i've been reading this book called "Stiff" by Mary Roach.
it's about human cadavers.
awesome, i skip the bar and john legend invite to read this book.
it was however, a bit disconcerting when i was in the cafeteria at work, the Southwest Airlines news was on TV, and people were eating lunch, enjoying their an hour of time off -- explaining to them what happens to your body when you're in a plane and it hits water (usually if you fly and drop, you drop on water)
"Well, so all your organs are in midair, searching to arrest. They need to stop sometime and usually you hit water. When the body's velocity is stopped by the water, the part of the heart closest to the water stops and smashes against the internal walls of your body. The other part of your heart is still hanging midair and this tug and pull -- tears your heart to pieces."
In this article, Alex talks about the same sort of things as does Mary, only with non-humans. Now, imagine the game birds in this article are actually humans. Makes death a whole lot easier to deal with. I, for one, will from now on book my flight seats closest to the emergency exit door.
The birds lie beautiful, iridescent against the folds of a polythene bin bag. They don't look peaceful. They look dead. They're a brace - a young couple. My mind races with macabre romanticism, imagining the dead lovers' characters.He's a preening fop, proud and dandy. She's a Laura Ashley librarian; shy, but bright. Her sensitivity coupled with his sense of unbridled adventure gives them that impenetrable air of invincibility that is exuded by soul mates when confronted by the tedious insignificance of the rest of creation. I don't know whether I should cut their heads off first, or pull off their feathers.
The pheasants are a present from my friend Gordon. His dad is a gamekeeper near Loch Lomond. Guinea fowl, peacocks, grouse and rare-breed hens peck for grit and grains among rusting MoD miscellanea and abandoned Vespas.
I decide to pluck the feathers first and start with the gent. I keep him in the bin bag to catch his clothes as I strip him. Because he has been hanging for 12 days he's ripe and they come off easily. I try to be gentle. When I'm careless, his skin rips, revealing the yellowy fat underneath. His dignity is plucked until he's naked apart from the feathers around his head. He looks like a murdered gangster, humiliated in death, wearing nothing but his trilby and brilliantine. His bumpy skin is bruised a violent purple from where he was shot. I carve the lead from his wounds. His moll takes less time, as if she doesn't care so much about losing her dowdy dress. As I cut off their heads, they are transformed. They are no longer creatures with a personality. They are meat.
I am embarrassingly squeamish. When I watched Dirty Pretty Things on a flight recently, I passed out during the operation scene and was woken by [bandmate] Nick McCarthy and a steward slapping my face. As I pull the wormy entrails out of the birds, I feel nothing, however. I wonder if it's because I've gutted hundreds of birds before, but it's not. It's because it's no longer a bird. It's now meat and there's no compassion for meat. It scares me when I consider the implications of this, so I don't. I get on with it. I brown the pieces, put them in a casserole dish with some vegetables and herbs then drown them with a bottle of wine. A few hours later, there is a general candle-lit murmuring of "rich", "tender", "gamey" etc. Beautiful feathers lie under peelings and coffee grounds, like a secret between a murderer and his kill.
ยท Alex Kapranos is the lead singer of Franz Ferdinand
