Daily Loaf

I tear the wrapper off a 3-Euro bottle of Cotes du Rhone with my teeth and push the cork inside with my guitar capo. It’s midnight here in Nice, and the fireworks are blazing out of a lighthouse in celebration of our American Independence Day. In the States it’s still the third, but this is as much a French holiday as American, I suppose. This is all besides the point, since my tale is actually set in Slovakia where I sampled delicious pig brains.

I say delicious with no twang of sarcasm. I ate them breakfast, lunch, and dinner for two days straight. Try them on a nice piece of rye bread with a side of tea. Mmmm! But In order to get them, you need to do some serious slaughterin’. Care to know more?

Back in Tampa I met a kid named Martin Kandra, an exchange student from a London university I don’t remember the name of. What I do remember was that his sister graduated from Slovakian engineering school right around the time I was leaving Krakow, Poland. I decided it would be a good idea to stop by.

For the first 3 or 4 days I spent in Slovakia I was pent up in a cabin drinking pear whiskey and eating goulash out of a cauldron on an open fire. There were probably about thirty other kids there, most recently graduated college. I would tell you more about the whole event, but at this point it’s a blur. I do know that within the first ten minutes of me being there, a girl broke 3 ribs and a Hungarian woman got completely naked on camera. It was all downhill from there.

The next week or so I stayed with Martin’s family on their farm in the village of Spisske Vlachy (if you’ve ever seen the film Dragon Heart, the castle is in Spisske). I lived in a room upstairs, and they fed me quite well. But soon came the time when more food was needed, and something had to get slaughtered. Ended up being a 300-pound pig that lived out back with the other 300-pound pigs and a giant dog named Benni. If you have never slaughtered anything, which until recently I hadn’t, here is how that goes:

Step 1-Get a huge pig, and while you’re at it some huge family members with one of those handy dog/pig lassos on a stick. You’ll need both to move this big mofo. And a word to the wise — pigs don’t care for the lasso.

Step 2- Holy Shit! The pig is going crazy! It’s squealing and thrashing about! Holy shit, man! Watch out or it could break your legs! Or even spill the cauldron of boiling water on you … you’ll see.

Step 3- Don’t panic. After all, you’ve got one of these! Is it a Maglight? Is it a caulk gun? Is it dynamite?

Step 4- It’s none of these things! Actually, it’s a captive bolt pistol. The kind of scary gun made for point blank shooting. So quick, someone grab that thing and make this pig stop going crazy!

Step 5- You just killed a pig, and it took all of a millisecond. The bullet broke up and fucked the pigs brain with shrapnel. Relax and look at what you’ve accomplished: totally dead pig. Bigger and stronger than you will ever be, killed by something the size of a dime.

Step 6- Psyche! The pig may be dead, but its nervous system isn’t, and there’s plenty of electricity left in there. You have a full blown Zombie Pig on your hands. It’s gonna try to stand and blindly run about. Remember, it’s 300 pounds, it can still kill you. Best have EVERYONE JUMP ON IT! ‘Cept for you of course. Grab a huge knife and cut its throat; the pig is dead and won’t feel it, plus you need to catch its blood in a pot so you can make sausage later.

This is my friend Martin and the very unlucky pig.

Step 7- Take out the nasty parts and dice the pig with an axe. Remember that cauldron of boiling water? It will be useful for de-hairing.  Now your slaughterin’ for real! If you didn’t projectile vomit or pass out, I’d say that you are farmer material. Good for you!

What a strange summer.

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