I’ve been working through the LLF course with my bible study and I've been examining my identity. What keywords do I use to describe myself? What items, locations, and rituals do I attach my sense of self to? What would happen if one of these was ripped from under my feet?

Fiction Bite - Library Closure Triggers Redundancies

“None of this shit will matter in 200 years” he tells me, slapping a steak on the board. He pulls the stainless steel, laser-cut mallet off the bespoke railing system and begins pounding the soft, copper smelling flesh. “Even this,” the now blood splattered mallet waves in my face, “will be stone age. Prehistoric. So don’t sweat it.”

More pounding as he warms the hand-ground cast-iron skillet. The dust, our collected dead skin and the excrement of a thousand house critters, begins to smoke.

“Take this cow,” the steak fills my vision, embossed with toothy concentric circles. “Since birth it’s lived a blessed life. Open air, fresh water, plenty of food, no disease. Why would it want to devolve to some scraggly bison?”

The pan spits as the flesh sears. The smell of auroch cooked over a fire. An unobtrusive fan unit whips away the smoke. Three layers of filters remove particulates before recirculating it into the air-conditioned kitchen.

“Sacrifices need to be made for progress.” He drops the steaming meat on locally hand painted plates. The steak knife is hand finished black walnut and stone ground Japanese steel. “It’s sad, but it had to go. Nobody reads books anymore.”

Pink flesh dances on his fork, arcing to his stupid, salivating mouth. I eat my quinoa porridge. I pretend I’m not looking. I pray he chokes; for the aurochs.

Quote of the Week

Watch the quote here

“You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.” - Fight Club. 1999 [Film] Based on the novel by Chuck Paulahnik. 

Extra points if you find the correlating exchange between the mechanic and the narrator in the novel (pg 143 in my edition)

Book recommendation - Blue Horses by Mary Oliver [Poetry]

Final Words

Last weekend I went to an outdoor centre, and rediscovered an old self, Joe the outdoor instructor. Years have passed, but he was there waiting for me. He just needed the right location to bloom. Is all my sense of self as transient as this? Or is some of it immutable?

With Love,

Josiah

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