For me, I just had to find some way to keep myself busy. For the morning of this most wretched of all observances of the year for me, I ceremoniously grabbed my sharpest knife and cleaver and applied them to disarticulating joints, cracking bones, slashing up and peeling away skin, and hacking at, grinding, and macerating raw dead flesh.
It's OK, relax! Don't over-react, I haven't gone off the deep end! It's not like I was in Halifax* . . . I was just processing and trimming some bulk pork for making my own homemade sausages. It's my way of rebelling against eating the industry-processed food. I at least know what's going into my own stuff. Sure, it's a dorky and weird thing to opt to do on Valentine's Day, but for me it's perhaps appropriate. Like the old European cheese, wine and beer-making traditions, sausage-making seems to be one of those food crafts best-suited for the monastic sorts**. I might as well call myself a monk, since it's another Valentine's Day with no one to share it with. Making tubular meat-filled phallic symbols all morning was as good as it got for me today. To be honest, it felt right to do, or it was at least chopping, cutting, and slashing at some inert fleshy mass was a more benign way to be cathartic, but what would have been perhaps even more fitting for me to do was to take the actual heart of the same poor beast and use it as an additional ingredient to pass through the meat grinder, thoroughly disintegrating it: an act truly demonstrative of my contempt for this damn stupid, inclement, ridiculous, alienating day. Thankfully, there are limits to both my appetite for destruction and gratuitous expressions of spite. That extra step would have just probably only edged me further toward a darker place. However, my focus wasn't tainted by too much bitterness. I concentrated on making my knife work flawlessly. I managed to take some gross-looking stuff and make it more delicious and aesthetically pleasing. My execution of this project was reasonably quick, efficient, inventive, well-contained, and clean, with no indication or evidence afterward that some orgy of blood, greasy lard, and raw pork had ever graced my kitchen. I think that Hannibal Lecter*** himself would have been impressed with my methods. As usual, nothing was wasted. Today's renderings were: three kilograms of Cajun style cured sausage, three kilos of Hungarian style smoked paprika and garlic sausage, three liters of Vietnamese Pho broth made from that noble hog's baked bones, marrow, tendons, and trimmings. For the finale, I fashioned a sort of a chichorón cassoulet made with the rest of that marvelous skin (to be served with some fava beans and a fine Chianti . . . slurp, slurp, slurp, slurp . . .). Through reviewing some recipes online, it seems like it's only the English, the Spanish/Mexicans, the Filipinos, and myself who can appreciate how delicious pork cracklings can be.
So, what of the other aspect of that main element of Valentine's Day: the LOVE part. Sorry. Love is a topic that I don't touch on here in this blog, or with any other company. I come nowhere close to being an authority with any wisdom on such a thing. It's too irrational, and too conditional to allow me to figure it out. I've heard of this myth of unconditional love; I live each day never seeing it really happening. I only know that I've witnessed and endured too many examples of what it isn't (in my mind anyway). To say I'm a bit jaded about the subject is perhaps an understatement. I could expose my thoughts about it, but it would be at the risk of sounding like a cold-hearted bastard, like I was once indoctrinated by the Khmer Rouge, or had once been some sort of feral child that was raised by a troop of rabid badgers. I'll limit myself by saying the following things about it and be done with the subject from here on in.
In regards to love and entering romantic relationships:
- In the history of literature, Dante Alighieri, writer of The Divine Comedy, foolishly forgot to include "dating after the age of 40" as another one of the circles of Hell****.
- I'm absolutely powerless to "make" someone love me back. Whenever love felt real to me, it has only turned back against to me and disappointed me and made me suffer by being unrequited. It has happened too often; so much so that one can't help but to feel isolated and to give up hope.
- Too many instances and too much exposure to what I would call "50 Shades of Crazy" has no doubt left me somewhat gun shy.
- It's far better to be alone than being around someone who does nothing but argue, nag, belittle, and accost you with other forms of negativity. So far, I've met more people who are like that than those who are not. The ones who don't sadly are either adults who are a just few too many years my junior and wouldn't be interested in me, or else too many years my senior.
- It's most often the case that, given this age, any women who are interesting enough for me are usually already partnered.
- The women I've found most endearing to me now all live afar. Life is unfair
Just one positive Valentine's Day in my life is all that I humbly ask for. I guess I just have to somehow stay strong and survive through this one to see if that will ever happen. Today, however, is just another wretched winter day here, made all the more challenging and difficult by having to fumble around through it in knee-deep snow and wind to acquire the more basal elements of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, never mind trying to attain that which approaches a higher love, intimate contact and connection, and acceptance.
*- I just heard on the news about some sociopathic misfit loser punks who were planning a murder rampage in a Halifax mall. As a much as a downer this bit of writing is, nothing tops that sort of unfettered anger and contempt. Thankfully, that was thwarted by the police there today.
**- Sausage trivia - I learned that the name of the type of delicacy we Anglophones call "summer" sausage has nothing to do with the season, and is actually a corruption of the words "seminary sausage", i.e. sausage that was traditionally made in a monastery. I can't guess as to why; maybe it changed to "summer" because the word "seminary" perhaps sounded too unnervingly close to the word "semen", which would undoubtedly be an obvious PR nightmare for the church, especially if it was construed that "semen sausage" was prepared by some monks . . . Ew, nasty! That, as I say, is a whole other weekend of entertainment. Anyway, more seriously, before the days of scientific thinking, having something wonderfully appetizing rendered from something like spoiling curdled milk, souring grapes, musty grain, or something formed from the less appealing bits and pieces of an animal was really thought to be miraculous and an act of divine intervention. Thus, such processes of fermentation and controlled decay and denaturation were left under the auspices of chaste and holy men who were charged to be in good standing with the Lord almighty. Speaking of holy men, it still baffles me as to how Valentine's Day, a day originally commemorating the execution and martyrdom of a priest, got deviated into what it is today.
***- An interesting, yet creepy,Valentine's Day bit of movie trivia: The Silence of the Lambs was released in theatres on February 14th back in 1991. I wonder: how many rejected marriage proposals happened that day after such a movie date? So, today's bloody activity thus seemed to be a bit of the homage of sorts. As dark, disturbing, shocking and graphic as it is, it still remains on my Top 10 all-time favourite movies list, and worthy of all the Oscars it won. More interesting facts about this film from this Mental Floss link
****- He should have added "February in Saskatchewan" as a circle as well.
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