Fearsome. Infamous. Grotesque. Horrible.
All of these adjectives have been used to describe that which we dread: The Eater.
But have we been to harsh? I'll tell you what happened to me yesterday. I saw The Eater. It's true. It was The real Eater himself. He's actually not half-bad. I was patrolling the forests when I saw him. I was petrified. I knew he saw me as well. I fell to my knees and begged, nay, pleaded for my life.
But it turns out The Eater was actually not interested in consuming me at all. He was actually a pretty chill sort of dude. Sure, he was The Eater and he even enjoyed it, but really the economy had him looking for work just like everyone else. He just wanted to follow his dream and earn his money making music. Can't fault a guy for that. Hell, this cat even had some chops. I know, I saw it later.
Now, I'm not saying he might not pop off and just eat one of us one of these times. I mean, that's what he does. But the guy really just wants to make music. As long as I gots my guitar, this one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple person is safe.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Ohio's Real Problem
At this very moment, a debate rages over the possibility of allowing casinos to open their doors for business within the borders of the state, the proponents promise the creation of 34,000 new jobs in the state, effectively "solving" the unemployment issues we are currently facing, in addition, the incoming tax revenues created through the tourism & entertainment appeal of the casinos would stabilize the struggling local economies. Opponents of "Issue 3", set to be voted on tomorrow make the case for keeping casinos out of the local neighborhoods because they claim that the figures of new jobs and projected revenue are grossly overstated, not to mention certain provisions that give complete controlling interest of the casinos to certain people - who happen to operate outside the state of Ohio.
This is a trivial debate, and not something with which I will waste any more time.
No, the real problem with Ohio's economy & overall resident happiness lies in the quality of life being provided by business owners in the state. While the casino debate rages on, there are more pressing issues that need to be addressed by both the state house & senate.
New Author!
I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome my good friend Ezekiel Mossback to the ACNS family!
Ezekiel lives on a farm in rural Indiana where he currently raises chickens and pigs. I have visited him on numerous occasions to learn more about the art of farming and raising animals, and I am held in rapt anticipation for this coming weekend when I will have the opportunity to help slaughter the chickens and prepare them for sale to the general public. Great care has been taken to make these the healthiest damn chickens you've ever seen.
As you can probably see, the 2 posts below are stories from the farm. I'd like to have Ezekiel write a loosely regular post on the blog describing his experiences on the farm. That way, us city folk can learn to appreciate the natural beauty and order that surrounds and permeates our physical world. And maybe learn how to make moonshine too...
Ezekiel lives on a farm in rural Indiana where he currently raises chickens and pigs. I have visited him on numerous occasions to learn more about the art of farming and raising animals, and I am held in rapt anticipation for this coming weekend when I will have the opportunity to help slaughter the chickens and prepare them for sale to the general public. Great care has been taken to make these the healthiest damn chickens you've ever seen.
As you can probably see, the 2 posts below are stories from the farm. I'd like to have Ezekiel write a loosely regular post on the blog describing his experiences on the farm. That way, us city folk can learn to appreciate the natural beauty and order that surrounds and permeates our physical world. And maybe learn how to make moonshine too...
The Blackhead Pig
There is no kindness in nature. Those effete, modish inheritants of an overly technological world who hold, usually at no fault of their own, the sadly mistaken assumption, handed to them by whimsical progressives—self-styled as such largely because they have progressed beyond reality-- and fostered by a few decades of nineteen-eighties-and-nineties public schooling and the television specials they watched after that schooling from three-thirty until their parents got home, that at least some animals are ‘nice’, had better avoid taking any vacations near the ‘natural world’ or their mistakenness will soon be sorely so. Animals are not intrinsic victims, but very often, if not normally are wicked, stupid, loathsome things intent upon the destruction of others and usually themselves. Anyone who thinks animals have rights has never discussed it with any animals, for if they did, the animal would bite their mouth off and end the conversation. ‘Animal Rights’ fideists have never met this blackhead pig that lives on my farm.
I went to buy feeder pigs with my friend Will. I forgot to tell him that the best way to carry a pig is by the back leg, and when he grabbed the blackhead pig around her middle, she began her shrieking, suicide inspiring scream that is still continuing as I write this two months later. The other pigs make somewhat pleasant grunts, and when worked up at my proximity, and the anticipation of food, they might emit as much as a grunting-snort sound. The blackhead pig condemns everything about me with her squinty, contemptuous eyes, and her pointed ears that curl back and around her head much like Satan’s horns must do. While I try to pass by, feeding the chickens, she screams commandingly at my cardiovascular system, frantically demanding it jack up my blood pressure until my brain explodes out of my eyeballs. If this fails, she increases the decibels of her deflating-balloon-combined-with-a-falling-bomb-and-locomotive-brakes cursing screech, mockingly daring me to shoot either her or myself in the face.
