Distasteful
He is a young man laying in a hospital bed after a car accident. He hit an abutment or a pole going 80 mph or so.
His body is still alive; his brain is dead. He’s not coming back. His parents are just now signing the papers to donate his eyes and heart and lungs and liver. They are mourning already.
And they have no idea what I’ve just done.
I’ve surreptitiously turned off his ventilator; I know how. And I have held a pillow over his face and suffocated him. It takes less time then you think. The young man is dead.
I’ve heard it said by those who have eaten people that the flesh around the knuckles taste best. I’ve taken that as my advice, tied a tourniquet around his upper arm (I know he’s dead, but I’m hoping that this will reduce any oozing) and began my dissection at the elbow. I plan on making a stew.
It goes slower than I anticipate and know that soon someone will come in the room and around the curtain and catch me in the act. When I get caught (and how the hell is anyone going to get away with crap like this?), I’m going to say:
My friend at Whistle & Fish “dislikes most memes.” He finds the questions soft and unenlightening. He thinks he knows better (and maybe he does), so he’s posed five questions of his own.
His first question: If you had to kill and eat someone, who would it be and why?
Let me get the joke out of the way: That question is distasteful.
I thought long and hard on it, and found it odd that I have a stronger aversion to killing someone than eating him. Killing is hard; eating is easier.
I developed the above scenario thinking that the death of a person almost always impacts more than one life. When a close relative or friend dies the effects ripple through the rest of our lives. In this imaginary scenario, I didn’t want to be the cause of lifelong grief. I figured I would have to kill someone already close to death.
But I would want to eat someone young and tender, not old and gristly. For some reason, I prefer to eat a male over a female. I think it has something to do with my very paternalistic bent.
So when the time came to complete the task. I combed the local papers looking for that teenager who crashed his car and is on life support, whose family is in the process of removing said support. Sure, I would kill him, but he’d already be dead.
Did I cop out? Find a loophole in the question? Some would think I did, but I don’t think so. The reason my friend asked the question was to elicit thought and story. I believe I just gave one.
And there are four more questions left. I plan being as obtuse with those as I was with this.
If you liked that, maybe you will like this:
- Me-me-meme
- Discovery
- Nonsequitors for 2008-05-15
- Martin Luther King Boulevard
- Imagination Is More Powerful Than Knowledge
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