Day 90:
Fishing is
- Something I love doing
- Incredibly time-consuming for not enough payout
So as much as I hated doing it, I started killing some of my chicken ducks.
What with all the eggs they lay, I have a lot of chicken ducks. Probably like two hundred. (When they finally come for me and it’s time for me to tear down that fence, every bug within miles is going to find itself on the other end of a usually-cooped-up beak.) So it’s not because I will run out of eggs that I hesitate. It’s not even because I feel like I have a relationship with each of these birds – there’s too many of them at this point.
It’s because cutting meat is icky.
Stop laughing.
Seriously. When was the last time someone in a populated civilized part of the universe had to cut through tendons and sinew? Most of our protein is either mass-processed in a factory planetside and 100% boneless when it gets to our plates, or is grown in vats on a ship then flavored and processed to taste like meat.
We don’t eat animals anymore, we eat meat.
Turns out animals are messier – a lot messier – than a pound of ground beef would lead you to believe. They have joints to separate and inner organs to remove and all kinds of weird things…
Like there are these two little things in the tail of a chicken duck – glands of some sort maybe? If you leave them in and cook the bird, you may as well just throw the whole thing out. It’s like skunk flavoring for birds. Just awful.
So I’m doing it; I’m killing my birds for food.
Even that’s not all that easy. Despite everything that people say about running around like a chicken with the head cut off, cutting off a chicken’s head while it’s standing around is not easy, even with a sword. And I don’t have time to make a cleaver. So I’ve been grabbing the birds, slicing their throats with my stone knife (which is getting dull, which is a problem) and trying not to get covered in blood.
Anyway, if there’s one up-side to this gross and disgusting process (other than tasty grilled meat) it’s that the birds are pretty fatty, so I’ve got grease for the first time since I got here. I can finally properly pan-fry vegetables. Anything else I cook is juicier.
And I can use the grease to do things like grease the drill bit I made so that it goes a bit smoother, which is helpful because there’s no engine to the drill except me.
And that, my friends, is the story of how killing my chicken ducks is helping me build a bridge.
ps. I did notice I’ve been here 90 days as of today. I’m furious at The Company, and that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
