Sunday, August 25, 2002 4:48 PM

Knock Knock?

Who is there?

I’ve been thinking lately. I know and confess it is a danger to cogitate so. Especially for me, who in my inchoate mental states often come up with monsters entirely out of my depths which tend to confuse far more than frighten me. Such is the laughable state of my internal turmoil that I can’t dream up a good multiheaded dog or some antediluvian slime with tentacles and a beak that snaps and rips.

You see here is the horror of television and the movies! I hear argument after argument by good natured Christian men and afternoon soccer beleaguered child guardian mothers who state with all gravity that the crime of media is manifested in the crime in the streets. If they are right, it just shows how tainted and unimaginative even the evil, squalid elements of our society have become.

We buy the dead flesh of animals from the refrigerated portion of our supermarket shelves. We don’t think of it as dead flesh, that guilt ridden disgusting image only comes from the moronic pining of animal rights activists. We don’t think of it as much. We don’t connect it with the miracle that buzzes around us each day. We don’t pin it in the nature and rhythm of our lives. It is just another activity, this driving, taking from stock, scanning across the bar code and slipping it eight minutes on high into the microwave, in our quotidian lives. I am not so full of “old-time” religion (those that know me only marginally accuse me of being full of an entirely other matter) that I would have us praise the dead spirit of the animal that yielded its life so that we may have a TV tray, but there is something to the notion.

I was recently at a poultry processing plant located on a road about a mile off the two lane black top in the Amish section nowhere Ohio. The plant personnel were made up entirely of guys and gals named Juan and Juanita, probably wishing they worked in more southern climes. What, I thought, must Friday or Saturday night look like in downtown Kidren (for so it was called) Ohio? Wild roving bands of mariachis strumming Tex/Mex stringed musical instruments, drinking Pulque and singing to Johnny Cash black attired, Old Testament bearded, simple folk grudgingly admiring the unplugged Dionysian nature of the music as they fled homeward in their surreys. On the tour of the plant we stood squarely in front of a piece of machinery called a water chiller. The purpose of this chiller was to take the freshly slaughtered chicken from the “kill” floor and drop its body temperature to a cool 40 degrees or so. It was called; it turns out a common name in the industry, a “red water” chiller. Jason and Michael Myers don’t have anything on our food chain. You and I have enjoyed just such chickens at many a Sunday American meal. (Actually my mother makes tomato sauce with meat balls and sausage.) This death, this wholesale slaughter is an okay part of our lives. We really don’t have to cower from it.

And that is the problem that set me to thinking. We do all that we can to become abstracted from these procedings. We think of the slaughter of adorable pecking little chickens for our sustenance as disgusting and evil. We let Hollywood give us our monsters, animated, full almost three dimensional, with special effects gore dripping galore, instead of dipping into our own deep little pools of dark psychic energy. We abstract ourselves from our jobs. Think of work as the enemy. Yearn forever for our leisure time. We let the nightly news and thoughtless political pundits fill up our opinion. We let formulaic preachers interpret our spirit. We let media psychics and pysch-o-logists inform our psyche. Each night lying on the couch in a funk after a terrible day.

I, for one, am going to stop it. Right after the HBO movie! Say, hon, grab me an ax. I’m gonna go kill a turkey!