I tried to tell myself, in my better moments, that it was not her fault that this was her only means of communication. Perhaps she was the victim of her own limited, wretched vocabulary. I tried scratching her back, patting her while I fed her apples. My hours of kicking back the mud pushed over the electric fence in the pigs’ clever attempts to escape-- doubtless conjured by the blackhead pig in order to seize my farmhouse, kill me in my sleep, and begin running the farm—and my back-breaking labor repairing their warm straw hut that they insisted on destroying so they could spite me by freezing to death, were rewarded by the blackhead pig’s increasingly clever attempts to eat me.
For example, one sunny afternoon, as the birds cheerfully chirped death threats to other birds near their territory, I strolled over to the pigs’ pasture to give them a bucket of corn. They love corn more than I love Krispy Kreme donuts, but not, apparently, as much as they love human flesh hot off the femur. The pigs were nowhere to be seen, which is unusual because they are normally frolicking about the pasture pretending they are chasing down little kids, or ruling the world. Thank God I am just enough smarter than the pigs that I suspected that something was up. I closed the gate behind me, and still they lay hidden. I poured out their corn, and they remained silent. It was only when I walked out into the pasture, seemingly cut off from ready escape that they poured forth from their den, the blackhead pig emitting her gleeful ring-wraith siren, and surrounded me. They had not accounted for my easy ability to step over the electric fence, and they gnashed their teeth and kicked each other for overlooking this obvious flaw in their perfect crime.
Every increase in my attempts to coddle and care for the pigs has been matched and raised by the pigs’ efforts to eat me. Since the overt attempt upon my life, they have chosen to keep their cards close to the chest, only casually opening their jaws and nonchalantly putting my leg between them. Never do they act violently enough that it will demand conclusive reciprocity on my part: after all they know that they only grow more valuable as they put on meat, and it would take a clear and present danger from them to make me butcher them before they weigh enough.
Animals are not kind, and they have no ‘rights’. Without the human person to care for them, to domesticate them, to drag them into the fire-light as White Fang was, animals trample each other, lay down in puddles to drown themselves, poop everywhere, seek out heavy objects to crush them, and eat their young. The ‘natural world’ is a free-for-all in which everything competes in exhibiting a newer and more absurd form of dying. The human person struggles to eke out a tiny corner of kindness, sense, and creation, before the ragweeds and multiflora roses of dying drag it down. Animals do not deserve our care, they have no ‘rights’ before which the human will must pay respect. However, our dignity demands that we care. Human rights and dignity are only kept alive by responsibility, and in caring for things, in tending our gardens, we safeguard our own human rights, and pay respect to the grave duty of being a human being. Failing to care for those things that are our responsibility does violence to our rights, to our dignity and freedom. Without this being truly human, the chickens would all be torn limb from limb by possums. Imagine a world where possums roam at will.
Disgusting. I have to go now; I hear the blackhead pig screaming for her dinner. If I fail to return to provide this essay with an adequate conclusion, it is because the blackhead pig has eaten my fingers.
I went to buy feeder pigs with my friend Will. I forgot to tell him that the best way to carry a pig is by the back leg, and when he grabbed the blackhead pig around her middle, she began her shrieking, suicide inspiring scream that is still continuing as I write this two months later. The other pigs make somewhat pleasant grunts, and when worked up at my proximity, and the anticipation of food, they might emit as much as a grunting-snort sound. The blackhead pig condemns everything about me with her squinty, contemptuous eyes, and her pointed ears that curl back and around her head much like Satan’s horns must do. While I try to pass by, feeding the chickens, she screams commandingly at my cardiovascular system, frantically demanding it jack up my blood pressure until my brain explodes out of my eyeballs. If this fails, she increases the decibels of her deflating-balloon-combined-with-a-falling-bomb-and-locomotive-brakes cursing screech, mockingly daring me to shoot either her or myself in the face.
I tried to tell myself, in my better moments, that it was not her fault that this was her only means of communication. Perhaps she was the victim of her own limited, wretched vocabulary. I tried scratching her back, patting her while I fed her apples. My hours of kicking back the mud pushed over the electric fence in the pigs’ clever attempts to escape-- doubtless conjured by the blackhead pig in order to seize my farmhouse, kill me in my sleep, and begin running the farm—and my back-breaking labor repairing their warm straw hut that they insisted on destroying so they could spite me by freezing to death, were rewarded by the blackhead pig’s increasingly clever attempts to eat me.
