I can always gauge the severity of recessions in the small part of the planet which I inhabit by the number of animal carcasses left to decompose on the roads. During recessionary times the sate fires the clean-up crews charged with the miserable job of “body pick-up”, and the roads become dotted with dead animals.
Times are indeed tough; my drive to and back from work is starting to look like a walk through a nightmarish museum of taxidermy experiments gone terribly wrong. The other day I counted 13 dead skunks just on my 30-mile trek home. And because it is winter, and natural decomp is slow due to low temperatures, their bodies remain as markers between which one can find dead rabbits, squirrels, snakes, turtles, ground hogs, opossums, the occasional hawk, mice, moles, voles, foxes, cats, dogs, deer, a beaver that died looking as if it was trying to pull itself, wounded, up a side-walk, and a dead wild Turkey that for the past two weeks has marked the beginning of the carnage on my way into work.
One day, when and if the economy really does pick up and unskilled labor gets hired once again by the state, these reminders of the crazy mindless way in which we’ve set up our daily lives might again disappear more quickly. Meanwhile, we wait for nature to take its course, eventually leaving only greasy stains as markers of where flesh, fur, scales and feathers used to be and through which, once upon a time, life ran...
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