It's Not About the Corpse

As a child, I used to like to go to the meat section of the grocery store and poke the plastic-wrapped fish in the eye. I think it was the "squishability" I enjoyed. There wasn't really anything else (especially in the grocery store) that offered the same tactile experience.

I imagine poking anything in the eye might offer a similar feeling, but people and beasts alike aren't particularly willing to let you stick your finger in their eye for fun. And conventional western morality being what it is, fish are about the only dead-things-with-a-head that a young boy might encounter.

Once I approached my teen years, I began to notice how uncomfortable my eye-poking tended to make those who observed it, which I found particularly funny. I started to have staring contests with the fish, and would punish their inevitable victory with a poke in the eye.

It's been a while since my last eye-poke. I'm not even sure they have fish heads in my local market anymore. Maybe the world has moved on.

We can't really change who we are, though. There is a large dead bird, a pigeon I think, in the parking lot at my workplace that has been there since Monday. If I can find the right stick, I may make subtle chirping noises while I poke at it.

If anyone's watching. People have to be watching.