I was standing around at a gathering of friends.  I was talking to Tim 3 (I have several friends named Tim so this one we’ll call Tim 3.)

Tim 3 can sometimes be gross.  Here is Tim 3 being gross at Tim 2’s art opening a while back.

Tim 3

Tim 3 wasn’t being gross yesterday though.  Not that I mind gross.  I’m more nervous about exceedingly tidy, well-mannered people than gross people.  I figure people who do gross things are letting their weirdness and idiosyncrasies show whereas well-mannered tidy people are HIDING SOMETHING.  Probably in back of a panel truck with a lot of meat cleavers.

As Tim 3 and I were yakking, an acquaintance named Patti was standing nearby talking with some other friends about learning to trust a chicken.

Tim and I overheard this bizarre statement and looked at each other.

Tim 3 and I definitely both heard Patti say “I needed to learn to trust a chicken.”

Tim 3 turned to me and said: I never trust chickens.

I said: I had a pet chicken when I was four.

He said: Did you trust it?

I said: Not especially.

Interestingly, this theme of trusting chickens came at the end of a week filled with family, dairy products and EGGS.

I didn’t want to be a total pain in the ass when I visited my mom for Christmas so I ate food made with eggs and butter.  It did not kill me, but my mom and my brothers and niece and nephew all knew I wasn’t that into eating it.  They spoke, slightly mockingly, of my animal welfare concerns.  I tried explaining that while the heinous mistreatment of food animals is why I abstain, another consideration might be FOULNESS and severe risk to one’s own welfare. The animals pumped full of drugs and filth and packed in drugs and filth and shipped and sold in drugs and filth and, guess what ends up inside your body? Drugs and filth!

Ironically, I was always the drugs and filth girl of the family.  Now I’m just the eccentric vegan with a pit bull who got TERRORIZED BY POODLES.

My mom has fifteen poodles. The shock value in the statement “My mom has fifteen poodles” is pretty amazing.

I love my mom and she is a very beautiful human being.  She just has a lot of poodles.  And they are jerks.  They catch one GLIMPSE of Mickey (when we visit, we are banished to the barn apartment so the poodles don’t have to see Mickey much) and they go bonkers, barking and lunging and acting like homicidal maniacs.   Walking on mom’s farm is kind of like being in one of the violent uprising scenes in Planet of the Apes.  Except with poodles instead of apes.   

So Mickey mostly stayed in the barn and I traveled between barn and house, hanging with my brothers and being forced by my tireless 8-year-old niece to hike, swim, and do yoga pretty much continuously when not consuming dairy products.

My mom was constantly rustling around, cooking, grooming poodles, horse whispering, and putting my brothers to work stacking hay, feeding horses, doing horse laundry.

Here is Geronimo the horse, quite naked (and dirty) as his horse blanket was being laundered.

Only my nephew was mellow. Enjoying his break from his CHICKEN business.

My nephew is twelve-years-old, has 30 something chickens, and runs an egg business that he’s soon passing along to my niece.  Hopefully, by next Christmas my niece will be tired out from running the egg business and won’t run my ass ragged.

I asked my nephew what he does with the chickens when they are past their egg-laying prime.  Does he whack them and eat them?  He said some, but the ones he likes he keeps as pets.

Because chickens are like any other animal.  They have personalities and quirks and habits. Some are likable, others, you wouldn’t trust AT ALL.

As it happens, last night, Tim 3 and I learned that our acquaintance Patti was NOT seeking to learn to trust a chicken.  She wanted to learn to TRUSS a chicken.

So that’s a very different story.