Chiasmus (ki-az’-mus): 1. Repetition of ideas in inverted order. 2. Repetition of grammatical structures in inverted order (not to be mistaken with antimetabole, in which identical words are repeated and inverted).
Hi! My name’s Bill! “I’d rather die eating meat than live as a vegetarian.” My father worked at a meat packing plant. He made up the saying. Sometimes he would stand at the dinner table and hold up a piece of bacon or a pork chop when he said it. He saw more blood in a day than a hospital emergency room in a month. As foreman, each year he was given a dead cow as a gift. He’d borrow our neighbor’s pickup truck and we’d drive to the slaughterhouse to pick up the cow. It was hell loading the cow. We would pour Mazola Oil in the truck bed, rest the cow’s head on the tailgate, jack up the cow’s hindquarters with the truck’s jack, and slide the cow forward on the oily truck bed. When we got home, we’d tie a rope around the cow’s neck and drive the truck under a tree limb and hang it up in the front yard. People would drive by and take pictures. Sometimes me and Dad would pose for pictures, standing in front of the cow shaking hands. One year PETA tried to “rescue” the dead cow. We fought them off with a garden hose and cubes of raw liver.
We let the cow hang in the front yard for about a week. Then, we’d yank off the skin and put on green surgical gowns to butcher the cow. We wear mirror gizmos on our foreheads with little holes in them like real doctors. We thought it was funny. My little sister would play nurse, wiping our brows and handing us stuff. We used a battery-powered hedge trimmer and a chainsaw to dismember the cow, then hacksaws, meat cleavers and knives to produce the cuts of meat. My favorite was the loins or “blackstraps” running along either side of the cow’s backbone. There were no bones, just solid meat! I used my “Bovine Butcher Blade” to cut out the loins—moving through the raw meat like it’s melted butter. I love making a meat turban out of one the loins, putting it on my head, and crossing my arms like a wise man, and saying: “I am the Meatman, ooo-kooka-too.” The cow’s tongue is fun to retrieve too. It’s slippery, but if you wear gloves you can get a good grip, pull, and slice. Once it’s tongue helped the cow to “moo,” now it’s headed for the pickle jar. Sliced thin, it makes a great sandwich—sprinkled with A-1 steak sauce, topped with two pieces of American cheese on white bread and, fried in butter, cut in half and served with potato chips and a glass of milk. Mooove over and give me a bite of that!
We have two freezers in the basement where we keep the meat. That’s where we keep the meat grinder too—in the basement—we grind up scraps and cuts of meat that are best for meatballs, etc. Mostly, it is meat off the cow’s neck. But that’s not all. We make flower pots out of hollowed out cow’s hooves and give them as Christmas gifts with dwarf poinsettias planted in them, with tiny little ornaments decorating them. Very festive!
“From cow to now” is what I think when I bite into a slice of steak and the juice runs down my chin, and I wipe it off with a paper towel, and quietly. burp, and sometimes go “bow, wow, wow” like my uncle Dave used to do. This year I made my little brother Dexter a cow suit for Halloween. It’s genuine cowhide skinned off this year’s cow, and I must say, it looks real good—it even has horns and a tail. It moos too from a recording I made on Dexter’s phone. He’s going to wear it today in the annual school Halloween parade. Maybe he’ll win the best costume prize. He’s such a good boy.
So, if you’re not doing anything tonight, “meat” me at the “Blue Coyote” and we can have a couple a beers and some all-beef Slim Jims. I ‘m buyin.’
POSTSCRIPT
While taking the shortcut to school through the woods in his cow suit, little Dexter was shot by a deer hunter, who had left his glasses in his truck and thought Dexter was a deer. Luckily, little Dexter was only nicked the ear. He was able to beat the crap out of his assailant with a tree branch, kick him a few times in the stomach, and then, continue on to school. He won the Halloween costume prize and then went home for a hamburger, medium rare.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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