“Cleaning a deer” for people who clean deer all the time
I know, right? Can you believe there are people who don’t know this shit? Weird. These are probably the same people who call the poop rope “the intestines.” We all know it’s a poop rope, people. Saying it in French doesn’t make it any less disgusting.
Anyway, my dad had just finished cleaning the deer when I made a recklessly fast, ninja-like U-turn to avoid getting tagged by my sister, and that’s when I ran. Right. The fuck. Inside of the deer. It took me a moment to realize what had happened, and I stood there, kind of paralyzed and not ninja-like at all. The best way I can describe it is that it was kind of like I was wearing a deer sweater. Sometimes people laugh at that, but it’s not an amused laugh. It’s more of an involuntary nervous giggle of what-the-fuckness. Probably because you aren’t supposed to wear deer for sweaters. You’re not supposed to throw up inside them either, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
I’d like to think that my father threw that deer away, because I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to eat food you’ve worn or vomited into, but while he was hosing me off he was also hosing off the deer, so my guess is that he applied some sort of a fucked-up Grizzly Adams version of the five-second rule. (Food on the floor is still edible as long as you pick it up within five seconds. Unless it’s peanut butter; then the five-second rule is null. Or if it’s something like dry toast, the five-second rule is extended to, like, a week and a half, because really, what’s going to get on dry toast? Nothing, that’s what. God, I could write a whole book on the five-second rule. That should totally be the follow-up book to this one: The Five Second Rule As It Applies to Various Foodstuffs. Brilliant. But now I’ve forgotten what I was writing about. Oh, yeah, throwing up inside a deer sweater. Right.) And that’s why I still suspect that my dad took home the horribly defiled deer sweater to eat. Except I didn’t eat it, because after that the smell of blood made me gag, and to this day I can’t eat any meat that I’ve seen or smelled raw, which my husband complains about all the time, but until he’s worn a deer sweater he can just shut the hell up. He says it’s all in my mind, but it’s totally not, and I’ve even offered to take some sort of blind smell test, like they did in the Pepsi challenge, where he holds bowls of blood up to my nose so that I can prove that I can smell blood, but he won’t do it. Probably because he’s kind of anal about our bowls. He wouldn’t even let me use one for throwing up in when I was sick. He was all, “Vomit bowl? Who uses a vomit bowl?!” and I was all, “I use a vomit bowl. Everyone uses a vomit bowl. You keep it near you in case you can’t make it to the toilet,” and he was all, “No, you use a trash can,” and I was like, “You sick fuck. I’m not throwing up in a trash can. That’s totally barbaric.” Then he yelled, “That’s what normal people do!” and I screamed, “That’s how civilization breaks down!” And then I refused to speak to him for the rest of the day, because he made me yell at him while I was vomity. Did you notice how I just skipped right to having a husband even though this paragraph is supposed to be about my childhood? My God, this is going to be a terrible book. But both stories have to do with blood and vomit, so that’s kind of impressive, in a way that’s really less “impressive” and more just kind of “sad” and “disturbing.”