Fall is the busiest time of year at the slaughterhouse. Farmers are anxious to get their summer’s work into the freezer before winter. Most days, even Saturdays now, are spent cutting away at a very full meat locker. The work is endless. There is always more coming in the back than going out the front. And because everyone hates my music, we mostly work silently. This lets me — forces me — to do a lot of thinking, which takes many forms. Sometimes my thought process is completely chaotic and random; for example, I might sing a song about what I am doing: Flank, Flank, Flankity, Flank Flank. At other times, I am more like a Chinese adolescent issuing a self-criticism before chairman Mao, “I swear, oh Great One, one of these days I am going to get up at 6:30 and do yoga.”

I was especially nervous about killing my first cow because I spend so much time with my thoughts.

Yup, that’s right, I did it. And to tell the story, I’m gonna make like Dane Cook and “Tarantino” it. When it was all said and done, I told Roger that, “My head was okay with it, but my hands are still shaking…[nervous laugh].”

So about five minutes before it was my time to “do it,” I was told to imagine a straight line across the top of the cow’s eyebrow, then go an inch and a half down from the middle, and that’s where you want to stun it. For some reason, “stun” is the term used to describe firing a 4-inch steel bolt through an animal’s skull.

Semantics aside, this was my only training before it was go time. A few weeks ago, I watched Shadic, the kill floor veteran, stun a veal. The cow was standing there, Sahdic walked up, pushed the bolt gun against its head, and pulled the trigger. This was the first time I ever saw a dying cow have any emotion. It looked completely surprised, like, “huh?”. It slowly folded its legs, then kneeled down as it it were going to sleep. It was so peaceful. Just “huh?,” and then it sat down. That was it.

Now as for my de-flowering: as it turns out, the third time’s the charm. My first shot was too low and the hollow sound told me I hit the nasal passage. The second shot was too far away; since it’s a4-inch bolt, you have to be pressed directly against the animal’s skull. By this point, I felt the urgency to drop the thing, but I couldn’t get a clear shot. Also, the cow knew what was up. Nevertheless, on the third try, it fell to the ground. Its legs stiffened straight out and vibrated. Snot shot from its nose. And it pissed itself. That was that.

(Pete, another kill-floor man, gave it an extra stun just to make sure, but in future retellings of this story, I will probably leave that part out.)

Once the animal was dead on the ground, I went back into the processing room. Roger looked over at me and asked how I was. I told him, “My head is okay with it, but my hands are still shaking.” He laughed and we went back to work.

Before I walked onto the kill floor, I was mentally prepared for the whole incident. I eat meat. I cut up meat for a living. I should be okay with killing it too. I wasn’t going to let this task have power over me. It was something that I was going to accomplish. To put it into skiing terms, it was like floating a three over a 40’ table. The experience was intense.

Watching that cow die in what I precieved as being a painful manner was hard, but my biggest concern was that meat might be tainted. This was after all my cow. I purchased it from a farmer in Western New York for about $1200. It’s weird to share the price, but I think it’s good to know that cows are really fucking expensive and I really didn’t want to mess this one up. But the guys at work just laughed when I suggested that the meat might be affected by the animal’s prolonged death: “That was nothing,” they said.

I bought the cow because, starting next week, I will be officially selling Natural meat. The plan is to have a business that requires minimal investment. For now, I see the investment being about $1600, but with the amount of meat I will receive, it should be easy to make a profit. And if it doesn’t, well then, I have a freezer full of delicious meat.

The whole idea can be credited to my silent work time. I’ve planned it all out and talked it over with the old-timers I work with, and I am pretty excited about the whole thing. So let me use this moment to announce the launch of Freezer Pleaser. If you want to enjoy the taste of a great steak, but without that guilty, factory-farm aftertaste, then it’s time to let the Freezer Pleaser, please your freezer!

Enough of the shameless self-promotion. I gotta go kill your next meal.