Freyja's Day Thing, 5/13/22

It Takes Guts To Live In This World

Pictured here: Six chickens’ worth of internal organs. For those who are more fascinated than nauseous, the round things to the right are/were developing eggs extracted from hens, with a thin membrane that would eventually become a shell. The ones that are covered in blood vessels were fertilized and would have developed an embryo. All of this was fed to pigs as a high-protein and high-iron treat.

It took all week to get time to do this! Real article tomorrow, but a lot of thoughts in the meantime:

• Yesterday, Dog #3’s invisible fence collar died (probably earlier), and she spent the entire night roaming the far pasture beyond the yard murdering chickens. She didn’t tear them apart or try eating them; just ran them down, broke their necks, and moved gleefully on to the next. Going out in the morning to feed the livestock was like walking onto a battlefield (the hogs and cows are currently in a separate field while the fences get repaired, so it was just corpses and feathers everywhere). Dog #3 then refused to be collected from the field and ran, leading Husbandmouth on a roughly 2-mile hunt where she fled through neighboring farms and woods. While he was doing this, I filled a wheelbarrow with chicken corpses, brought them all to the house, and processed Every. Single. One. We now have a freezer full of chicken and the hogs ate about 15 pounds of offal. If you’ve ever processed even a single chicken by hand, using just a knife, you know it can be moderately strenuous. Particularly depressing was that among the many casualties were our only two adult roosters (the Delaware Blues that were to be the pride of Husbandmouth’s heritage flock), so there will be no new chickens until the current cohort of juveniles get old enough to get it on. Maybe I can get a school district in Portland to send them some porn so they could get an early start, but they’d probably just have a bunch of non-procreative oral and anal sex and invent new pronouns (bird/birds/birdself?)

  After recovering Dog #3, Husbandmouth and I had a serious discussion of, “do we keep this dog?”

  Dog #3 was a Christmas present to me from Husbandmouth, an Alaskan husky obtained from an all-husky rescue in Maryland. Apparently, huskies are outrageously expensive to actually buy from a breeder or pet shop, but for some reason, Dog #3 and her mother were abandoned (most likely the mother was abandoned and subsequently gave birth) and were collected when they became a roadside nuisance, so other than a few months at the rescue, Dog #3 was likely entirely feral her whole life.

  

  Pictured here: A mass murderer and career criminal.

  While she is very sweet-natured and not at all aggressive to humans (though she is a pushy, rough player that strangers can find offputting), Dog #3 has been extremely hard to train, and has destroyed quite a few valued possessions since coming to Mouth Farms. She continues to chew power and water lines. She responds apparently obliviously to correction and needs to be physically dragged to be made to move.

  The decision ultimately came down to, “do we love this dog?” Husbandmouth was an unreserved “yes.” I also arrived at “yes,” but more hesitantly than I’d like- I remain uncertain as to whether Dog #3 loves me, though lots of people assure me that this is the case.

  In any event, a strong thread that runs through our family is that we don’t abandon people and we honor commitments, and a commitment was certainly made to give Dog #3 a forever home. I’ve also seen that virtually every dog I’ve been around- and I worked on a documentary about rescues- can, if given enough time and patience, become well socialized. So, Dog #3 stays.

  But it was a rough day facilitating a staff meeting over Zoom with the room still smelling of entrails and 3 hours of manual labor.

• Coincidentally, yesterday was also Dog #2’s birthday. Dog #2 came to us about 8 years ago, at 7 months old, and was also a rescued feral street dog, this time from the mean streets of Queens. He is tall, scrawny, goofy, awkward, nervous, and extremely concerned with being liked (as he universally is). He apparently had it rough as a street dog, as he came to us with a walleye from some sort of head trauma (which has since recovered) and a seizure disorder that manifested a year or so later (which has since largely gone into remission). He was so feral that Husbandmouth had to teach him to climb up and down stairs, to not be afraid of entering the house, and to eat food from vessels instead of the ground, all of which he was mortally afraid of.

  Anyway, a longstanding tradition in the Mouth household is that all our dogs have a “birthday cake”- whatever food they first reacted very strongly to. On their birthday, I make that dog’s “cake” as the family dinner with additional portions for all the dogs (who do not normally eat ‘human food’ in significant amounts, contributing to them all being incredibly healthy and fit). Dog #2’s birthday cake is meatloaf (which may as well be Brothermouth’s, too, except that he would likely also count virtually every form of actual cake as his ‘favorite’ as well). So, yesterday, dogs and primates alike enjoyed meatloaf from local Angus beef and Mouth Farm vegetables.

  

Pictured here: The birthday boy. He is deeply concerned that you, specifically, like him.

• The past two-plus years have been a source of rage and despair that washes back and forth over me in a sort of tidal pattern, occasionally stirred by news of additional, significant events. But lately, more than any other negative emotion, I find that the darker section of my headspace is consumed with how utterly powerless I feel: there’s been some substantial (if not truly transformative) good news on the truth of the scale, damage, and evil of COVID tyranny, and some local successes in pushing back on some of the truly awful social degradation of recent years, like the sexual grooming of children and the forceful imposition of perverse and racist progressive agendas. And yet, the bigger picture seems to chug merrily along, with the elites acting as though no significant criticism of their global biofascist agenda has ever surfaced, that mass surveillance, censorship, and behavioral control is the inevitable future of every living human; we’re still pouring truly staggering amounts of cash into a foreign war with absolutely no strategic value (and huge downsides) to us while our economy continues to be systematically, deliberately crippled; and so on.

  And all of it, even the good stuff, I’m utterly powerless to impact. It was all done by people way up there that never asked what I thought or wanted; I exercised no vote or argument or opinion; I simply hear reports about what the gods decided to do to mess with us today, and decide how I’m going to live with it. I’m keenly aware of the real reasons why food and gas bills are bleeding my bank account to the point of legitimate fear, I’m exceedingly well-informed of the awful diplomatic and political formula behind goading a nuclear power that I honestly couldn’t give a shit about into war, I’m as knowledgeable and educated about the bigger picture of the postmodern progressive agenda to utterly dismantle every adjacent brick of national cultural identity as the villains are themselves. And I can’t do shit about it.

  I am an ant that can tell you everything there is to know about how magnifying glasses are crafted and how light magnification creates heat while being burned alive by a cruel little shit torturing me on the sidewalk.

• Husbandmouth finally, after many travails, passed his trucker’s licensing tests in full, with CDL and all the certs you could have. So he can finally get a job, which will be a tremendous relief to my constant financial panic, and we’ll finally have all the trimmings of a flawless household to begin the humiliating, abusive process of adoption again.

  Real article tomorrow. Have a good weekend!