I’m a proud slaughterhouse manager of thirty years. I’ve seen the industry change a lot. But this new generation just might bring the whole thing down. Like, at our weekly “team meating,” my man Gus was presenting about how to best stun a cow with a captive bolt gun and sensitive Sylvester raises his hand and says, “I just think we can get beyond meat.” You know what, Sylvester? I’m Gen-X. I grew up listening to Morrissey. I knew meat was murder before you were even born.

Last night I saw HIM again. No, not Jesus. (If only it was, maybe HE’D save me.) It was the elephant man. He was slinking down the hallway, in that mysterious little way he likes. He crawls on all fours, balancing on the tips of his fingers and the balls of his feet. His shoulders dip back and forth, back and forth, as if dancing to some awful song that only sick creatures like them can hear.

I understand now how serious you were when you shouted, “I will not live with a pig!” It is also abundantly clear that my decision to bring home a four-hundred-pound Gloucester pig named Dumplin’ did not turn our sad two acres of weedy herb gardens and blighted squashes into a Farm.

It is a family legend that my great-great granduncle Ezekiel used to go on fishing trips with his close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, at the end of which, Waldo—he preferred the name Waldo to Ralph, if you can believe it—inevitably dragged my relative to a local brothel (no one in my family believes this, but still).

A tin-plated nonsense came up over the hill on spindly legs and entered our village at a stately pace.  Our village, having never seen such a thing, crowded the visitor, eager for a chance to benefit from its peculiar form of smarts.  Presently, the crowd around the figure thickened so that its stilts now acted as posts sunk into the earth.  Its immobility was all the better for the onlookers to worship it, and although skeptics existed, they were shouted down by the others.  The nonsense itself, now robbed of the ability to execute its gawky walk, it preferred, I thought, not to make itself a target of ridicule.  It stayed in our village thereafter.