I’m so tired. Another 12-hour

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I’m so tired. Another 12-hour day. 

Yesterday was turkey processing. Today was turkey packaging. Chickens, we do all in one day, but turkeys takes two. 

For legal purposes, a turkey counts as four chickens. No, no, hear me out, this is New York State in their infinite wisdom. 

(rambling behind the cut; I’m exhausted so it might not make sense entirely. Lots of discussion of animal death so skip it if you’re not into that.)

In New York State, if you’re a poultry producer, you can process your own birds on your own farm for personal use and private sale, up to 1000 birds.

But for the purposes of the law, a “bird” is one chicken, or ¼ of a turkey. Yeah. So, under the thousand-bird exemption, as it’s called, you can process either 1000 chickens, or 250 turkeys, or any combination thereof whereby one turkey equals four chickens. (One turkey and 996 chickens, for example.)

Now, they don’t really check, per se, and actually before my sister bought her farm, they were slaughtering about 2000 chickens and 150 turkeys per year under the “thousand-bird exemption” and had been doing so for like ten years without anyone batting an eye. But, technically, that was illegal, and so basically the first major thing my sister and her husband did was improve the facility to bring the operation up to code. Now, with a 5a-certified facility, they can process up to 10,000 birds, whereby a turkey counts as 4. They also can process birds for other producers, and can sell to restaurants, and can sell parts. (The fact that we can slaughter for other producers has mostly been a pain in the ass thusfar, but that’s why we had a turkey processing day already this year [I missed it], and are having yet another one on Tuesday, which is why I’m still in town.) (There are no other local poultry slaughterhouses that are certified organic, so, while it’s not really worth our while in terms of what we can charge for the labor, we do it because otherwise some friends wouldn’t be able to sell their chickens as organic even though they raise them that way. We’re enriching the local foodshed, but mostly it’s a pain in the ass.)

Anyway. That was boring, but I felt like I should relate it.

Turkey processing is much more intense than chicken processing, and we were trying to decide if it’s really four times more intense than chickens. And actually, it might be.

See, a live chicken weighs between five and eight pounds. We chuck the chickens into little crates and load them onto a trailer to bring them down for slaughter. The turkeys? 

A live turkey weighs between eighteen and thirty pounds. They have long necks and powerful wings and long legs. They also can fly, albeit not well. We herd the turkeys down on foot and pen them next to the barn, and part of slaughtering them entails actually catching one (on Saturday my brother-in-law actually had one fly over his head, and he caught it midair as it came down; they’re not really very tame) and carrying its unwilling ass to the restraint cones. Turning them upside down is an act of strength, and you have to shove their heads down into the cones to get them to actually go upside down. (Unlike chickens, who tend to just hang there, turkeys will actually pick their heads up like cobras and look around. You have to push them down in there, and then you have to hold them for a moment so they’ll get lightheaded and go docile.)

Chickens, you can scald two or three or maybe four at a time, and then chuck straight into the plucker, give ‘em a quick finish pluck, and toss through the window into the evisceration room. Turkeys, you have to scald one at a time, and then cut the legs off, and then pluck the flight feathers and tailfeathers, and then cut the head off, and then cut the neck off, and only then can you put them into the mechanical plucker, which does an absolutely shit job. Then you can finish pluck them, and only then can you try to get them through the window. This is actually pretty challenging, because they weigh a fucking ton. We have a kind of chute thing, and you have to kind of heave them, and they smack into the eviscerator who’s standing there.

(Guess where I stood the whole time. Yeah, I got smacked with a lot of turkeys. The finish pluckers were apologetic but I was like dude, I get it. You gotta fling it. I’d rather stand here to make sure they don’t hit the rim of the counter and flip over onto the floor. It’s fine, getting bodychecked by a dead turkey 150 times is not the worst day I’ve ever had.)

I actually only eviscerated a few birds. I actually spent most of the time doing a secondary pass of finish-plucking, because it is so fucking difficult to get the goddamn pinfeathers out of turkeys. I finish-plucked, and then distributed the birds to the other eviscerators, and only eviscerated birds when everyone else was all set. And in the middle of the session, I had to stop what I was doing and help my sister package about 45 of the finished turkeys so we could move them from the chill tanks into the walk-in cooler, because we simply could not fit any more turkeys into the chill tanks, and couldn’t add any more chill tanks because the room was full already.

