It's Christmas and I'm surprised to see snow in Sweden · 6:24pm Dec 27th, 2014
Also, attempting to use mobile skype for anything is a journey to the very pit of hell and a punishment I would not wish on my worst enemy.
Not that I have any enemies, you understand. Just people who have yet to realise the truth of my words. They'll come around eventually.
Eventually...
A little while back I read something, a short fiction I was asked to read by a writer of quite some talent and skill, who I fully expect to be published and fairly famous a few years hence. It was a fantasy story, set over a few days in the life of a butcher caught up in a mystery. I knew she was a butcher because her dialogue stank of sour pork fat and discarded offal, and her actions spoke to the realisation that everything is meat, and one fillet is much like another when you get down to it. A butcher can be many things; jolly, bitter, serious, paranoid or just plain dull, but they all share a commonality: they've seen the joke. We're all a single cut away from the marble slab. There's a skeleton inside.
They work their craft to slice and dice and present us with the finest, freshest, tastiest cuts of tender meat prepared however we like it, and we repay them by using "butchery" as a cruel slur on badly written prose and the slaughter of innocents and infantry in far-flung fields and foreign lands. But perhaps that too is the joke. The butcher cuts and life goes on.
Now you must excuse me while I attempt to strangle this abortion of code that is skype.
Oh, and there's a new chapter of No Room For Regret going up in a couple of days. All finished, just letting it hang for a while. Thus, the tag.
Comparatively, the latest update for Skype desktop makes me want to strangle kittens, and had I known what would entail beforehand, I would not have updated to it.
At least my laptop is free of the scourge.
Mobile Skype? Bro, I feels you. No human being should have to suffer the horror of that program.
2681947
My skype actually updated against my will. Then I downloaded the old skype. And then it updated again. There is no escape.
I don't suppose it would be possible to receive a reference to this story, that we others might read it?
2682230
At the point of being a bit redundant, butchery as a trade is interesting, and I think people's response to it it somewhat telling of our time: more than ever, we are removed from -- to use a word apt in more ways that one -- the nature of the food we eat. The meat we are accustomed to comes in these nice, sleek, plastic-wrapped packages, sometimes further ensconced in cardboard or paper; the meat is in recognizable shapes with convenient labels denoting what they are called, and we (collectively) are content to draw the logical, tenuous, sanitary connection that these red, shiny shapes were once part of an animal, but such a realization is left more of a choice than anything necessary or concrete; an exercise for the consumer, as it were.
Butchers, on the other hand, by trade or 'amateurs' (those who do butcher animals, such as some farmers and hunters, more for their own purposes than sale), deal at least on a semi-regular basis with the reality of -- quite literally -- disassembling an animal, some beginning with a creature that begins the process fully under its own faculties. The transformation from 'living thing' to 'brisket' or 'boneless breast fillet' is all but forced into full acceptance of the process, and what that meat represents. This, mind, is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something that generally differentiates them from the average consumer of this day and age, perhaps in ways that are not immediately apparent or predictable. [We] Humans are by nature omnivores -- the rare cases and "modern" squeamishness aside, to intend no disrespect against vegetarians, have through the fullness of our history dealt with our food in the way of butchers, at least in some small respect, in that we knew what that meat actually meant...
Meat is life, through death.