It is bow hunting season and in the shop the body of a buck hangs from white nylon strapping run between the tendons of his rear legs. He sways above a tarp. His hooves are in a 5 gallon bucket. This morning he was eating acorns and picking his way through the maples looking for does. We left his innards on the fallen leaves.
I’m flushed and proud. But chilled too. We’re all reducible to meat buckets. My happiness is an electrical impulse in my brain. A cocky neuroscientist could attach an electrode to my skull to make me feel this pleasure, bypassing all the experiences that make a life. But probably not.
Perhaps, you’re taking Ozempic, the wonder drug that puts you off your food. It’s been called an eating disorder in a shot. Perhaps, you’ve noticed side effects. You don’t feel the desire to drink, to shop compulsively, to smoke, to vape, to gamble, or to bite your nails.
“It’s a miracle drug!” they say. But after a few months, even knowing you’ll gain all the weight back, you’ll refuse to take another shot. “Anhedonia,” they’ll say. All you know is that you can no longer find easy pleasure in vice.
The pharmacists haven’t learned that we meat bags need the drive of desire and the trials before triumph to be sated. Not stimulation, not simulation, but storyline. Liking, wanting, learning.
The hunter is a marksman, an observer, an anticipator, an intuiter. He is a testament to skill, patience, and respect. Most of the time, there is no reward at all. But every day, he hunts. Because neurons that fire together, wire together.
When I sat on the pine needles in the gloaming, silent and watchful, hoping for an encounter with a deer, I was embodied, coated in hedonic gloss, swimming in Ludus, Agape, Philautia. As a hunter, I was supposed to be attententive and calm and perfectly still, but instead—after months of anhedonia—I was preoccupied by sonnets of fierce hope, stealthy joy, and maniacal love scrolling through me. Thoughts of bodies and lives. There is more. There is nothing else. A meat bag for another day.
Your thankful author,
Jen
P.S. Don’t make this Thanksgiving a cluster-pluck. Give'em pumpkin to talk about with these jokes.
“My family told me to stop telling Thanksgiving jokes, but I said I couldn't quit cold turkey.”
“Why did the chef refuse to crack an egg? He didn't want to whisk it.”
“I was planning on taking home leftovers, but all my plans were foiled.”
🦃. 🦃. 🦃. 🦃. 🦃. 🦃. 🦃. 🦃. 🦃. 🦃
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🛍 Jen Preservation Society