We had a lot of turkeys. They’d processed another producer’s handful of turkeys– 25 or so– and had thrown in a few of the farm’s, 20 to be exact, just to round out the session. Last year so many turkeys were killed by predators that this year we ordered 30 extra turkeys just to be safe… and then had no significant predator lossage. So the farm actually produced… 172 turkeys, which is astonishing because we started with 180 poults and lost 13 in the brooder and 2 in the field, so how that math is supposed to work I can’t even tell you.

Anyway.

The running jokes of the day, of which there were many– well, I only know about on our side of the wall; the kill room always has its own dynamic. The clean room started off with making fun of my sister. She was doing her usual job, which is to be the last person in the line– de-lunging, tucking the legs, monitoring temperatures, and distributing birds into the tanks. And since the actual numbers really matter with the turkeys, she was keeping a running tally of exactly how many birds went into each tank, by making hatchmarks on the side of the tanks in chalk. 

The chalk, unsurprisingly, got wet, because everything gets wet in the clean room. [surprisingly that is not a running joke yet but i’ll make it so, on tuesday, just you wait.] “Ewww,” she said. “There is nothing grosser than wet chalk.”

At that very moment two eviscerators were about elbow deep in turkey guts, and a third had just gotten entirely covered in shit because that’s what happens when you cut into a dead bird. Everyone turned and stared at her.

“Nothing grosser,” said the shit-covered eviscerator. “Than wet chalk.”

My sister fixed her with a dogged stare. “I’m standing by it,” she said. “Nothing grosser.”

So the entire day, no matter what disgusting thing happened (and there was one extremely gross turkey we wound up discarding rather than finishing up, because it had apparently suffered some kind of intestinal mishap or something; it was all weird-textured, oddly proportioned and undersized, and it was literally full of an endless river of the foulest shit ever, and the hapless eviscerator who tried to process it wound up covered to the elbows in absolutely disgusting filth, far fouler even than the normal grossness of turkey shit.

“No,” my sister said, trying not to gag, “wet chalk is way grosser,” because she’s a stubborn bitch and it was a good joke, even as she carried the thing to the gut bucket and tossed it out. Poor creature. [Brother-in-law said, that one did not struggle when he put it into the restraint cone. It sort of stretched its neck out and went limp, like, take me now. Apparently it was not… thriving. Sometimes these things happen. Nature and random chance are cruel. Who even knows what was wrong with it. It is in the compost pile and will return to the soil and enrich the land, poor thing.]

The other running joke– well, anyone ever in this entire world who has ever handled a turkey carcass is extremely aware that a turkey neck bears an unnerving resemblance to a human phallus. I mean, that’s just. That’s just what it looks like. There’s no “oh it kind of looks like” no. No, it’s just. It’s a dick. It looks like a dick. There’s nothing coy or indirect, there. A turkey neck looks like a dick.

But the corollary to it, is that the turkey’s neck area really looks like a vagina. Once you cut the neck off, then there’s kind of folds of extra skin hanging out (you strip the skin off, and cut off just the meat and bone part of the neck, and leave the skin, mostly), and the folds kind of, well. And then the breast forms a kind of V shape that looks pretty much like the mons pubis on a human, and. I mean. It’s gross, but it’s also impossible not to see it once you’ve seen it.

So we all thought it was pretty gross/hilarious, and made a lot of crude references with the turkey necks and that particular angle of view of the carcasses, and it was generally really stupid and immature.

Except. So, everyone in the clean room was female, except for Vegetable Manager, who is extremely chill. 

Everyone in the kill room was male, pretty much, except one of the finish pluckers (who often eviscerates, too), and maybe another one of the rough pluckers, I don’t recall.

Now, I was standing right by the window, and so I was often speaking through the window to the woman finish plucking right there, and she was in on the vagina thing so she was laughing along about it, and my voice carries really well. 

After it being a running gag for a while, the other finish plucker, who was an apprentice this season and is an actual teenage boy, though he’s proven to be pretty mature for his age, confided to me (i’d gone out to get a cup of coffee I think), that whenever we made a joke about Turkey Vag, the rest of the guys on the line would kind of blush and go quiet and look at their feet. He thought it was funny, but we were definitely making the old guys (the other men within earshot were all at least 50) uncomfortable. 