For example, one sunny afternoon, as the birds cheerfully chirped death threats to other birds near their territory, I strolled over to the pigs’ pasture to give them a bucket of corn. They love corn more than I love Krispy Kreme donuts, but not, apparently, as much as they love human flesh hot off the femur. The pigs were nowhere to be seen, which is unusual because they are normally frolicking about the pasture pretending they are chasing down little kids, or ruling the world. Thank God I am just enough smarter than the pigs that I suspected that something was up. I closed the gate behind me, and still they lay hidden. I poured out their corn, and they remained silent. It was only when I walked out into the pasture, seemingly cut off from ready escape that they poured forth from their den, the blackhead pig emitting her gleeful ring-wraith siren, and surrounded me. They had not accounted for my easy ability to step over the electric fence, and they gnashed their teeth and kicked each other for overlooking this obvious flaw in their perfect crime.
Every increase in my attempts to coddle and care for the pigs has been matched and raised by the pigs’ efforts to eat me. Since the overt attempt upon my life, they have chosen to keep their cards close to the chest, only casually opening their jaws and nonchalantly putting my leg between them. Never do they act violently enough that it will demand conclusive reciprocity on my part: after all they know that they only grow more valuable as they put on meat, and it would take a clear and present danger from them to make me butcher them before they weigh enough.
Animals are not kind, and they have no ‘rights’. Without the human person to care for them, to domesticate them, to drag them into the fire-light as White Fang was, animals trample each other, lay down in puddles to drown themselves, poop everywhere, seek out heavy objects to crush them, and eat their young. The ‘natural world’ is a free-for-all in which everything competes in exhibiting a newer and more absurd form of dying. The human person struggles to eke out a tiny corner of kindness, sense, and creation, before the ragweeds and multiflora roses of dying drag it down. Animals do not deserve our care, they have no ‘rights’ before which the human will must pay respect. However, our dignity demands that we care. Human rights and dignity are only kept alive by responsibility, and in caring for things, in tending our gardens, we safeguard our own human rights, and pay respect to the grave duty of being a human being. Failing to care for those things that are our responsibility does violence to our rights, to our dignity and freedom. Without this being truly human, the chickens would all be torn limb from limb by possums. Imagine a world where possums roam at will.
Disgusting. I have to go now; I hear the blackhead pig screaming for her dinner. If I fail to return to provide this essay with an adequate conclusion, it is because the blackhead pig has eaten my fingers.
John 3:19
I arose long before dawn, in the fog enshrouded dark, from my warm air mattress alongside the radiator. Consoling my groggy innards with coffee as hot as the morn was not, and as dark as the window through which, with sleep begrimed eyes I watched, I balanced my shotgun, breeched, upon my knee. For some time I sat upon a stool, watching nearsightedly for some stirring near a white fence that loomed monolithically in the mist.
The hillcrest became a black line contrast. A buck placidly eased along it. Another followed. Then suddenly my eyes were snatched by the trap at the periphery of my vision. In it wiggled a white- faced vermin. I had the satisfaction of having stopped this threat to my chickens, but was nevertheless burdened by the duty that I now had to execute.
I donned my marine-corps sweatshirt and stocking hat, belted on my jeans, and shut the breech of my shotgun with a determined click that announced its latent power. Too powerful: at the gun-case I traded it for a restrained but equally reliable .22. In my rubber boots I rounded the house. The possum faced me from its cage, a white circle of fur with malevolent black angled slits of eyes that held hatred and sure knowledge of what was to come. Not afraid, not sad, the possum awaited me head-on, angry that it had been suckered by this inferior creature, but resolute in the knowledge of its fate.
"Im sorry possum," I said, looking it in the face, and took direct aim at its forehead. Josie the cat appeared, rubbing around my boots and looking at the possum. "Go on Josie," I said, not wanting her to see what I had to do, nor to be startled by the gunshot. She did not listen, so I walked a distance to get her to follow. I left her sitting near the porch. I had to act now before she returned to be an outward judge of my inward compunction.
I clicked back the safety, took four quick strides towards the possum, formed an E upon its face with the sights of the rifle, and shot it. The possum whipped around, dying. I had hit it straight through the head, but I wanted no risk of it suffering, and fired twice more. The second shot blew its jaw half way off, and it bled heavily. One sure look confirmed the deed, and I lingered not one second more. I safed the rifle while turning immediately around, and as I stepped grimly, one step after another, I could not keep my head from hanging.
It is not possums' fault that they are evil, but nevertheless they are evil. they would gut 50 of my chickens in a few minutes, just for the fun of it, and eat only a mouthful. It had to be done.
The hillcrest became a black line contrast. A buck placidly eased along it. Another followed. Then suddenly my eyes were snatched by the trap at the periphery of my vision. In it wiggled a white- faced vermin. I had the satisfaction of having stopped this threat to my chickens, but was nevertheless burdened by the duty that I now had to execute.
