How to Respond to Jehovah’s Witnesses Series – “They are just imperfect men”

But lets face it. At the point I’m beating a dead lion, and crying over spilled choices. Enough of that shit. Anybody with a lick of sense and open eyes can easily figure out that god is a story, and a story invented as yet another tool to control your mind with, in a whole bag of tools for the same purpose, like the tool called Ari Melber or the socket set labeled ‘Kardashian’.

Don’t consent to letting them be used on you. Free your god damned mind. There is no salvation anywhere, but if there was, its name would be

Anarchy.

***

It was too cold and damp to go for a walk today, but I did it anyway, for a Work-related purpose. I needed to get these pictures.

I like turkey, I love lamb, and when I am out stalking the elusive perfect breakfast burrito, I’m usually going to order it with bacon.

For the most part though I’ve always been perfectly aware that continuing to live as a carnivore is pretty incompatible with the main thrust of my values.

Some activist recently put up these little postcards on the co-op bulletin board.

I saw them a week or two back; didn’t really think much about it, but for some no-doubt-divine reason, I went for that walk to capture them and bring them here.

Yes, it’s propaganda, and I don’t know if all of it is even true. But if I went out and did the research and could come back here and tell you for sure that chickens can only count to four … so what? The subtext and the real message would not change.

I think the one that really got to me was the last one about pigs and belly rubs. This may well be because I would really, really love a belly rub right now myself. I’m going to linger in that longing ache for a moment. Pardon me.

Okay, back.

So a baby pig can recognize its name long before a baby human can.

But the evil System profits mightily from chopping up that semi-sentient baby pig with a name, wrapping its remains in a body bag of plastic (hey, there’s the plastic again!), and selling it to you and me because we think maybe a proper chili verde would be just the thing for dinner.

Listen, I often do just that, so I’m not shaming hypocritically.

But I’m looking at his little Wilbur face right now–or maybe Hers–and I’m not resisting the feeling of being horrified … with how I live, by how we all live, routinely.

I talk a lot about what the System and the Empire do when they put human beings into the Meat Grinder–half a million dead Iraqi kids being “worth it” to the ironically named Secretary All Bright, the homeless at the traffic lights of the world’s richest country, and all of that–but it’s a little more personal somehow, when it is me walking down the meat aisle and making a choice to favor this chunk of Wilbur’s body over that one. You know I want a fresh kill, and not a corpse that’s starting to look too much like a corpse.

Anything good on clearance?

No. Good has very little to do with it. The savory tang of the simmering pot aside.

***

Am I about to rush to vegetarianism?

I doubt it. At least not for those admittedly compelling reasons alone.

But there are other reasons.

Before this storm, I stocked up on groceries. At the Albertson’s I stumbled across a whole rare organic chicken, and it wasn’t violently expensive. Maybe four bucks a pound, $15 total.

I brought it home, watched some videos, and put the bird into my dutch oven. It lives now in clean and cooked pieces in a storage container in the fridge, waiting for my hunger and pleasure. The bones, the skin, they’re already at the landfill by now.

In my experience it’s really hard to find good organic meat at all, and hard to justify the expense of it even if you do.

But even the often fruitless searching and the money isn’t quite enough to push me all the way there.

I’m trying with a mighty effort to simplify my life and to get the hell out of the way.

Meat … is complicated.

That chicken was the one and only thing I’ve used the oven for in the many months I’ve been holed up here.

In a truly simplified life somewhere out of the way, I’m not sure an oven justifies itself. I mean … maybe one of those cute little things that sits on a woodstove and folds up out of the way … but really? Meh.

Even mucking about with doing a bird on a cooktop isn’t very efficient. You’ve got the paper towels to pat it dry. You’ve got the blood and juices befouling countertops and sinks and posing hazards. You’ve got to keep a meat thermometer around (thank god the landlady’s drawer had one in it). Compared to something like a chickpea curry masala and rice, it’s just a lot of time and bother, relatively.

A lot of time, money, equipment, and fuss.

All on top of the image of a living thing that once counted to ten embalmed and resting in the mausoleum of my refrigerator.

It’s Overkill.

***

I used to think of The Hell Out Of The Way as a place.

I still do. To a point.

More and more, I see it as a process.

It’s going to continue, I think, to be worth it to haul around five or ten pounds of bulk Equal Exchange coffee beans, and a grinder and a kettle and a French press, at a basic cost of something like fifty dollars a month.

Probably the same for sending $135 to Elon every time the calendar comes up on an 11, so long as I have $135 to send.

Probably a truck, and tires, and gas, a big kit for an arched cabin, and a check to Dreamhost and Protonmail and the pharmacist.

Is chicken worth it? Is pig meat? Is an oven? On these things I’m leaning more toward a no.

Pile the moral cost on top of the actual cost on top of the time it takes to get the money and the time it takes to invest it judiciously in flesh-eating and gas for an oven, and … I’m just not feeling it, at the end of 2022.

Thinking, in this warped anarchic way, is all I have to offer you out there in the world.

I hope it’s enough.

In the meantime, let’s check in on what Gabor Mate’ has to say on the subject of Enough. Try to ignore the surrounding chirpiness and listen to … the meat of it.