Which is hilarious, because at least one of those guys loves to repetitively tell stupid sexist jokes– innocent but ugly ones about, like, women liking to shop and sounding like cackling hens when they laugh, and such. So. Serves him right to be the uncomfortable one for once.

Today I stood in the kill room, which was scrubbed to within an inch of its life, and had the drained, bagged, labeled, and weighed carcasses handed to me through that window, and then had to arrange them on tables. We wrote down the weight of each carcass, and then brother-in-law went and matched the weights to the spreadsheet of customer orders, and assigned each customer an individual bird as close as possible to their desired bird size– and, the assigments are done in order of who signed up first, so like, if you’re the first person to request a 25-pound bird, you’ll probably get it, but if you sign up on Saturday for the bird on Sunday, and want a 25-pounder, you might get stuck with a 14-pounder because that’s what’s left, even if you show up for pickup in the first five minutes. (This doesn’t prevent people showing up early in hopes of getting a better bird, but, we can’t really do anything about that.)

Anyway– it was exhausting, I lifted every single turkey at least once, and almost all of them at least twice, but many of them three or four times. Given that the smallest bird was a freakish 10.5 pounder, and most of them were in the sixteen-pound range, that’s no small thing. (There was only one 25-pounder, but there were a handful of 22s, a lot of 21s, a pile of 20s, and an entire table of 19s.)

So, I’m tired as shit now, but I can’t really go to bed because I’m at Middle-Little’s and she’s not home yet. (She stayed at the farm to make wreaths. I was like, no fucking way am I going back out in that goddamn cold. No way. But she worked a short shift at her retail job today so she was much more up for spending a little time out in the cold– she had to come over around dinnertime anyway to pick up a turkey for her friend, so she figured she’d get out there and make stuff.)

Also everything hurts but let’s not worry about that.

The thing is, we really did have a lot of fun on Saturday. It’s hard fucking work and it sucks, but I do really enjoy the company of just about everyone on that crew. I’ll miss Teenage Boy when he goes, and Assistant Livestock Manager has actually already moved away but came back to town just for this (both of them are staying at Farmsister’s house, which is why I’m staying with Middle-Little). But at least Veg Manager is sticking around, and most of the others are locals too. 

It’s a good time. It’s just really hard fucking work, and it’s exhausting.

We do it again Tuesday, so. I gotta spend tomorrow cleaning, I think. I hope it gets back above freezing, I’m tired of being cold.

… I just compulsively cleaned Middle-Little’s kitchen sink and counter, and unclogged her bathroom drain too, because I’m apparently a masochist. I sort of hope she doesn’t notice, or think elves did it, because she’s going to think I’m crazy.
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pearlo: i’ve been thinking again lately about

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pearlo:

i’ve been thinking again lately about how dissatisfying i find it when conversations about writing smutty scenes seem to arrange themselves around categorizing lists of words as inherently Sexy or Not Sexy. Like, I feel like I see a lot of people who are starting at what’s a sexy word for _____? and that’s personally never an approach I’ve found super helpful, because it takes me too far out of the character’s head – and the only secret/tip I do find really helpful for porn writing is staying in that context, concentrating on how they’re perceiving it and the words that they would be thinking or saying and going from there.

(So, like, relatively clinical terms are Not Sexy; but there are some characters they work for. I’ve definitely written due South sex scenes in Fraser POV that use language like that, and it can work really well, especially the contrast between that language and the intrinsic earthiness of the actions themselves, and that duality in Fraser. On the other hand, I also wrote a ton of sex scenes about dirty stinky boys in bands, and the vocabulary that was appropriate for those was completely different.)

anyway. the only other piece of advice i have about writing porn (at least porn with cis dudes in it) is: it’s really not necessary to give precise measurements about cock size. you can just say it’s big. we’ll believe you. i don’t want to imagine a ruler out in bed with them – unless you’re actually writing a story about them measuring it, in which case that’s hilarious, and carry on.

Yes! This! 

Man I can’t tell you when the last time I agonized over a word in a sex scene was. Sometimes I dither between two different phrases, but the way I resolve it is usually, what stands out the least? What’s truest to the character? And if the character would not be paying attention to a detail, I promise it’s okay to just avoid the detail! Leave the space where it would be, like if you were shooting it there’d be a gesture offscreen, or a beat where it’s obvious something’s happening elsewhere, or whatever, and move on.  You don’t have to describe something your character wouldn’t care about. Your readers will follow you.

