Baphomet Joins The Circus
They had a small circus come through, so I went with my cousin and her 2 boys. My cousin hadn’t gone to a circus in probably 20 years, as she is opposed to the treatment of animals at circuses. But she didn’t tell me that before we went. Her husband and friends were kind of fucking with her about it. If she would have told me that before, I certainly would have agreed with her in principle. I know something about being held in a cage and being chained and shackled away from my natural habitat… I’d be kind of reluctant to visit a zoo, and even if I did goto a zoo, the personal implications would be very prominent to me. But I wasn’t particularly thinking about the implications for the animals, I just thought her boys would enjoy it.
It was a rather small circus, so they only had a few animals, like goats, llamas, camel, elephants, and horses. Most of the “acts” were acrobatic. Then a few clowns. I suppose it was a fairly nice show for a small circus. But the constant push for more money was rather obscene - buy this for the kids, buy that for the kids. All these extra charges on top of the $20 adult entrance fee. Hey, at least we didn’t have to pay for parking like we did at the museums… The fucking constant display of American flags and “patriotic” crap about how great America is was also obscene. At least they weren’t trying to sell the goddamn flags - not that I saw, anyway. A number of the performers were rather young. I guess the tradition is for families to travel together and pass the craft down through generations, but the child-labor implications (something I also have some personal familiarity with…) were disconcerting as well. I knew a few guys in prison who told me about working at carnivals, and overall it seems like a kind of fun job to do for a little while - you get to travel around to a lot of different places and meet a lot of people. I don’t think it would suit me as a “career”, though.
The boys wanted to ride the elephants, which also cost an extra $5 a piece, but I paid for it - thats something exciting for kids, and I got to ride an elephant like that at a circus as a small boy too. Jack, the older boy, rode the elephant, but Gavin, the younger one, got scared when he went up to ride the elephant, so he rode a horse instead - and he was scared riding the horse alone too. Afterwards though, he said he wanted to ride the horse again, so he wasn’t too scared.
I didn’t really feel like taking many pictures, so I only took a few of Jack riding the elephant. I always suck at taking pictures of moving subjects, but I did a better job than my cousin’s attempts to take some pictures of Gavin on the horses 
Gavin seemed to be more fascinated by the wallpaper photo of Baphomet I had on my iPhone than the circus, because he kept asking me to see Baphomet, and then when I showed him the picture he said he “wanted him to come out”. Well, he couldn’t say “Baphomet” too precisely, but he did a damn good job. 
I would think that Baphomet would look scary to a little kid maybe, but he liked Baphomet and wanted him to come out and play
