Life's Little Karma Display Board

I found out something last night that quite literally changed my life. Yup, it was a life changing day. No I didn't get laid off or fired for a change, or even cheated on, or lied to, by another 'baker. Not anything even remotely so trivial.

For me it was something so monumentally wrong, and about someone I have adored all my life, and admired, and held in the deepest reverence possible, except maybe for a god, or something like that.

I found out that John James Audubon killed all of the birds he painted, before he pinned them to a display board, where he would literally spend days sticking their beaks, their feathers, their expressions even with pins, to pose them in specific positions to make them appear more "lifelike".

He killed every single bird he ever drew. He shot them in the back of their heads, so as to not make a bloody mess of their faces.

He killed them for his own personal monetary gain. He killed them to make his paintings more realistic than his contemporaries. He killed them to publish books. He killed them for his own pleasure. He killed the one thing I always believed he cherished.

He opened the door for me to discover them, to escape to their world, to share in it, to find some incredible fucking beauty in an otherwise pretty shitty world.

It allowed me to experience freedom and flight, peace and promise, a world very alien to me. They let me watch them soar, and pretend their world was mine, if only for fleeting moments every now and then.

They taught me their songs and their language, their culture and their ways.

The bastard.

Hence now that the ranting part is winding down, I propose that for every ignorant, bloody, bastardly, greedy slob that has ever robbed the world of even one element of it's most magnificent beauty, should be held accountable and be sentenced to die in the exact same manner that he subjected his victims to, and then to be placed on public display for all to see, forever and ever.

I'm not suggesting a discussion on the death penalty, god knows that's been done to "death" here already. What I want would be a public display board, in a library, or a museum, or somewhere like that, in the section where his "beautiful lifelike" bird paintings are housed, and children could look at his paintings and actually believe the story, and all the lies. They could believe for a moment that someone so wonderful actually devoted his entire life to capturing the endless beauty of a bird in flight.

Moments before they would then get to visit the display case, where the ugly truth would be told, and the decision to love or not, to have passion or feel nothing but indifference, would at-least be based on fact, not on a prettied up story, with streets, and buildings and monuments erected in the name of not a hero, or even a kind and humble man, but instead of a selfish, egotistical, sadistic mad man. Who had but one goal in his pathetic life, to paint better than the only other man on Earth he felt *could* draw better than him, and to sell more books than him as well.

I would like to stand in front of his display case today, and think to myself how much more lifelike, or should I say human-like he would look if only his right shoulder was pinned down with just a little bit sharper of an angle, you know, so the sunlight hitting it would look more realistic for that time of day. Or perhaps his left testicle would be more believable if it had a mole or two growing from underneath his sparse gray pubic hair.

There are others who I have wished would die in the same manner that they inflicted on their innocent victims, but never, ever did I in my worst nightmare, realize a person who held such a delicate life in the palm of his hand in one moment, could then blow the life out of him forever, for nothing but the sake of his "style" of art.

Even the insect display boards don't upset me, well not that much, because the creator doesn't spend his whole existence leading people to believe that he loves the creatures that he displays. He might even believe he is passing information down to others, so that the species can be kept from becoming extent, or be able to define and/or differentiate new strains.

But this man, who was as a god to me, had the ability and the desire, to have quite possibly, at one time or another, held the very last of a particular species of a bird in his hand, just moments prior to blowing it to extinction. Forever and ever.

Cheating humanity from *ever* being able to hear, or see, or even have the knowledge of a beautiful bird who once flew freely through the air and was brought down, shot to death and then pinned to his exact specifications, for his own egotistical legacy, making the infinate decision for all of us, to unmake what god saw fit to create.