So you mostly can talk about what’s going on as your character would perceive it, which means you just use the language your character would use, and if your character would never in his life say the word “cock” then you don’t have to use it, you can even just leave it blank, or use a placeholder word or a euphemism or workaround phrase or whatever. But the point is that it shouldn’t be distracting. The point of the scene is what’s happening, not the actual specifics of the genital (or whatever) choreography.  [caveat: euphemisms: it needs to be an unobtrusive euphemism, if you notice it on a reread it’s too flowery.]

The last chapter I published of anything featured a scene with a couple having mutually-satisfying sex without removing either one’s underwear. [One was badly traumatized, the other was recently postpartum, they needed some things out of this scene but a complicated sex act was not one of those things they needed.] I still think it was a pretty hot scene, or at least a really emotionally-satisfying scene! You don’t have to specifically put an erection into a specific hole, or really any specific body part into any other specific body part. You can vary your actual sex acts pretty infinitely. Unless you’re writing to a specific contract I guess, which specifies which sex acts and with what frequency, if that’s a thing. But if you’re having really awful trouble choreographic the erection into the hole it might actually be your characters not really wanting you to do that. Try letting them do something else really intimate but not quite so logistically complicated, and see what words come out then. Sometimes there seems to be a feeling like Tab A must go in Slot B for it to be a Proper Sex Scene and I think that’s one of those formulas that doesn’t always serve everyone extremely well. Especially if you’re a person who has never personally experienced that particular tab-and-slot combo– you can write it if you want the challenge, of course! you do what your heart wants even if it’s complicated! but you know, if that’s not flowing well, feel free to write something more rooted in your actual life experience of finding things hot, and see what you come up with? I promise, your sex life isn’t that weird. Porn gives a distorted view because a lot of the genuinely hottest stuff doesn’t look like anything when you visually record it. You don’t have to have some easily-categorized fetish. Sometimes the thing that sets your brain/loins off is astonishingly relatable to other readers even though it’s not something you’ve ever read before. Blaze that trail! 

And yeah definitely never measurements of cocks unless that is the point of the scene, really seriously that is not necessary. (And with OP’s distinction of cis dudes– you know, I feel like even with non-cis dudes, or even with like, tentacled aliens or whatever, anyone who doesn’t have just a Regular Old Biological As Seen In Porn™ Dick, it’s still not necessary? Like, if it’s an object someone might not be familiar with you could give a rough size observation– a tentacle as thick as a tongue, for example, but really, it doesn’t have to be in inches or centimeters, and if the POV character doesn’t get that good a look at it you don’t have to be specific at all.)

This is not a visual medium. What better time to enjoy that than erotica? There’s so much about sex that’s so great that has nothing to do with specific visuals or choreography. 
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Is absurdism different from existentialism? Sorry if I sound weird asking. (Love your blog btw)

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Absurdism is indeed different from existentialism, though the difference is subtle. I’ve written on this before, and I’ve even posted a nifty little graph comparing various forms of existentialism.

But, in short, the difference between existentialism and absurdism comes in their solution to finding meaning in life. They both agree that the universe is inherently meaningless, but existentialism states that we must create our own meaning. The existentialist mantra (at least of the Sartrean variety) is existence precedes essence; we are born, we exist, and then we must choose to craft our own essence, our own purpose.

Absurdism, on the other hand, focuses on the tension between a meaningless universe and our constant striving to find meaning. This tension is what gives rise to the Absurd. Camus argued that we are all immersed in this tension and are thus presented with three alternatives: we can kill ourselves, we can deny the absurdity and take refuge in myths and religion, or we can embrace the absurdity. To embrace the Absurd is to own up to the meaninglessness of it all and move on, to keep living and living well. Camus famously illustrated this using the image of Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill for all eternity. Sisyphus could wallow in the futility of his task, or he can accept his fate and make the most of it. ‘Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.’ Camus said. ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

There are further differences between the two schools of thought, and many variations within. But both were deeply concerned with how to live and how to confront the millstone of a potentially cold and indifferent cosmos.
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