I donned my marine-corps sweatshirt and stocking hat, belted on my jeans, and shut the breech of my shotgun with a determined click that announced its latent power. Too powerful: at the gun-case I traded it for a restrained but equally reliable .22. In my rubber boots I rounded the house. The possum faced me from its cage, a white circle of fur with malevolent black angled slits of eyes that held hatred and sure knowledge of what was to come. Not afraid, not sad, the possum awaited me head-on, angry that it had been suckered by this inferior creature, but resolute in the knowledge of its fate.
"Im sorry possum," I said, looking it in the face, and took direct aim at its forehead. Josie the cat appeared, rubbing around my boots and looking at the possum. "Go on Josie," I said, not wanting her to see what I had to do, nor to be startled by the gunshot. She did not listen, so I walked a distance to get her to follow. I left her sitting near the porch. I had to act now before she returned to be an outward judge of my inward compunction.
I clicked back the safety, took four quick strides towards the possum, formed an E upon its face with the sights of the rifle, and shot it. The possum whipped around, dying. I had hit it straight through the head, but I wanted no risk of it suffering, and fired twice more. The second shot blew its jaw half way off, and it bled heavily. One sure look confirmed the deed, and I lingered not one second more. I safed the rifle while turning immediately around, and as I stepped grimly, one step after another, I could not keep my head from hanging.
It is not possums' fault that they are evil, but nevertheless they are evil. they would gut 50 of my chickens in a few minutes, just for the fun of it, and eat only a mouthful. It had to be done.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
I'm starting to get the feeling...
That this 'Higgins' character is a figment of my imagination. He's the 'Tyler Durden' of ACNS. I've got some 'homework assignments' to take care of...
Exciting Business Opportunity!
As any mildly internet-saavy person understands, unsolicited emails from people who are waaaay to excited about what they have to offer are usually some sort of ploy to steal your money or identity. Ususally.
About once in a person's lifetime, there arrives an opportunity. I'm not talking about your usual daily opportunities to drink an exceptionally delicious cup of coffee or put on your favorite pair of pants. No, this is much bigger - this is a ONCE IN A LIFETIME opportunity. The proof is in the description - these things only happen about once in a lifetime or so - Redundant, I know, but I want to make sure you understand.
Since I work in the pre-owned medical equipment industry, these unsolicited emails show up in my inbox on a regular basis - usually, they end up right in the digital trash can for virtual incineration. Most of these emails are foriegners looking to steal equipment from my company by "purchasing" it with no intention of paying for it. But I just recieved one that was different. This email is from a supplier here in the US that's going to make me a rich man. I'll let you have a look, just promise me you won't tell anyone about it. I'm going to suprise my parents with a new house with all the sweet cash money I'll be rollin' in. Check it:
It's time to start anew. I know that THIS is what I was made to do - my destiny, if you will. That, and I've always wanted to work for a company with a catchy name like "Rocket Sprockets". True happiness is right around the corner with this promise of a 'once in a lifetime' opportunity & I'm not going to let this pass me by...
About once in a person's lifetime, there arrives an opportunity. I'm not talking about your usual daily opportunities to drink an exceptionally delicious cup of coffee or put on your favorite pair of pants. No, this is much bigger - this is a ONCE IN A LIFETIME opportunity. The proof is in the description - these things only happen about once in a lifetime or so - Redundant, I know, but I want to make sure you understand.
Since I work in the pre-owned medical equipment industry, these unsolicited emails show up in my inbox on a regular basis - usually, they end up right in the digital trash can for virtual incineration. Most of these emails are foriegners looking to steal equipment from my company by "purchasing" it with no intention of paying for it. But I just recieved one that was different. This email is from a supplier here in the US that's going to make me a rich man. I'll let you have a look, just promise me you won't tell anyone about it. I'm going to suprise my parents with a new house with all the sweet cash money I'll be rollin' in. Check it:
Mr. Hanessey,
Rocket Sprockets, Inc. is an international supplier of partially used medical equipment. We supply over one billion hospitals, clinics, prisons, and resorts with middle-of-the-line syringes, plastic tubing, spoons, bunson burners, and douches. I am also proud to say that we have practically cornered the market on prior-owned proctological equipment!
We are interested in using you as our regional consultant for acquisitions for this region. You would receive commisions for all acquisitions made within this solar system (excluding Uranus, and Pluto which scientists have conclusively proven to not exist).
If you are interested in starting a new and exciting relationship with Rocket Sprockets, Inc., call me any time, night or day and we can 'grease the wheels' for the most lubritive business adventure of your life!
Sincerely,
Roger D. Riordan
Staff Manager
1-800-666-1234
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