Mom is stoned.
post
An overdue existential crisis, or moment of clarity, caused by a lifetime of routine alienation between the consumer, the product, the store, the factory pen and butchery.
Mom should read Marx, and The Jungle.
Maybe pick up hunting, if she wants to see what it takes from her own pov.
I was pressured into going hunting a few times with my dad growing up, and I ended up killing a few deer. It's something I'm not proud of, one among many things I came to regret later in life.
I used to think "If you can't or won't kill it personally, then you shouldn't eat it" was an argument in support of hunting. Now I think of it as an argument in support of vegetarianism. Funny how perspective changes everything...
What's also funny is how as a society we say things like "kids who kill bugs grow up to be psychopaths," yet we totally normalize hunting as a sport. Why is that? For that matter, why don't we say "anyone who eats animal flesh is a psychopath?"
As if being five steps removed from the suffering and death somehow abstracts the cruelty so that one can indulge in the pleasure of what is produced by it without bearing any moral culpability in the processes by which that meat arrived on one's plate?
Why is it only the forms of cruelty that society doesn't accept as cultural pastimes that are considered taboo? I should rephrase. Why does society accept some forms of cruelty and not others?
+1 to the existential exploration.
A little more lot and she'll eventually stumble in to "Where did this existence come from? Why is there matter to have a universe, why is there any existence at all? If God exists, how was he created?"
Pre-vegan thoughts.
I'm pretty weirded out by everyone in this thread saying Mom is high as fuck or having a mental break because this feels like a pretty normal series of thoughts to me, and not like something that would be distressing or brought on by distress.
Post the spider poem
It does probably help a lot with poetry, too, to look at the world for what it is, rather than navigating it on auto-pilot.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. Very few people are capable of examining their loop for what it really is, let alone going off autopilot.
Some people just have a very narrow existence, I bet your spider poem was great.
You're just casually slogging through dissociative existentialism on a regular basis?
You guys are getting through?
Mom is beginning to see through her cultural conditioning to things that the owner class meant to be invisible. Mom is made of meat and the flesh on her table was once an individual like her, maybe even a mom like her, and Mom let herself become complicit in a system that makes one victim the victim of another victim all for the enrichment of the cruel and hateful creatures with economic power.
This goes back way further than ownership. We’re talking millions of years. Dinosaurs feasting on dinosaurs. We’re a little speck of dust on a speck of dust in the blink of an eye to the vast, uncaring universe.
That’s because it is poetry. Mom might need a psych eval, but it’s still poetry (and I love it).
// I cooked a steak tonight
// and was feeling alien
//
// How weird this gross piece
// of cold raw flesh
// on a cold plate is
//
// and I was thinking
// I am just an animal
// with the luxury of packaged flesh
// and is it human flesh?
// Like
// I wouldn't know
// We just believe it's a cow but
//
// we don't
//
// have fucking proof
//
// of anything
//
//
// The knife went through the same
//
// as if it was my own leg
//
// -Mom
Is this your mum?
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal… Even in death I serve the Omnissiah.
omnivore realises the cognitive dissonance required to consume meat :P
I place the rotisserie chicken onto the cutting board and grab one wing firmly, then with a practiced hand, twist and dislocate the wing from its shoulder. I pause for a moment to look at the joints in my own fingers, then continue to dismember the rest of the chicken with my bare hands.
that lady is dissociating. get her some therapy.
Mom trippin balls.
Is your mom channeling Phillip K Dick?
Mom accidentally dropped an existential poem in the group chat and then probably went back to doing dishes.
This is exactly why I voted for Trump to dismantle the EPA and FDA.
If we can’t know anyway there’s no sense in wasting money on trying.
/s
Sounds like mom got a little crispy herself before dinner.
We should normalize poetry.
Where funny
I find the juxtaposition of the innocuous lead in ("text from my mom") with the rather unhinged text funny. The comparison to poetry, which I personally associate with peacefulness, adds to the expectation that it's going to be a pleasant text, which gets subverted spectacularly. I can also imagine the mom's encounter with the steak, resulting in them drafting the text to their child, which makes me chuckle because it's such a silly thing to experience.
It's less explicitly funny than a lot of things, but the subtlety doesn't mean it isn't funny. Humor is subjective and all, but there's plenty of funny to be found here for most people.
Because you are unaware of 'prose?'
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