Soul

I didn’t lose my soul. The Veal Eater never gave up the Ghost.

It was dark there, underground, but not dank; not mossy; no lichen or tangled roots descending from above. That’s tacky. Those caverns and graves are for the cliches. The stumbling decrepit victims of the world who rise like Jesus from the Tomb. Our place was clean, sterile, and pragmatic.

The exchange of grey matter for sawdust was less mystical than it was medical. We didn’t go to sleep, pink and dreaming, and wake up dark and deadly, magically transformed from persons to monsters. We weren’t cursed; we weren’t blessed. And we weren’t an accident. I’d tell you to ask him, but just like in every honest depiction of creation, he was the first victim, meal, loss. Adam killed God, and saw that it was good.

If you are a dualist, a foolish, naive dualist, you probably think it was never tied to the brain, not even to the pineal gland as the grandfather of modern dualists thought it was. You probably think the soul is never lost, just changed, distorted, corrupted. That it lifts out of the body with the tidal breath.

If you are a materialist you probably deny me a soul anyway; or you think it was irrevocably tied to the lump of meat sucked out of my skull, fired down the hose like Augustus Gloop ascending to the Hell of Wonka’s factory. That without the brain there is no soul, no essential being, no definition of the person.

But I was always like this. If the sawdust did anything to my soul, my essential being, my me, it intensified it. The cattle were always food, I just didn’t know how to eat. So I nibbled away, consuming them as they consumed me, and each other, an endless circle of hunger and inhumanity.

I’m just better at it now.

Winter

Winter is a bad time for us. No matter where we have spent our time (spendthrifted our time; hoarded our time) in the snow or out, winter is a bad time for us.

The temperature drop means that the cattle huddle indoors. They fear the frost. The playground, normally populated by plumped veal, indolent heifers and castrated bulls, sits empty. In warmer weather they linger late, returning to graze even after they've troughed up, staying out until just before they are off to their barns for the night. As darkness and fatigue descend, so do we, and the stragglers are ours.

But in the winter they are inside long before they are tired, if they come out at all. In the winter we have to go looking for them, at their holiday parades, outside the movie theater, coming out of The Cheesecake Factory or the "family" restaurant. Brains taste better when they are fed, when they are fattened, marbeled by cultural transfats. Finding those well-fed brains in those sated cattle is harder in the winter. We can afford to be selective, to pick our moments and our meals, but it comes at a cost.

The cold weather slows us down. Without new blood, without fresh brains, our own grow sluggish. Blood thickens, the skin pales, necrosis, pathalogical and opportunistic death settles in and we no longer move as quickly. In the winter we take on a little of that graveyard locomotion, the cemetery shuffle that our dilapidated kin have perfected. We have to hide our faces in the daylight more often, in the doldrums between feedings, because it begins to look so obvious, so obvious, that we don't belong. We hole up, just like the cattle do, not because we fear the frost, but because we are afraid of discovery. Like we always are, but in winter with life going out of the world the wary are attuned to death, and they can see us.

Spring brings new life for everything.

Thanks

It would be easy to make a crude "I'm thankful for brains" joke. Too easy. It's the obvious place to go.

But what is less obvious than a zombie camouflaged by the suburbs?

I am thankful for the Veal Eater.

I am thankful for the predictability of the cattle.

I am thankful for the forced-and-encouraged anonymity of the suburban commuter lifestyle.

I am alternately thankful for and resentful of the promise she made, the one that ignited this desire to carry on. I love her and hate her for it.

And most importantly I am thankful for people on the internet who send me things like this:

Yes, I'm thankful for brains.

Ball

If I had to guess, if someone put a gun to my head (and didn't immediately pull the trigger; because, you know: zombie) I would say that seventy percent of our excursions are pre-emptive rather than necessitated. I know what happens when we go too long without eating: muscles atrophy, skin rots, the brain slows down, hair falls out. Good nutrition is important.

