How to Cook a Cow Head

The only neighbor who didn't hate us, and who we never called the cops on, was a guy we nicknamed nerd. Nerd lived alone, and his only defining characteristics were horn-rim glasses, and a passion for vacuuming, which we frequently heard him doing. I always imagined him up in his living room sitting in a recliner, staring at a high-powered vacuum in the center of the room. I imagined that he was using his superior electrical engineering skills to constantly modify his vacuum, seeking evermore power. I think eventually he will invent a vacuum so advanced that it will take over the world.

All of these wonderful people living around me, the titanium mill down the street, my $86.00 a week job and $500.00 per month rent, my credit cards rapidly reaching their limits, and my 3 hours of sleep per night were still not enough to make me see the town I lived in for what it was. It was not until I was in the grocery store on that night in December, that I fully realized there was something wrong with this place.

It was Friday night and my girlfriend and I were going to the grocery store to get something for dinner. The cheapest grocery store in town was a place called "Shop'n Kart". It was cheap for a reason. I'm not sure how they got their prices to be so low, but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with changing expiration dates and mixing the hamburger with meat scraped off of the highway.

The selection was substandard, but on this night we found an item that one would normally have to buy straight from the butcher, and perhaps not even him. We walked down the meat isle and in the distance something caught my eye. The section that housed the frozen turkeys was a large object bundled up in plastic wrap. It was much too large to be a turkey, so we decided to investigate.