you, sir, are a fishmonger.

adam, my sort of boss and favourite person with whom to work, says that cutting fish gets him high. apparently he killed his heart doing too much of everything with his misspent youth, so i believe that he is using this metaphor correctly and accurately. i never quite believed him, though, or i thought it was silly at the least. but yesterday, i swear to every dying god there is, i felt it.

i think about my customers. a few of them, of course, are lovely, interesting people. but they are not really customers, you see? i mean the other ones. i don't think they ever walk anywhere. i don't think they ever sit next to people they do not know, and i think that when they do, they think it is unpleasant. i think that they go to work at desks where they sit down and don't move for most of their lives, like veal. i think they push abstract concepts around all day and all year. of course, there is not necessarily anything wrong with that. i would very much enjoy teaching english, after all. but i think that, were they to examine these concepts closely, they would find that they were not very good ideas at all. i think that they might find that, perhaps, the world might be a better place if their job did not need to exist. and i think that after work they come to me, and they treat me and my friends badly, because that is what hierarchy does, and they think that my fish smells bad, and they do not want to touch it, and they would not really know what to do with it if they were to do so. i think that they cook boring things, but that is not the point. the point is that if someone were to take a bullet for them, i hope that they would not whine about not wanting to touch the corpse. my fish died so that they could eat it. it died for them. and they do not respect that at all. and i think that after that, they go home to children that are raised by institutions, children that they neither know nor like nor really wanted for any reason beyond the fact that having them is just what they were trained to do. they go to houses full of things, and they do not know who made any of them, and they do not really think about that. i do not think that they ever make anything, or touch anything real. i think that they are filled with stupid secrets because they are afraid. i think that they must be desperately lonely, because they do not know anyone who is not like them. and they go to sleep, and the next day they do it all again, exactly as they did the last day. i think that they are sad, and that they feel unfulfilled, but that they are comfortable, and so they allow their lives to keep happening to them. and the idea of that terrifies me. i want to scream at them and kick them sometimes.

my job is often frustrating, but it is the least alienating job i can imagine finding in this city. yesterday i did something that, somehow, i have never before done: i was filleting a bluefish larger than my niece. i only needed one side, but i pulled at the organs, some of which squished and tore and turned to a thick smear on my gloves, and i wondered if i had organs like that. and i found the big one, the hard and pink one, and i cut it open. (this is the part that is new. i have observed it before, but never done it myself. i cannot imagine why.) there were two whole fish inside, one of them cut in half, and both in the early stages of digestion, but still two whole fish. i pulled dead things out of another dead thing, and they were covered in slime and kept company by things that could have been worms or parasites or the spines of other dead things. and i felt like a thirteen year old boy, which is not unusual, but always fun. i was disgusted and thrilled and shaking and in awe. my head was buzzing and i was grinning for the rest of the night. directly after this, i had to clean our prep sink. our prep sink collects a gigantic pile of bits of dead things over the course of a night: there is the skin of thirty fish, and spines and rib cages, and trim, and heads, and the stomach contents of my blue, and the squished organs, and other squished organs, and long strings of intestines, and day old meat. and normally it is just the pile, and i am used to it, and it is gross, but it is my job. but today i knew what each and every part was. i was new and naive and pure, and it was all that was left of hundreds and hundreds of dead things, inside out and cut. nothing happened to them that could not happen to me. i made much of that pile, myself. and, you see, that is so much of the difference! when i cut them, i feel the obligation to the boys with whom i work, because the less meat i miss, the more money we will, eventually, make. i owe a good cut to the customers, fools that so many of them are, who pay for it whole. i owe a good cut to the fish, because its life was worth too much for anything to be wasted. and i touch them, and i smell like them, and i know them, and i feel connected. i wear their scales on my arms and my face. when i kill lobsters, i wear their antenna in my hat, and i laugh with the customers, who do not really know that what i cut helps to keep them alive, and that for nine hours a day i am made death.

i really touched something. i reached inside of it and pulled out its last meal and knew in this stupid, abstract way what a few moments of its life might have been like before it got to me. when do we ever get the chance to do that in places like this? we're all so specialized. none of us know how many people are working to make our lives work the way that they do. and of that, i am ashamed.

i think that maybe i don't deserve to eat or own anything i haven't ever touched, or killed, or grown, or, at the very least, without knowing the person who did it for me. if i don't know them, how do i know what they did to it, or why? how can i possibly avoid abuses if i don't know anyone involved? i'm not at all there yet. there are so many things in my house, and i do not know who made them, and so i feel far away. alienation is not good for anyone. i am beginning to feel, in fact, that it might be morally wrong. i graduate after next semester. i am, just now, considering moving west, to the coast, with the intention of ending up in south america where i will fillet fish for tourists, as i've explained. (i am made of meat, and bones, and words, and lust, and escape plans.) i'm thinking about organic farming, maybe. and whitney gave me a great many ideas: i could work for a queer organization in a city somewhere, and i could get paid for farm work in oregon, and i could be a park ranger on the ocean or in the woods. these things put a fire in my head. i dreamed of them last night, of explaining to my mother where i was going and what i could do. there are so many things i'd like to learn. there are so many things i want to touch and understand.

i am sorry that sometimes i have to roar about being a fishmonger. but admit it: you wish you were a fishmonger, and if you were, you'd roar about it, too.