January 13, 2010
Chicken Run
If there is a downside to my bucolic residence in north Georgia it is the ubiquitous presence of the chicken house. There are probably twelve houses within a square mile area. Don't know what a chicken house is? Here's a fine example:
Much finer than what you'll find around here, by the way. The local ones are much more ramshackle.
Here's the inside of a chicken house:
(I do believe the public relations folk photoshopped all the eight hundred pounds of eye-tearing, vomit-inducing shit out of this picture, by the way).
The upside of a chicken house is that it's usually empty. The downside is that it smells like fucking ass. Normally the prevailing winds keep the stench in the other direction, however every once in a while a wind shift will bring the funk on. A few weeks after I moved here I was convinced there was a dead animal under Key's front porch.
"It's a fucking possum," I declared. "No cat could smell this bad." I fished around under there for an hour, and gave up. An hour later I was going to look again and the smell was miraculously gone. Wind shift.
"Something got that dead possum," I declared. "It doesn't smell anymore. Do we have coyotes?" Apparently she had become vexed with me, for she walked outside and said "Oh. That was the chicken house."
I'm fairly certain Nagasaki at H-Hour + 1 smelled better than the chicken house, but I sucked it up, and resigned myself to the fact that every few weeks I'd get an hour or two of the barnyard pimps, as my light-skinned Negro friends in jail called them. Plus, it only takes six weeks to raise a brood, what with the steroids, and the locals only raise about three broods a year.
The hilarious part of this story is how I purchase and consume this disgusting steroidal garbage while convincing myself it is healthier than those several hundred Black Angus I see grazing alfalfa as I drive to and from work.
I really need to eat more red meat. It is the Lord's will. In fact, I have several employees who raise the Anguses. Farm women. I wonder how a video called "Two Girls, One Boltgun" would fare on YouTube?
P.S. I should have added the phrase "smells like ass" to my 2010 dead pool. I apologize for its banal use. Which reminds me of another point: I had a friend who forever lamented his lack of more heightened senses, like the other animals, or superheroes. I told him, loosely, "I wouldn't mind having a bit keener eyesight, but I cannot handle any greater sense of smell. The very idea that I could smell your freshly digested kohlrabi from across the street does not enthuse me, sir. As it is, I'm smelling all I can tolerate of anything."
I like my chicken in the form of a nice 22oz. rib eye. Medium rare with salt and pepper only, as anything else on a good steak is sacrilege. And just so slightly burned around the edges.
Fuck a bunch of the barnyard pimp and the diets that encourage eating that shit. It doesn't even qualify as decent filler.
Posted by: dick at January 13, 2010 10:09 PM..."kohlrabi"...Damn, you ain't right.
Posted by: Yabu at January 13, 2010 10:13 PMWhy you city-boy poseur, chickenshit smells like ammonia. Put a pinch of skoal between cheek and gum, pop a PBR or six, add the smell of chickenshit on a humid day, and it's just like being down on the farm, ahhhhhh. It makes damned good fertilizer too. I'll bet that alfalfa is fertilized with the local poltry effluent.
Posted by: Casca at January 14, 2010 10:25 AMI was paid $1.50 an hour as a kid to shovel the sawdust/chickenshit into a dump truck, which we then spread on the cow pastures. This story reminds me of that... Smell wasn't too bad unless the house leaked, then the ammonia would knock you over.
Posted by: CSM BigBird at January 14, 2010 2:50 PMMan, they is a shitload of chickums in that there pitcher.
Only 800 pounds of chickenshit in that whole house? I'm surprised. When we had our horse, he could crank out 800 pounds of shit all by himself in a week or two. Money in one end, shit out the other: that was horse ownership in a nutshell.
Posted by: Elisson at January 14, 2010 3:09 PMI'm convinced it's a weapon of mass de-pluck-shun. If you had sinuses before you got a whiff of the stuff, you'd surely swear they'd been acid-burned afterwards.
Posted by: Omnibus Driver at January 14, 2010 5:28 PMOnly a Georgia boy could get away with griping about the noble yardbird.
The only thing that will knock that smell back is 13 yearold sourmash.
Count yourself lucky, in S. IL we have large factory hog farms and oil wells that stink like hell also. Casca has it right, PBR helps a bunch.
Posted by: Cocklebur at January 14, 2010 7:14 PMI concur with Cocklebur. My mom's house is within whiffing distance of a pig farm (that being several miles away, but still quite noticeable when the wind blows in the wrong direction).
However, I humbly submit that a cellar full of rotten potatoes can outstank any feces produced by any animal.
Posted by: PeggyU at January 14, 2010 7:31 PMOught to try being out at 5AM for a nice, long run through the twisted, back country byways of Korea in the summer. Every animal what is raised by man and has a part that festers is aromatizing the countryside out there.
Posted by: Andy at January 14, 2010 9:54 PMThe worst smell I ever smelt, was when I helped my cousin move, he had a freezer that died with about 200 pounds of deer meat in it. Which was in there for around 2 months in summer, that was the only time I ever yakked over a smell.
I have never been to Congress though, sure the smell of that many politicians in one spot would be worse.
I didn't see any KFC sign on that thing.
Posted by: Cappy at January 15, 2010 5:07 PM"it smells like fucking ass"
I'm going to have to disagree with you on that.
I grew up on a pig farm. Pig farms smell like ass. My father fertilized the corn fields with anhydrous ammonia. That stung my eyes. He also delivered newspapers next to a field being fertilized with chicken crap - that smelled like goddamned World War III with a hangover, halitosis, and a stomach virus.
Posted by: guy at January 16, 2010 12:20 AMAndy, that's why you have to eat the kimchae, and drink the soju. Then the stuff coming out of your pores smells as bad as everything else, and you don't notice. You must be one of those air force fairies. Back in the day before porta-potties, we cut fifty gallon drums in half, and used them for our latrine. The honey-dippers came out every morning to gather their treasure to spread on their garden plots, and paid us for the honor.
Posted by: Casca at January 17, 2010 3:02 PM