"My maw-ther was never in love you know... My faw-ther, Alphonse, was not the grand passion in her life.  He knows this; she knows this.  But they manage anyway... My mother has been comfortable... but she will never have a grand passion and she knows this and she is now maybe wondering if the confort and safety of staying with my faw-ther was worth that loss... And now I think she is like a cheetah in the zoo, which has lived a comfortable life but has never run fast, the way nature intended her to.  Okay, the cheetah is alive but, so what?

More Shampoo Planet

As Mark and I complete our task, he fills me in on a comic strip he is drawing for his school English class.  "It's called The Fleshlings.  It goes like this: all the animals in the world are upset.  They're going undercover because they are trying to retrieve a secret treasure stolen from them long ago by the humans.  They dress themselves inside human-being costumes and they call themselves the Fleshlings."
Mark showed me his drawings while I continue to snip away the pills.  The Fleshlings he has drawn wear ridiculously bad costumes: little tails and wings sprout from beneath badly tailored suits: beaks poke out from sagging latex-rubber nostrils; triangular ears point out from askew wigs on the heads; bathing beauties in bikinis have furry paws.
"But what happens is the animals, the Fleshlings, while looking for their treasure, can't help but fall into the human life.  They can't help themselves.  The foxes start working in Wall Street.  The dogs start hanging out in bars drinking cocktails and watching ESPN.  Calm giraffes become airline pilots.  The sheep do anything.
"The human being, meanwhile, start having to spend all of their time preventing the chaos resulting from all of these extra Fleshlings living in their midst.  This means hiring more police, creating meal kitchens, training social workers and continually inventing exciting, action-packed TV-show pilots."
"So what happens next?"
"The humans learn about the Fleshlings in their midst and decide they now have to go undercover in order to learn more about what the animals are plotting.  So the humans start disguising themselves inside animal costumes."
"And?" Snip snip.
"History repeats itself.  Once inside the costumes, the humans, instead of becoming like animals, become even more human-like.  They begin organising the other animals into teams and political parties.  They start building fences around bits of land and plant seeds and give all animals names and organise twelve-step programs to help pull the little creatures out of their depths."
"How does it end?"
"In the end both the humans and the animals forget what they were looking for in the first place - why they're even in these costumes to begin with.  But they continue wearing the costumes, regardless.  At the very end only a small secret society for both humans and animals remember the search for the treasure which was stolen long ago."
"Great sequel potential, Mark."
"Thanks."