Rare video of the reclusive Donald

The Donald is well camouflaged by laminated wood flooring, his natural habitat.

Life of Pi

Donald Is Richard Parker's Biggest Fan

By Preston Sinclair 

 

I've seen this look on Donald's face before.

"Thank you. And so it goes with God."

              Pi Patel

   Donald is my fourteen pound, three legged ginger tabby.  He curled up on the couch with me and became fascinated with Richard Parker. Now he fancies himself to be a smaller, less agile version of the cgi script star of Life Of Pi.  There's something about the tiger in all of us perhaps that helps us relate to this hostile reclusive shipmate of Pi Patel.
   Yann Martel's Life Of Pi is a spiritual odyssey. It's a journey during which a boy creates his own religion.  In this age of menus, and drop down boxes, who's to say that someday one won't be able to create one's own religion by selecting the best attributes of each? 

  

   This story illustrates the ultimate confrontation between Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. My favorite chapter in the book is where the priest, the imam, and the pandit confront Pi, as he's walking with his parents, about the fact that he's attending services with each of them. They should have continued to compete for his immortal soul. Instead they shunned him because they didn't understand him.  They set him adrift. They were too set in their own spiritual dogma to answer a young boy's questions. Either that, or else there were easier souls to win and his wasn't worth their time. He was forced to create his own parable as a result of the sinking of the ship during which he lost his entire family, his own Noah's Ark if you will.
  

   Ang Lee won an Oscar in 2013 at the 85th Annual Academy Awards for Best Director for Life Of Pi. This is because he was the spiritual center of the film. Some people thought Ben Affleck got snubbed because he didn't get nominated for Best Director for Argo. Suck it up, bro. You got your Oscar for Best Picture, which goes to the producers of the film. I saw Argo and it was a well produced film. Was Argo well directed? Meh, I think The Academy knew what they were doing.
   There has been speculation on the web about the floating island inhabited by meerkats.  Meerkats are like an adorable cross between a monkey and a cat. They are very social creatures and Pi probably knew about them from his experience at the zoo.
   I associated this floating island with the Sargasso Sea that is created by the swirling tides in the Atlantic Ocean which collect seaweed and flotsam. With a little imagination, I can see an analogy with the huge swirling tidal dump of plastics in the Pacific. Some day we will be able to walk from California to Japan on a plastic ramp across the Pacific.  At this point in the story Pi was so starved, dehydrated and delusional that he could have mistaken this flotsam for an island.
   At the end of his journey Pi tried to explain what had happened on board the ship to the Japanese insurance adjusters. People are often trying to explain or defend something in the name of religion. I think the point of Pi Patel's story is that religion should just let us be. Donald believes he's a tiger, therefore he is a tiger.

Donald doing his Richard Parker impression

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.”   Buddha