Lots Of Discarded Critters Make Dallas What It Is
(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)
Dallas bows to no city in its variety of indigenous versus introduced wildlife, with jokes that synthetic and metaphysically generated forms will outnumber standard biological forms in future Trinity River fossil beds. During its existence in the Dallas area, St. Remedius Medical College conducted extensive surveys of local life and its interaction with each other and surrounding humans and other sentients. From the great filter-feeding starlings slurping up pollen in abandoned lots to the clock goblins tinkering with abandoned machines, St. Remedius regularly published tales of new discoveries and new observations of the local plants, animals, protists, cyanobacteria, and nanites: their relationships, their habits, their predators and parasites, and sometimes their extinctions. With the last, living specimens and sometimes additional samples were taken, with some surviving in captivity or in Patti cages, but efforts to remove introduced species usually cause more damage to the local ecosystem than what they cause, having filled niches vacated by earlier forms or sometimes creating whole new niches that never existed before. As to why Dallas is so unique, consider the life cycle that dictates everything in Dallas: business.
The horror starts every year in innumerable houses in North Dallas and suburbs, when incipient University of Texas at Austin business students discover their impending alma mater when they wake up to The Talk: “Sorry, but Daddy doesn’t love you enough to send you to SMU or Baylor. You really should have put out more.” Eight years of keggers later, they return for revenge. “So you laughed at frozen marmalade-stuffed hot dogs? Well, I’ll show you ALL.” The trends, the acronyms, and the buzzwords change occasionally, but whether it’s discussing autodriving rickshaws or pronouncing “SAAS” as a verb, the plans are pretty much the same. Five rounds of venture capital financing for a business plan written with green crayon on toilet paper (often done ironically to get an edge in business news coverage), a relocation to cushy new offices in the latest tech El Dorado (complete with electric scooters on each floor for impromptu pool noodle jousts in the hallways), and a demo in The City Where Dumb Business Concepts Go To Die (alternating between Austin and Portland, depending upon which city is ignoring zoning and basic safety regulations “to allow businesses to innovate” that given year), it’s time to come back to Dallas for more funding. This usually comes from fratbro real estate developers who “had an idea once” seeking to prove their trendiness to golf buddies and their latest trophy wives, and an endless supply of sycophantic coverage in a dying daily newspaper so long as the fratbros remain involved, usually with clumsily staged rumors of an initial public offering that promises to make their long-suffering employees rich and incidentally keep the fratbros from collecting the founders’ thumbs.
But what happens when the fratbros see another bright shiny object in primary colors and abandon the Quest For Dumb? In a perfect situation, the company is bought by a slowly dessicating tech giant in search of a tax writeoff, and it gradually and inevitably disintegrates within forty or fifty layers of red-stapler management. In slightly less perfect situations, the company pivots to the latest buzzword, dumps its employees, and pays out massive executive retention bonuses while selling what little of value remains for spare parts. The adrenaline overload comes when the founders just make the last red-eye flight to a country without an extradition treaty and strong laws against unauthorized scrying and prognostication, or to their shielded, hardened, and incredibly illegal anti-apocalypse bunker on Elyard-Amos Island, seconds before law enforcement and/or certain family-based alternative financing organizations intercept them and impress upon them that the money they took isn’t really theirs. Most of the time, the employees only learn of the perfidy when they arrive at work to discover the doors locked, with their personal possessions held “as evidence.” The founders’ houses are cleared out and then leased to “partners” to become unlicensed cannabis grow houses or elemental sacrifice nodes, the various side-hustle/vanity businesses (usually involving heroic amounts of comped alcohol) liquidated, and any family left behind expected to fend for themselves, even with the companies with successful acquisitions. In a few years, when bankruptcy laws and statutes of limitations expire, they come back, immediately propose five or ten new projects they conceived while in exile, and the cycle continues with a new set of hosts. In many cases, the parasites hit the same hosts: Dallas’s collective mating call is, after all, “The leopards won’t eat MY face, not again!”
In most cases, the sole output was promotional material: backpacks, pens, clipboards, windbreakers, insulated mugs, and other ephemera tossed into a dumpster after a disastrous garage sale hoping to make the mortgage payment on a middle manager’s McMansion. Occasionally, the company’s liquidation leaves actual intellectual property to be fought over in public auctions, even if buried on laptops imploding with downloaded porn. Far too often, though, some prototypes and even first-generation implementations hit the public, and the company’s cessation means that the public becomes responsible for their cleanup and disposition. This essay delves into the natural history of several typical forms, but a comprehensive guide is still in the works. The one thing they have in common was their abandonment after their creators (or their financiers) no longer had a use for them, but they found their own places and thereby help keep Dallas unique.
One of the stalwarts of parks, vacant lots, and drainage channels is a returnee of sorts: the genetics company WAYTTBS (the acronym’s meaning lost to time and bankruptcy court) announced early after its formation that it planned to “rewild” the greater North Texas area with animals extinct since the Pleistocene Epoch. Its promotional materials promised to resurrect and return mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats, and other North American fauna to the area, writers not associated with the local daily or Creative Onanism questioned the plausibility and sanity of replicating Pleistocene megafauna, especially since examples turned up regularly in St. Remedius quantum pocket exploration, the company founders persisted, insisting that the research and subsequent press conferences about possible successes were important.
