I was reading an article last night that made me remember
something that I hadn’t thought of
in a long time. It was when I first realized that we are just matter. After years of Catholic school, and hearing about Jesus, and all the prayers referencing death, and family deaths, you begin
to think about death. But this was a different thing. I’m talking about a time back
in the 1970’s and 80’s when close to where I lived, it was common to just
abandon your big consumer garbage on a deserted street. Refrigerators, sofas,
TV’s.. you name it. Stolen cars would sit there until they were stripped for
parts, windows broken, and then used by the neighbors as a place to throw empty
beer bottles into.
Another thing you don’t see too much of today is dead
animals on the street. There would always be the carcass of a dead cat, dog, pigeon
or squirrel that would just lie there until nature herself made it
disappear. As far as we were
concerned, or the kids at least, it was like gum on the sidewalk or sneakers on
the phone wires. This one time
there was a cat on the sidewalk that had somehow just been killed. It was
unusual because normally by the time we got to it, it would was partially
smashed beyond recognition by passing cars, until it was just a pancake of
blood and fur, or feathers. This
time however, it was a real cat like the one my family had at home. It must’ve
just been killed recently because it was still in good shape, other than the
fact that all its insides were on the outside. I remember looking at the guts
which looked exactly like uncooked food… sausages and meat, perfectly intact. I studied it carefully, noting that
there wasn’t much blood, just a lot of organs. A lot more than you think would
fit inside this cat’s body. So to boil it down, this miracle of Life, this
spark of creation that God or Mother Nature or Zeus alone is capable of
creating is nothing more than a bag of cold cuts. That may have been the first
time that I realized that the food I eat is made out of dead animals, and that
my insides probably look a lot like this, and that I’m probably food too. And
that one day, one way or another, I’ gonna end up like this, in some form or
another.
Much of my early teen years were spent walking around this
area of town called “The Dumps”. It’s the area around Rikers Island jail, where
again, people would just dump garbage that didn’t fit into their own trashcans.
Old furniture, bathtubs, construction debris, dead pets, mattresses. You get
the idea. It was a lot like what you would expect Calcutta to be like, except
we explored and played in it for fun.
One time poking around down there, we found the corpse of a
dead German Shepherd, maybe 3 or 4 years old. It was moving and making noise.
We poked it, afraid that it might turn it’s head and snap, or maybe really was
dead. But it was stiff. The 3 of us turned it over, and found the underside
covered with hundreds of thousands of maggots and other bugs buzzing and eating
their way to the top. That freaked me out , and further reinforced that idea
that we are all just worm food. Bugs eating your corpse seems so less noble
than vultures doing it.
