It’s not that most people I know would rather go to sixth period than to the zoo with me. It’s just that they have no choice. There’s work to do, tests to make up, colleges to be accepted by. Most everyone I asked rejected enticing offer of a free trip to the zoo.

I had all but given up hope of finding a companion when I went into the Tech Services room and found just that. To Kazumichi Nakahara, the zoo sounded far better than American Government. Kazu and I didn’t know each other well. I mostly knew him as the guy who at an assembly last year had asked a woman to explain the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the remaining minute-and-a-half she had left. She told him to read a book.

And so we left for the zoo, where the animals roam for 50 yards before turning around and roaming back to the other side of their cages, where children taunt the beasts and throw things into their enclosures — choking hazard! — and families watch in morbid fascination as the carnivores devour slabs of raw meat. Off to the zoo we went.

The first exhibit was the African Savanna. From the viewpoint in the African Village, we could see two zebras, a few gazelles off in the distance, and a flock of ducks in the small pond. A mother was saying to her young son, “And look at all those ducks. Do you think ducks really live in Africa? That’s not very realistic.”

Next along the way was the hippo pool. Three grotesquely gargantuan grey blobs swam in the dirty water, occasionally opening their rectangular mouths to gaping sizes. Hippopotamuses are actually among the most dangerous animals in Africa, but they can’t help but come across as gentle giants. One swam over and stood half-submerged before us, looking up with its sad eyes. It charged out of the water with its mouth opened and went and stood on the plane looking miserable, exhaling a grunt of discontent. Seattle in winter is no Africa.

As we walked away from the hippo pool, Kazu said “Hippos are big.” I agreed and added, “Hella big.” This was the general extent of our discourse concerning most displays. We might notice a sign saying that emus can run up to 30 miles per hour and I would say, “Emus can run fast,” and Kazu would add, “Hella fast.” Or Kazu would see a miniscule poisonous incandescent green frog and say, “That frog is cool,” and I’d say, “Hella cool.” What more was left to be said, save for the occasional odd comment such as, “It’d be tight if some girl got eaten by a hippo,” and the obligatory response, “Hella tight”?

The next section to visit was Tropical Asia, or the Trail of Vines, whose main attraction had been Hansa the baby elephant until her unfortunate death in 2007. The elephant forest was devoid of elephants, but we eventually saw them by their barn. The mud-caked colossuses stomped across the ground, tusks missing or broken, covering 20 feet with each step. On the other side of the path were the tapirs, large black and white herbivores with severe overbites.

We then went to see the Komodo dragon, a fearsome lizard with burnt-orange scales and a forked yellow tongue. In 2001 as a Father’s Day gift for her husband Phil Bronstein, actress Sharon Stone arranged a tour of the Los Angeles Zoo for him, during which he was given a chance to go inside their dragon’s cage. He had always wanted to see such a mythic, prehistoric creature up close. As soon as he went in, the dragon attacked him, nearly biting his foot off.

Safely separated by a barrier, I tapped lightly against the sleeping dragon’s glass enclosure. It opened its eyes and squinted at me, the folds of skin on its neck standing out like veins bulging in anger. I rapped harder on the glass. It squinted even more angrily, but that was all it could do. Without the glass, I’m sure the dragon would have attacked me in an instant. It would’ve attacked me and every other inglorious human bastard responsible for stealing it away from the island of Komodo and bringing it to this terrible place. But it could not. Bronstein was foolish to go inside that cage. He entered the dragon’s lair; he got his comeuppance.

Closing time was nearing and we still had half the zoo left to see. Nearest was the Tropical Rain Forest. We entered the building which simulated the muggy environment of a tropical rain forest — “This room is humid.” “Hella humid.” — and took in everything that was there as fast as we could. Snakes, frogs, turtles, piranhas — “It’d be greazy to get eaten by piranhas.” “Hella greazy.” — toucans, iguanas, chameleons, cockroaches.

We made for the gorilla paddock. Just as we arrived, a gorilla slammed its fist against the glass, causing four college-aged guys to recoil in mild fear. Then they went back to what they had been doing: perturbing the gorilla with the flash on their camera, pounding on the glass, mocking the gorilla by pretending to be gorillas themselves.

Our last stop before we left was the flamingo corral. The flamingos were brought to the zoo last summer; to promote the new arrivals, they had employees and interns place pink plastic lawn flamingos all over Phinney Ridge. Sometimes a neighborhood man named John would go around and take them all. The actual flamingos stood around more or less like their plastic counterparts.

Kazu said as we returned to my car, “All the animals in there are lazy,” and I responded, “Hella lazy.” Locked in the zoo, the animals can never know complete satisfaction, but they are fat, and to an animal fatness equates some simple sort of happiness. There is no foraging required. There is no everyday struggle to live. Stripped of the Darwinian necessity to survive, kept in a place where they have no predators, the animals are living artifacts, nothing more than facsimiles of their true selves in the wild. Their purpose here is to be seen, to be pointed at, and to be endlessly entertained by.