanted was to live in the ocean—that was it, their entire wish list, and instead I’d decided they’d be better off in my bedroom. Just as my dad had decided that I’d be better off at the football game. If I could have returned them to the beach, I would have, though I knew it was already too late. In another few days they would start going blind. Then their shells would soften, and they’d just sort of melt away, like soap. “Are you going over there or aren’t you?” my dad said. When the last turtle died and was pitched into the woods behind my house, Shaun and I took up bowling, the only sport I was ever half decent at. The Western Lanes was a good distance away, and when our parents wouldn’t drive us we rode our bikes, me with a transistor radio attached by rubber bands to my handlebars. We were just thinking of buying our own bowling shoes, when Shaun’s mother and father separated. Hank took an apartment in one of the new complexes, and a few months later, not yet forty years old, he died. “Died of what?” I asked. “His heart stopped beating” was the answer Shaun gave me. “Well, sure,” I said. “But doesn’t every dead person’s heart stop beating? There must have been something else going on.” “His heart stopped beating.” Following the funeral, there was a reception at the Taylors’ house. Shaun and I spent most of it on the deck off his living room, him firing his BB gun into the woods with that telescopic look in his eye. After informing me that his father’s heart had stopped beating, he never said another word about him. I never saw Shaun cry, or buckle at the knees, or do any of the things that I would have done. Drama-wise, it was the chance of a lifetime, but he wasn’t having any of it. From the living room, I could hear my father talking to Jean. “What with Hank gone, the boys are going to need a positive male influence in their lives,” he said. “That being the case I’ll be happy to, well, happy to—” “Ignore them,” my mother cut in. “Just like he does with his own drat kids.” And Jean laughed. “Oh, Sharon.” Eighteen years passed before I learned what had really happened to Shaun’s father. By then I was living in Chicago. My parents were still in Raleigh, and several times a week I’d talk to my mother on the phone. I don’t remember how the subject came up, but after she told me I was stunned. “Did Shaun know?” I asked. “I’m sure he did,” my mother said, and although I hadn’t seen or spoken to him since high school, I couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed. If you can’t tell your best friend that your dad essentially drank himself to death, who can you tell? It’s a lot to hold in at that age, but then I guess we all had our secrets. It was after talking to my mom on the phone that I finally went to the library and looked up those turtles: loggerheads is what they were called. When mature, they can measure three and a half feet long. A female might reach four hundred pounds, and, of all the eggs she lays in a lifetime, only one in a thousand will make it to adulthood. Pretty slim odds when, by “making it,” you mean simply surviving. Before the reception ended that day, Shaun handed his BB gun to me. My father was watching from the living-room window, and intercepted me just as I raised it to my shoulder. “Oh, no you don’t. You’re going to put somebody’s eye out.” “Somebody like a bird?” I said. “We’re firing into the woods, not into the house.” “I don’t give a drat where you’re aiming.” I handed the rifle back to Shaun, and, as he brushed the hair from his eyes and peered down the scope, I tried to see what I imagined he did: a life on the other side of this, something better, perhaps even majestic, waiting for us to grow into it.
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Aug 8, 2016 23:38
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Aug 8, 2016 23:39
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Kaluza-Klein posted:what about clams op I don't know poo poo about clams. Pretty sure scientists don't either. hosed up organism imo
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Aug 8, 2016 23:45
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I would love to be a clam does anyone know a way to turn into clam
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Aug 8, 2016 23:48
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Full Metal Jackass posted:I would love to be a clam i knew a old dude named clem he got real close
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Aug 8, 2016 23:51
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Zzulu posted:The turtles i had as a kid ate meat I think youre thinking of "dogs"? Edgar posted:What about hobos with the barrel with suspenders they wear? Meta-turtle? cultural appropriation 
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Aug 8, 2016 23:52
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Good, thanks for it.
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Aug 8, 2016 23:53
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did you know pistaschios are actually baby clams
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Aug 8, 2016 23:55
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reallivedinosaur posted:did you know pistaschios are actually baby clams 
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Aug 8, 2016 23:56
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I think they are related, yes.
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Aug 9, 2016 00:00
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reallivedinosaur posted:did you know pistaschios are actually baby clams They're baby mussels, you idjits
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Aug 9, 2016 00:01
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All life comes from a common ancestor, specifically Jesus.
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Aug 9, 2016 00:23
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nah man one's a mollusk; the other is a weird loving reptile
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Aug 9, 2016 00:27
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Kaluza-Klein posted:what about clams op clams are basically water snails
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Aug 9, 2016 00:31
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a snail that loses his shell due to incurred gambling debts is called a slug
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Aug 9, 2016 00:32
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according to a documentary i saw a there was a retard frog-squirrel, and then *that* had a retard baby which ... and then this monkey-fish-frog had butt sex with that monkey.
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Aug 9, 2016 00:34
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How could they not be? Pretty obvious, lol.
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Aug 9, 2016 00:49
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Turtles are descended from dinosaurs and I'd guess snails are too, but they were basically just larger snails back then.
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Aug 9, 2016 00:52
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Turtle are just the evolved form of snail.
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Aug 9, 2016 00:53
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They're related, but not closely, since they're from completely different phyla. Same kingdom though.
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Aug 9, 2016 00:55
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sometimes when i wear a hooded sweatshirt i pretend im a snail
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Aug 9, 2016 00:56
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 06:54 |
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box turtles eat snails so if true op then box turtles are cannibals hosed up but kinda cool actually actually maybe not cannibals but close enough imo
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Aug 9, 2016 01:02
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