Who Eats Who?

You do not eat it, it eats you. And slowly you die from the inside out.

It secretes, what may be, a morphine like derivative. One can only speculate. But one thing is certain…you think you are at peace. That the world is just fine. That re runs of Oprah are 2 thumbs up, and only because the remote is buried too deep in the cushions for you to excavate it and search for Jerry Springer.

It allows you to convince yourself that you aren’t bent out of shape waiting 4 years for the next Harry Potter book. And that if the chick you met online isn’t down for shacking up after a gin ginger ale and a spritzer of cannabis then she’s just prude, and simple, and you’re smarter then her anyway.

Eventually you notice the blotches on your skin. But you keep eating it and it keeps eating you. And the blotches turn bright red. As you are on the way to see the doctor one of them bursts open and blood and entrails pour out from your stomach, but it doesn’t feel half bad. Now you are dizzy and your fluids are filling the base of your car. Things are going from fuzzy to black, and all you can think about is that you are depreciating the resell value of your vehicle by mucking up the interior.

And when you awake you are no longer you...


It owns your memories but does not allow you access to them. It replaces the little bits of missing flesh on your tummy with its own tissue, a thin little Kleenex like membrane that prevents further intestinal drainage. Then it walks your body to the meat market in the center of down town. The one behind the Starbucks just off 3rd street, and the butcher welcomes you with a hug and a pat on the back. Even though you do not know the butcher, it really does not matter, you are not you. Who the butcher recognizes is someone else, someone else swimming in your skin. You are just along for the ride, it owns you now and you bend to its will, even though you are not allowed access to its thoughts. You are just a marionette carrying out a thoroughly rehearsed performance.

The butcher gives you a handsome little reward, though you aren’t sure why. Witch you then take to the bank and deposit in your account (but it’s not your account, its someone else’s…that person or thing pulling the strings, the one who has consumed you).

Then you return to the butcher. He tips his hat as if to say “tah tah for now mate” There is a brief handshake and then he swipes you across the neck with his meat cleaver. Not in a violent hateful way. In a smooth, nonchalant, business like way.

He then cuts you into tiny pieces. Your choice bits get shrink wrapped and have little blue ribbons pasted on them. Your leftovers and bone get hung from an iron wrack in a pressurized room. The room fills with highly concentrated blasts of steam. The steam heats and liquefies the gristle, and the last bits of meat drip from your bones onto a collection filter on the ground, and your bones get tossed out. The remains get poured from the filter into a blender with a corn starch paste and puréed. This gets tossed into a little can labeled “cat food.” And by the end of the day you (and it) sit neatly wrapped in roughly 50 separate cans, packages, and display cases.

2/3rds of you will be sold out to other people. People who will cook you for dinner, or pack your for lunch, only to slowly be consumed from the inside out. Eventually they too will return to the butcher, just as you did this day.  Like you, they will take his money and drop it into the same mysterious bank account, then continue the cycle over again until the butcher has made ground beef and pork cutlets out of a fair portion of the upper east side. All will merge into this uni-conscience, this meat eaters hive mind.

Eventually it will have you (mixed in equal proportions with thousands of other people) cash out the account and retire to a time share in the Bahamas during the off season, and perhaps a bungalow in London’s West Indian Quay during the summer months.

The last 1/3rd of you will sit in the butchers display case and rot under the neon lights until you are thrown into a rusty dumpster 5 days later and you will be finished off by flies, maggots, and the occasional crow.

But fear not. Take heart in the fact that they are not eating you.

In reality it is you eating them.