wideeyedfunk

Tag: zooarchaeology

  • The dogs will not have the last peanut butter cup.

    The vastiness of the cosmos has been replaced by wonderment at the intricacies of mammalian interiors around here lately. The WideEyedLaundry is full of gored up shirts and khakis. My mind, in moments of distraction, traces ropey muscles, rubbery tendons, and white bones rather than the sparkle of faraway stars and dark matter. I imagine muscles flexing, tendons pulling, and mighty bison hooves stomping on dusty ground.

    A buffalo died at the zoo a week or two ago. The strange nature of my job calls on me to transform this creature from fur and flesh to clean, white skeleton. The process involves waterproof shoes, a U-Haul van rental, several students, many scalpels, and protective gloves.

    BisonDefleshing a bison used to be normal. Well, not yesterday normal, not for me. But most of our human past required the ability to make dinner from something that used to be walking around. Personally make dinner, not abstract-grocery-plastic-wrapped-into-a-frying-pan-dinner. Now, it’s a little strange for most people.

    I just can’t help but notice the way things go together in there, under the skin. I can’t help but marvel that it all works. I can’t help but realize that the bison and all of the creatures who passed through the lab before it this past year smell like food. Except the woodchuck. He had been on the side of the road for a bit too long and he smelled greenish. Not grass greenish. Bile greenish.

    Smelling dinner all day, being up to my elbows in what is now biological waste rather than forthcoming meals, makes me want to dine on things that didn’t once have perceptions.

    Yesterday after the bison I was standing in line at Trader Joe’s buying pizza dough, cheese, and beer. (Not, you’ll notice, plastic wrapped meat). My eye fell on the impulse buy shelf at the checkout: “Perfect for the ride home!” the little sign said. I peered closer – ah, a little bag of dark chocolate peanut butter cups. Perfect indeed!

    20141104_191555This evening there was one left. One. I poured myself a glass of wine and shuffled the little guy out of the packet. I don’t know what happened but it flew out of my hand. I heard it ping against the microwave door, knock against the front of the fridge. I saw a gleam of the foil wrapper as it spun to the floor. To the Dog Zone. That peanut butter cup is safe in my belly now, but I’m telling you that there was an ugly period of fending off Miss Tibbit and Hamish and scrambling around to beat them to it. We won’t discuss that further.

    For better or for worse, I know what the inside of a bison looks like. Therefore, I, not the dogs, get the last peanut butter cup.

  • I dreamed of flesh eating beetles.

    I dreamed of flesh eating beetles and mortifying tissue and woke with the sense memory of the smell of decay.

    I blame the Turdus migratorius from yesterday. It wasn’t his fault, poor little robin, that one of the students found him dead on the road and collected him for the lab. It certainly wasn’t his fault that a skilled graduate student showed me how to skin and eviscerate a little songbird using his carcass. We recorded data for science and the permits, and plucked and skinned and removed blobs from inside him using forceps. We wrapped him in cheesecloth (did the cheesecloth company ever imagine such a use?) and put him in the lab fridge to dry out for a couple of days. It made me think of dry aging a nice roast. Might have to hit the butcher later.

    The dermestid tank, the flesh eating beetle habitat, was right next to us while we worked on the bird. Did they watch us prepare their supper? The larvae will creep through the cheesecloth and snack like crazy when we put the robin in there on Saturday. Just think, while you are enjoying your Saturday morning coffee and pastries before tackling the weekend chores, the dermestid larvae will be tying on bibs and settling in for the smorgasborg.

    We’ll have a nice clean skeleton in a week or so. That American Robin, number UBZA-002, will contribute to federally funded research about mutually impactful human and environmental relationships for generations. He’ll visit schools as part of a science class lecture about archaeology. He’ll teach graduate students about bird skeletons. He is transforming from performing flight with wings through physical space to causing flights of mind through ideas and hypotheses.  Is that some kind of bird rapture?

    The WideEyedSpouse won’t let me keep the dermestid tank here in the WideEyedHousehold. He says keeping flesh eating beetles in the basement is like housing a zombie. “If I fall down or something when I’m working out, next thing you know my leg is gone,” he argues. “Er…” I have no response.