Snoring

Three weeks ago this very day I stood with two monks in a field in Rimont, France. Let me tell you how, as the rain spattered and splashed its heaving drops around us, we attempted to lure two prime ripened pigs into a large blue van, specially lined for the occasion. Let me tell you how we built a ramp for them, nailed wooden stairs for their slipping trotters, slapped and patted them, tempted them with over-ripened food, pleaded with them on our rain-soaked-mud-covered knees, prayed hail-mary’s for them, smeared spaghetti over our hands and gave chase, beat them with sticks, swayed them with rhetoric. Let me tell you how whatever we tried, these piggies were not getting on this van.

The night before the day’s slaughter I had gone to say goodbye to them; they were snuggled up next to each other and snoring gently. Of all the slumbering animals I have ever met, pigs just so happen to be the cutest. Orgh-schwoo, Orgh-schweo, they went. But all that seemed quite distant as I stood there slipping in the slop of the mud, smelling the sweet pig sweat on their soon to be bacon, hearing their grunts and snuffles as they tried over and over to bite through my oversized Wellingtons. They began to lose their adorability.

And as I chased those two pigs around a rain soaked field, a stick in hand and two monks in tow, the three of us weighed down by guilt and wet clothing, it occurred to me how reliably unexplainably ridiculous life is. How predictably unpredictable it always becomes.