Outside Boxes

Androphagi is what you call eating human beings if you don't want to use the word cannibal. Around 1930 a New York Times reporter, William Buehler Seabrook, got, from an intern, a piece of healthy human fresh, from the description I'm guessing a thigh. He cut off a steak and cooked the rest as a roast. He describes it as being the most like veal. The steak was a bit stringy, but the roast was succulent. Since March 2007, 25 albino Tanzanians have been killed and eaten, under advice from a witch doctor, to bring good luck. Titus Andronicus, the whale-ship Essex, the Donner party, those soccer players, the siege of Stalingrad, isolated Japanese soldiers eating the crew of a downed American bomber. We know from middens that Neanderthals ate each other and probably were eaten in turn. A basic rule of survival is that you don't waste protein. Just a side-bar but interesting reading, so much information that everything is fair game. Work to do, I prep the pedestals D has indicated he wants for the glass show. Distracted by family emergencies, I can't settle my brain. Mom was in the hospital, after a black-out, but they couldn't find the problem, sent her home, she blacked-out again, fell and broke an ankle, so back in the hospital. My sister, on hand, is handling logistics, and I'm on a kind of stand-by that's disconcerting. Nothing I can do, really, but stay close to the phone, thinking in fits and starts. Her reserves are very nearly tapped. I talked with her about this at Thanksgiving; mostly, she was worried about Dad. The language of loss. Begins as a patois- pidgin, develops to a creole, then a dialect, then a full-blown expression of grief. I immerse myself in the mundane, mindless chores, paint some walls, paint the pedestals. No further calls, I go to the pub for a Paddy's Irish whiskey with a Murphy's stout back, talk with the owners about Pegi's girls doing a Celtic dance number at the St. Patrick's Day celebration. The ways of the world are ephemeral, but at least they keep us occupied. Kierkegaard was crazy. Consider Regine. Maybe I just too often support the long oppressed without enough sympathy for the truly depressed; I am, in the end, a feminist, without the trappings. More a blues riff than an intellectual tirade. You lose your girl, your dog, miss the train, and wake up in the rain, it might well be your problem, not the way the world is constellated.