People ask me why I’m obsessed with penguins. Actually, their question is more like, “What is your f—ing problem, you freak?”
In truth, I’m no more obsessed with penguins than anyone else. It all started back in high school…
[Insert wobbly flashback transition.]
Back in junior high school, I wrote an article for an English class assignment about the endangered “partying penguins” in Antarctica. Apparently they drank lots of Kokanee beer and listened to Dire Straits and Pink Floyd (it was the eighties). The article was accompanied by a cartoon: a penguin wearing a lampshade on its head while playing air guitar with a lamp.
People seemed to like it, so I drew a few more. In response, someone gave me a toy penguin. And seeing that I had a toy penguin, someone else thought I had a “thing” about penguins and gave me another penguin-related object.
When people come to my home, they saw penguins, assumed that was obsessed with them, and bought me more. In the following years, I was inundated with them. People meant well, but it drove me up the wall.
Eventually something snapped. When I think of wild animals, the first thing that pops into my head is a flightless bird from the southern hemisphere. They’ve invaded every corner of my life. And I don’t even like the bloody things. It’s really quite tragic.
It could have been any animal. What if I had written an article about the partying platipi? Or the dancing doormice? The rowdy rhinos? The wanton wildebeests? Of all the alliterative wildlife available to me, why did I choose penguins? My life could have been quite different today.
Bloody penguins.
