Social Tip #52 - Meat

During high school I lived with my father and brother in my childhood home in Scottsdale, Arizona. Despite the fact that none of us cooked or cleaned anything ever, we had a second dishwasher, oven, microwave, and refrigerator/freezers. We hid the extra refrigerator in a laundry room that was buried in decaying clothes, dusty children's shirts and tennis whites that were too out-of-date to wash and too dirty to donate. They were left there the day we moved into that home, long before my mom stopped doing the laundry.

No one ever used the second refrigerator except for my dad because he signed himself up for the "Meat of the Month" club. My dad considered the meat to be too precious to cook, so he banked his cow parts in the freezer.

Some time after the meat membership lapsed, that refrigerator died, and went untouched for many months, possibly years, until out of curiosity I made the mistake of opening it. I was met with a force powered by death. I smelled that smell with my entire head. All of my other senses were shut down and my entire existence became that smell.

I slammed the refrigerator shut and abandoned it, and over time the entire east wing of our home smelled like the slaughterhouse I had already come to associate with the city of Scottsdale. That smell gave me a purpose in life, a challenge waiting to be met. I spent years building up the courage before I reopened the refrigerator, dumped gallons of bleach into it, and dragged it out into the backyard where it stayed until sometime when I was in college, right next to the second of two grills that were never used.

R.I.P