The Spinal Tap

Like Water for Chocolate, by some quirky epiphany, was what inspired me to breed chickens. Let me make that more accurate: first, I had a cage built, stuffed it with a few dozens of quails, then waited for the birds to begin popping out eggs. I thought this because Tita de la Garza in Laura Esquivel’s novel makes it seem so easy. How cool was it to just step out into the yard in the afternoon, pick up a handful of birds, and cook them with the surety of a seasoned chef.

Turns out, when all the quails had grown, I slaughtered and cooked them and prepared myself for what looked like my last meal on Earth. But quail meat tasted like my own testicles if you boiled them, not that I’ve actually tasted my own testicles. Which is just my blasé way of saying Holy Mother of God, This Doesn’t Taste Right!

As the sight of the empty post-quail cage eventually oppressed me, I decided to make two dozen 45-day-old chicks call it home. These are the chicks you can easily buy at any palengke Red Ball Express download . This time I was sure I could actually eat them – the chicks were barely three days old, chirping innocently with one another (probably nursery songs in chick language], and already I was googling for the best chicken breading recipe. I was so forward-thinking like that.

One day, I surveyed my “tenants.” I picked one of the chicks and looked closely in its eyes. And fell in love: it was stuffed toy cute, it was impossible not to.

“I hope you really are a chicken,” I tell it, “and not some girl trapped inside a chicklet’s body.”

Because that would be sad.

In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the film, Jean-Dominique Bauby suffers a stroke. He was editor of Elle How to Be a Serial Killer divx The Dancer Upstairs divx , he loved fucking those pretty fashion women with low self-esteem and big holes in their hearts. With pussy just dropping on his lap like Moses’ plague of frogs, Jean-Dominique lived the kind of life that we in the biz can only describe as “OMFG, that’s awesome, dude!!!”

But one day Jean-Do has a stroke. Next thing, he wakes up unable to move a muscle except his left eyelid. Doctors tell him he’s got the “locked-in syndrome.” Which means his very awake, very vital mind was trapped inside a dead body. It was clear nothing could be done.

“I’ll ask you something, and if the answer is yes, blink once,” doctor says. A silence. Then doctor asks, “You feel fine?”

Jean-Do blinks. Repeatedly. Maybe too fast. It’s the locked-in syndrome, blink-a-rama version of “Go over that corner and fuck yourself, doctor.” True story.

I only mention this because the chicken, who looks so cute, couldn’t possibly deserve this. All that cuteness made me suspect there must be some catch; that inside this chicken must be somebody awesome that’s just locked in. Maybe a topless, forever young Elizabeth Taylor. Who knows? And nobody will ever know because in 50 days, she’ll be swimming in succulent sauce enriched with seven secret herbs and spices.

I grew up with the notion that beautiful things deserve beautiful things. But for the chicken, with its Japanese anime looks, it isn’t. To live a lifetime in dark narrow cages, pumped with nameless chemicals, put on conveyor belts, decapitated and plucked by machines. The entire process is so brutally elegant, or elegantly brutal, it should be on a postcard and sent to prison inmates to cheer them up. I thought, how could I have the liver to actually slaughter these pretty young things? How can I be so cruel and heartless, a destroyer of little worlds, the Shiva of these innocent birds?

So burning with this new-found moral integrity and love for all living things, I went to my mother and firmly told her, “From now on, you do it! All that ninja head chopping and feather plucking, I won’t do it anymore. My Chuck Norris morals forbid me.”
I felt good. Self-righteous and good.

And when the time came, as she didn’t forget my careful instructions on the breading recipe, them chicks tasted good, too. Just like my own testicles — if you enriched them with seven secret herbs and spices. In the wildest figurative sense, of course.

{Image: Stephania}

{Also: 8 stories of “locked-in syndrome”}

(Also: The chicken crossed the road because…}