Working steadily on the dissertation. That is to say, finding myself ever more disturbed at what ‘humanity’ seems to entail. I don’t know exactly what we are, despite all our posturing about what we would like ourselves to be. I wonder about morality and relativism and the boundaries we allow ourselves to cross daily, so long as we have a moral excuse for them. While this comment applies to literally every territory of human existence, I want to discuss our treatment of ‘other’ creatures. The usual line I hear is that opting out of factory farming, and choosing instead to purchase meat from local farms allows the animal a ‘happier’ life.

We all suffer pain in our lifetimes. But we still visit pain upon these animals, despite their heretofore ‘happy’ existence. I wonder if cows learn to trust those who care for them, and if, at that final moment, when the cow/chicken/pig is still slaughtered despite all that ‘humane’ care, they feel a level of betrayal along with the physical pain that their particular death will bring. Chimpanzees are nothing like cows, but it’s clear they feel those kind of emotions (watch “Project Nim” if you don’t believe me). It’s not a hard stretch to find other animals who do have relationships of trust with humans, as well. And I don’t know about you, but I would prefer a much more peaceful death than having my throat sliced open or a bolt stabbing through my skull.

So tonight I am ambivalent about “who” we are. We are capable of inducing happiness and pain, of creating misery and kindness, of loving and hating. Our moral compass, if we have one at all, seems to come from what serves our existence best (and if I go all Darwin about it, it seems that helps us to survive–more about this quandary later). But we decide what best serves us. For me, I simply cannot swallow the excuse that the cow had a happier life until the moment the farmer took him out back and used a bolt gun to stab him through the skull.

I know this cow will die, someday. Or, if we didn’t practice the production of farming animals for slaughter, it might never be born at all and other varieties would be given the chance to evolve. So many varieties of animals have died or are dying out thanks to modern factory breeding techniques, as it is, that our lack of biodiversity is a serious worry. But, I do think there is a moral difference between forcing the animal to become my meal and allowing it to live a life unimpeded by our egotism.

In other writing news, I finished a new draft of a story about a sheela-na-gig, am at work on a YA fantasy novel about runaway teens, and in general brood every free second of my day. Nothing new here, except, perhaps, for my growing cynicism. I don’t want us to be horrible to each other or to our partners on this earth. The kind of pain we visit upon each other (both human-to-human and animal-to-animal) rattles me.

Today I woke up at 6:30am to find an email from Scape e-zine, buying my story, “Double Dutch”! I’d been having a pretty terrible week/month, so to find this wonderful news in my inbox kicked me straight out of the doldrums and into writerly ecstasy. It’s my first actual sale, though I’ve placed plenty of work in other pubs (gratis). I’m so excited I could throw up.

I wrote “Double Dutch” during week three of Clarion West, and it began a string of absolutely weird ideas I never thought myself capable of writing. This story taught me that I should never, ever let my internal censor tell me something was too weird to write. After “Double Dutch” came an absolutely frightening story that still hurts to think about. But “Double Dutch” kicked off a new way for me to explore fiction, so I couldn’t be more excited that this is the first story I’ve sold.

Please check out Scape and embrace all its glory:

My poems “Jumping Point” and “the velocity of the fall” have been accepted for the 2011 issue of Oracle, the journal published by the University of South Alabama. I wrote “Jumping Point” while at Naropa University’s Summer Writers Program, and “the velocity of the fall” came about one fall afternoon as the leaves swirled through the creek in my backyard. I feel privileged to have my work forthcoming in this journal!