on tropes and truths

they're eating the skunks, they're eating the rats

an activated adrenaline system at three am can impact a life.

for me, the impact is that this post is late going out. for you, my sudden leap from sleep to fight mode was instant but resonates still meow.

I heard a terrible bird noise and a gutteral animal noise. As my head became clear and Laura confirmed that our hens were safe, from the sound of things it was a racoon killing a young crow.

Fuck I hate racoons.

We need some ‘boat people’ to come and clean things up.

I guess though, this would be taking advantage of the boat people.

And then I’m a cat person. I prefer cats to people.

There’s a new cat in the house. freddy.

freddy’s been running around the neighbourhood for a few months now.

He’s cute, orange and has a huge set of nuts.

Well, he did until yesterday when the vet added freddy’s nuts to his ball collection.

we used to have a vet in toronto called dr tandy. Dr Tandy had a collection of all of the nuts he removed from animals over the years.

when i worked at the oyster bar, the owner had a dog he’d bring into the bar all the time. it was a chocolate lab called cadbury.

the owner kept cadbury’s nuts in a jar behind the bar. the idea of drinking formaldehyde and a pair of the mutt’s nuts brings whole new meaning to the words ‘top shelf' spirit’.

The cook there was a top shelf spirit himself. Johnny was Korean Canadian. He spoke english better than I do. I sound like a Nova Scotian. We have a way we’ve arsed up the language all our own. Johnny sounded like someone from L.A. Or Toronto. Or Vancouver. You know. He sounded like that generic north american accent we hear on tee vee.

Essentially, he ‘sounded white’.

When the owner brought in Cadburry?

Johnny sounded like Jerry Lewis pretending to be Japanese.

He made everyone super uncomfortable. This made things hilarious.

Even more hilarious?

He’d have a big ass knife in one hand and a sharpening steel in the other.

He’d call out:

Oh Cadbuuuuuuu reeeeee! Ah-come ah ovah heh. I rike a make goo food. You make a nice soup.

Then to the guest’s he’d shout: Ah you no worry. Not fo yu. Just me. One time each year. Good for blood.

He would then nod his head and wink, turn on his heal then walk off sharpening his knife while singing some sort of high and nasal Korean folk song.

Again. This was hilarious.

Some don’t laugh at this sort of stuff though.

Grace for example. Grace was born in Vietnam in the mid to late seventies. She came to Toronto as a small child. She, like thousands of other Vietnamese refugees arrived by boat. When the boat people came, the racoons in my wife’s working poor east end downtown Toronto neighbourhood disappeared.

Grace finds this very embarrassing.

Yes! They ate racoons. I ate racoons. You need to understand, we were starving. This was meat.

So, when the big onanage coloured windbag Turnip starts going on about they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, I do not suspect that desperate, poor and hungry immigrants are doing this.

They likely are.

What I find surprising is that someone would be so comfortable that they would not have the compassion to imagine how hungry starving people would want to eat whatever they could in order to survive.

But what’s repugnant?

We pretend that poor people either DO NOT OR SHOULD NOT eat pets. We get offended and puffed with outrage when someone suggests that immigrants eat pets. Immigrants from places with a real threat of starvation will eat whatever the fuck they can find.

There is no worse way to die than to starve.

They’re eating the dogs.

They’re eating the cats.

And in a nation as wealthy as ‘Merica, a nation that wastes a hundred and fifty billion pounds of food every year, it’s obscene to leave these people unfed.

Someone needs to buy these people some real food.

There’s plenty to go around.