As it turned out, only one of WAYTTBS’s successes was legitimate, even as it led to the company’s bankruptcy. The effort to bring back Merriam’s teratorn was wildly successful, with flocks released throughout the greater North Texas area, but a vibecoded gene gave the reconstituted birds an absolute obsession with bright shiny objects, much like the company’s founders. The resultant lawsuits from understandably horrified citizens chased by predatory birds with three-meter wingspans for tennis bracelets and pearl earrings cratered the company, but before it did, it announced another development: the resurrection of the horned burrowing rodent Ceratogaulus. The resurrection was a fraud: several breeding pairs were poached from a quantum pocket near the city of McKinney, but by the time authorities confirmed the theft, the founders had gone to ground and the animals released in the wild. Today, “cerries” form colonies in areas with sufficiently deep soil for them to produce their distinctive corkscrew-shaped burrows, making them a pest particularly in the Park Cities. Occasionally, pranksters suggest completely ineffective methods of cerrie control to credulous Park Cities garden center managers: the use of catfish stink baits in live-capture traps during the heatwave of 2011 left the Highland Park area smelling of far more than the usual unearned entitlement and smarm.
Most discussions of uncontrolled advertising focus on admolds and flora, such as the native wildflowers dosed with retroviruses intended to display QR codes in their blooms intended to promote potential advertisers. To this day, local primroses open each morning with URLs for long-defunct festivals and restaurants, confounding wildflower photographers and grade school teachers. One of the more famed examples of this are the gigantic colony admolds growing over every concrete surface in downtown Dallas, gradually collecting nutrients from pollution and storing solar energy until dark. The admolds were designed to flash advertising about an hour after dark, but with a lack of advertisers willing to pay in anything other than “endorsement,” the transcription and transmission hardware and software were bricked by their suppliers, which themselves went bankrupt. While enterprising wags have worked out partial reverse engineering to give the admolds new displays, usually mocking local political figures, most nights just bring random slow bleeds and moire patterns on Dallas’s skyline. The combination of north winds causing atmospheric inversions over the city and cooler temperatures make the displays in winter especially brilliant and mesmerizing, and Dallas is one of the only cities where residents actually look forward to smog.
A botanical intrusive species making a major contribution to the Dallas biome is the walking crepe myrtle (Lagerstroemia bolanderii), originally developed as bioremediation for any number of heavy and/or radioactive metals, most of which were either in trace amounts or completely lacking in Dallas soils. Much like philodendrons like Monstera, these crepe myrtles “walk” by extending roots in its preferred direction, anchoring the front roots deep in the soil, and pulling its rearward roots out, averaging about two meters of movement in a week. Unfortunately, the trees not only collect heavy metals in nodules along their trunks, dropping the nodules on the edge of impassable spaces such as parking lots or roadways, but they also strip the soil of most other elements, such as aluminum, iron, and phosphorus, and compounds such as salts. The end result is a dead trail behind each tree that can only be colonized by species adapted to living in poor soils, such as nitrogen-fixing or carnivorous plants. In Dallas, that means that the space behind a walking crepe myrtle is rapidly filled with advertising wildflowers such as bluebonnets and primroses, giving them a decided advantage against native grasses and perennials.
The final entrant is the sole survivor of a fad in artificial pseudolife: the mobile advertising rack. The Bennies (so named for the big “Bennie’s” logo on the front) were a line of vending kiosks intended to be self-powered and self-maintaining, sitting outside grocery stores and strip plazas during the day and offering various preselected items for sale to passersby. At night, they left their alcoves and swept parking lots and sidewalks, collecting debris, road dust, and discarded soda cans and bottle caps and consolidating potentially valuable materials in compressed blocks in their bases. The plan was that the Bennies paid for their spaces both from vending and from recycling the debris, as well as from spare change dropped in the lots. The Bennies survived the subsequent crash of the mobile rack market by being self-protecting: when the manufacturers of other racks shut down and nobody came to claim the racks, enterprising metal scavengers both human and electronic snatched other racks and carried them screaming into the night, but the Bennies could protect themselves from predation with a severe electric charge. It was possible to overturn a Bennie as it went about its nightly sweeping rounds, but the compacted debris blocks made them so heavy that the return was rarely worth the shock.
Eventually, the Bennies would have worn out and shut down, desperately trying to sell broken weedeater parts and dead squirrels, but instead they became the center of an elaborate social system. With the revival of retro communication systems such as zines, minicomics, and print newsletters, their printers learned that in exchange for parts the Bennies needed and could not replicate (helpfully displayed across the front of the kiosk), the Bennies would display and dispense printed matter and make sure the publishers received full compensation for all sales, either in change or in debris blocks. Considering the value of platinum, lead, and other industrial metals in road dust, the publishers could expand their selections and pay their contributors, the Bennies could get the best in replacement sweeper brushes and keypads, and patrons of the stores had additional reason to carry spare change and bills to feed the kiosks and make sure scavengers left them alone.
In a few places, such as around the Last Dangerous Minyard, all of these forms converged. The Bennie remaining when the original storefront shut down still patrols the parking lot at night, cleaning up discarded cans, cups, food wrappers, and items blown in from elsewhere, its front display loaded with zines from two dozen vendors at the monthly shows. The surrounding berms and islands host lively colonies of cerries, happy to snack on treats offered by visiting shoppers. The edges of the lot are patrolled by walking crepe myrtles and their following bands of primroses advertising long-dead radio stations, with the deposited loads of metals and salts enthusiastically swept up by the Bennie and collected in its bins. The Minyard boasts its own admold colony, one responsive to outside noises, and the occasional outdoor band playing in the parking lot leaves the storefront flashing in colors and residual images matching the beat. Every visitor to Dallas needs to stop by for a vendor fair, and tip the Bennie as you leave.
Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.
Discover more from The Annals of St. Remedius Medical College
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.