But we could persist even without the quantity of food we eat. We could be like the grave-dwellers, eating only a few times each year, and in some cases a few times each decade (you don't want to get close to these, though; they smell like death. Har har.)

But I don't want to persist; I want to thrive. I won't tolerate the death of the mind or of ambition, no matter how the body has failed. We continue because we promised her we would, that we would still be here. We continue because we must.

********************************************************************************

"Where did you get the ball, sweetie? Did you go eat without Daddy? You know you aren't supposed to go outside without Daddy."

"It."

"It what?"

"It give ball."

"What gave you the ball?"

"Hungry. Jump. It give ball." Pause. "Not bite. Not bite him."

Him. Fuck.

Chalmers

To look at us, to observe us, to interact with us, you'd never know that our heads were filled with sawdust (the Colonel's Secret Recipe of sawdust, of course, but still only sawdust) instead of living brains.

We respond to the world in the same ways that you do. But it's hard to tell, even for me, if we are really experiencing the world in the way you are. You with your brains. Do your brains give you access to a world that our sawdust doesn't allow us? I think I remember what the world used to be like; I think that it remains the same.

But that "think"...are we really thinking at all? Are we feeling? Are we noting the redness of red, the sweetness of brains, the brightness of the day?

Or are we just auto-responders, programmed-sawdust tricks, confusing, clever deceptions assembled by philosophers and mad scientists?

Desperate scientists.

Hopeless philosophers.

Whatever. I'll still say that I think that your brains taste amazing, even if you and I can never tell if I actually think at all.

And it's cold comfort to the cattle when my jaw clamps down that I may not really be thinking at all.

Lessons in Living, Dead.

Some days I'm better at getting out of the house than others. I bring my daughter with me to the grocery store or to the mall while I browse. I don't buy anything; any cash I pick up here or there goes straight to rent; I don't work and we need the apartment so that it at least looks like we're normal. (Aside: Those idiots who hang out in graveyards all day and all night, slowly rotting from the damp and never giving a thought to staying clean and inconspicuous just give me a headache. Make an effort. Fuckers. Take some pride in your being; you have been given a second shot at existence.)

As I was saying, I don't buy anything. That isn't the point of the trips to the store. The point is to care. Complacency will be the life of us.  If I don't care enough every day to get up, get out, and keep track of what is going on in the world then I will wither. The doldrums will win, the hunger will dominate, and my daughter and I will get caught as we rampage down a suburban street picking off soccer moms. So, activity, involvement. Playing among the cattle. Keeping track of who is divorcing whom, and whether or not Bat Boy has finally had a kid of his own; noting the changing fashions; watching books climb and fall from the bestseller lists; I pay attention to all of these things and pretend they matter until I almost convince myself. I train my being to react as though they are important, to behave effortlessly normal.

She thinks it's a big waste of time, of course. "Daddy, can we eat now?" she asks every time we go to the store. "No sweetie. Not now. Now we learn." I'm teaching her that there is value in normalcy, even if it's only self-preservation.

Only self-preservation. It's so hard to get through to her sometimes, to teach her that this existence we have is precarious and precious. She's young, and impulsive, and driven by the now.

Well, weren't we all like that once?

But the ones without Grandpa and the Kids

I'm not above using television to pass the time and distract the Veal Eater from her near-incessant pesterings to "just go out and crunch something."

Really, child? Did we not just return from a binge at the ball pit? Three moms, six kids, a nanny and a stay at home dad; there is no way you are still hungry. You're just bored.

So what do we watch? Something grisly? Macabre? Come on. Do you watch the Food Network when you're craving a burger?

We watch the Smurfs. Those little fuckers crack me up. But I can't stand the episodes with the new Smurfs. Where the hell did they even come from? Are the kids grafts? Are they Smurfette's kids (ignoring for the moment the fact that she is artificial)? And Grandpa? Like we needed an even older Smurf.

No, give me the early episodes any day. They are the perfect distraction from the pangs and quiet the Veal Eater's cravings.

Although whenever I see Gargamel's bald pate I do get a little peckish.