Mongolian Squirrels
Yesterday, I was butchering a tiny chicken. Usually, I’m quite fond of doing this. It’s a skill that requires less and less energy & investment. The better you get, the more familiar you become with the creatures you’re cutting up. On your 10th chicken, you’ll understand its anatomy so well, you can separate a leg in about 4 cuts. Left of the joint (1) Right of the joint (2) Tendon inside the joint(3) follow through, and finish the slice (4). It’s a very meditative experience, and satisfies that thing in me in an odd way.
While preparing last nights dinner however, I felt sad for the chicken I was butchering. The entire thing was about the size of my hand. Was it young or did this type of chicken only get that big? either way, how could the farmers look at such a small cute thing, with barely any meat on it and decide to kill it?! This was very out of character for me, but it reminded me of a moment I saw on TV last year.
Y’see I’m real keen on those wilderness survival shows where they drop someone in a forest in the middle of nowhere with some cameras and have them record what it takes to survive. I was watching a season of one of these shows when I became particularly enamored by one contestant. He was this very emotional guy who actually cried every time he had to hunt and kill something to eat!(there’s a picture of him below) I couldn’t get over it! I’m always so fascinated with and attracted to people who have strengths that I lack, and I admired him so much for it! On this particular episode, (the one that broke him in fact) he had been starving for days tracking a large deer. His rationale was that, if he killed one large animal, he could sustain himself from the one kill, as opposed to many small ones. Unfortunately for him, the mongolian wilderness he was surviving in was far too treacherous and the deer got away! Right as he had accepted defeat, a squirrel (or perhaps a mouse, my brain doesn’t work well!) walked right into his camp. He killed it, ate it, and cried again.
Initially all I could think of was how much I loved that man and how sad I was to see him quit the show so he wouldn’t have to keep killing the woodland creatures, but yesterday as I did the dishes, I thought of the squirrel.
“How fucking unlucky do you have to be, to wander into that exact spot, at the perfect time when this human from America, who is usually thousands of miles away, would be right there in front of you, starving to death, the day before he was set to leave that very area”
Really, what are the odds of being that exact squirrel, out of all the squirrels in the forest?! It’s all so cruel! But then I realized, we are all that squirrel! 1 in a quadrillion chance to be born in the first place, and then the rest of your life is determined by the luck of which piece of dirt you were shat out on to. What color did your skin end up being? what gender were you assigned? is your family wealthy? is your country poor? do you live in a hyper capitalist war nation, or a small village ravaged by colonialism? are you able bodied? or deformed?
It seems to me like I rolled a lot of the bad pieces when making my character! I am that squirrel and so are a lot of the people in my community who would be reading this.
Every time I see an ignorant person claiming to be proud of their heritage because it supposedly makes them superior to another, the first question I think of is, “what did you do to be born who you are?”
“I’m a descendant of the spartans! the greeks! the assyrians! we were pharaohs! we invented this! you stole this!”
yes, but what did *you* do to be walking around so proudly? NOTHING! It’s always nothing, just pure luck. How exhausting!
The chicken noodle soup that I made, was the best I and my roommate had ever had though!
