The Decapitated Cow Head Strikes Back

Or "Cows without Chests:" a satire of literary success in the Machine Age

Hi Everyone,

This is what I mean when I say I write some weird, unpublishable stuff. I wrote Part I following a lovely walk in a local gorge. If you want to read something lyrical and pure, just stop once you read that part. If you want to read something bizarre and snarky, read on through Part II.

This bit of satire was cathartic as a writer who has struggled with personal integrity versus market demand in a culture that I believe is trending reductionistic and anti-human. If it sparks thoughts, please do comment.

[Edit: I had some people reach out asking about this story, and I’m sorry if I didn’t clarify enough! It’s satire, meaning everything you are about to read is PURE FABRICATION. I did not get internet bullied by a YouTuber. The editor, the poet, and the YouTuber are all figments of my imagination.]

Cheers!

Amelia

I. Where Are Our Bodies? A Modern Ozymandias

Why is it so easy for us to forget what we need and love? 

When I am here, surrounded by the trickling walls of the gorge, it is very easy for me to imagine how all pain will vanish in one breath. How, when taken out of its home court, evil becomes small and irrelevant as a pebble. How a place can heal. 

I feel here as though I could slip off my skin as easily as once slips off a dress. The shirring of the water becomes my clothing. The light ripples on the shattered cliffside. I swim upstream. The five tiny white petals of a raspberry blossom peek out at me from the shadows, containing, in their brightness, the whole world.

Just before the waterfall, in the center of the steam, rests a lumpy boulder, the current dividing around it in glistening strands. It looks like the decapitated head of a cow, with an unnaturally domed forehead. Pachycephalosaurus, I realize later—the beaked, hardheaded dinosaur that walked upright on two feet.

That, I think, is the ludicrous sum of modern human achievement. One lumpen mass, motionless in the midst of a stream like an adolescent boy in a dancehall, too young, too awkward, and too clueless to join in the joy. But eventually, of course, he will. God’s creation flows easily around him, and as it courses onward, it exerts a gentle tug. Soon, the stone will come dislodged, and the cow’s head will tumble down the waterfall to rejoin its body at the river’s end. 

Sun crowns the frilly tops of trees. Honeysuckles breathed the elusive scent I caught downstream, and here, upstream, I find them, rearing their heads like seahorses. I have run up sixty stone steps, and now I run them down. I pass again through the lacquered metal gates with the oak leaves and the crafted acorns and the curving bars from an unknown, buried smith who knew so well the shapes of nature.¹ 

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Dear Readers,

It was the early days of the Internet when I first published this short essay in a literary web ‘zine. A month or two after it went up, the entire website vanished into thin air. I later learned that the last remaining editor of the literary journal had shut it down so he could pursue a secondary B.S. in Accounting. He had observed his fellow English majors fell almost exclusively into two categories: (1) working in marketing and making bank, or (2) working at McDonald’s and barely scraping by (while writing great works of unpublishable literature by moonlight). This noble editor lived proudly in the second category and retained a stubborn commitment to the arts until his girlfriend told him she wanted to get married and have kids. Forced into a corner, he folded the literary journal. By then, its readership was so small no one even contacted him to ask about it. No one, that is, but me.

More recently, however, my essay was reposted on the YouTube channel of a successful decapitated cow head, who has made his career educating people on how to make millions in marketing and B2B blogging. The cow head had been a nobody when I published my short essay, which portrays his kind in an unflattering light. He held onto his bitterness for many years and let it fuel him to aim higher and achieve more. Now that he has gained about 2 million subscribers, he felt empowered to speak out against the haters (aka, me) and created a video response.

The Twitter outrage generated by this response has thrown me and my work into the public arena, which, as a writer, is actually really gratifying. In order to rack up as many subscribers as possible, I’m riding the wave of my cancellation by reposting the original essay here. To be fair (and to attract more web traffic), I’m also including the transcript of the cow head’s response. If you say I’m just proving the cow head’s point—well, none of us is pure, and we all gotta eat. I think my former editor would agree that sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

Bon appetit!

The Poet

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II. The Decapitated Cow Head’s Response:

“Americans Should Visit Natural Parks to Build Healthier Individuals And Societies—watch me DESTROY a hater.”

Mooo. I remember being offended by how I found myself objectified and othered in the above text, and I think I should have my say as a fellow being. It’s already offensive enough that the poet implied that we decapitated cow heads “need” bodies in order to be whole. Watch me! Still no body. Still don’t need one. A head’s enough for my voice to be heard. I’ve come into my power, and I’m going to DESTROY the author of that essay by demonstrating I can make the exact same point he was trying to make —but better, more successfully, with more readers. Haters gonna hate, but the best of us harness that rage into self empowerment.

The writer of the above adolescent maundering was inarticulately dancing around a point that’s really quite simple when you cut the fluff: It’s healthy for you to go out in nature. I found an article on this phenomenon from a Japanese tourism website:  Forest Bathing in Japan (Shinrin-yoku). Here are just a few of the health benefits they cite: 

“Forest bathing improves sleep quality, mood, ability to focus, and stress levels … Dr. Qing Li, MD, Ph.D… identifies a nature deficit disorder in society, which contributes to negative feelings about life, but can be significantly improved by just a few hours of forest bathing.”

Bam. Moo. There it is! It’s good for you. The Science says so. No need to prevaricate. To sum it up in a jingle, an author named Aldous Huxley once wrote:

“Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.”

(And no, I didn’t just copy and paste that from a Goodreads quotes page. Why would you say that?)

That’s what’s so great about national parks and spaces. They allow you take a holiday from the pressures of daily life without any harm to your health or your rationality.

Now, when people like the misled and weirdly religious author of the above text hear people like me explain the scientific rationale for enjoying nature, they accuse us of pimping out nature to the wellness industrial complex. But dude. How else would national forests and nature preserves make a sustainable level of revenue? We’ve got to bring in more well-funded scientific studies if we want to bring in the tourists. After all, people trust scientific stats to give them glowing skin and a slender figure. They listen to Science because it directly benefits them to do so.

All this to say—ignore the poet. Her essay is defunct. It’s all about useless, old-fashioned, and honestly quite bigoted notions of feeding your ‘heart’ and ‘soul.’ People like the author of the above text are usually pretentious, self-absorbed trust fund babies who think they sound oh so “sophisticated” when they reference “The Great Works of Literature” and feel entitled to waste people’s time with their droning. 

Finally, who’s motivated by poetry to go out and visit a national park? Poetry just begs the question. Blablabla you think the clouds are pretty. Who cares. What’s in it for me? For example, now, when I read that blasé title “Stopping by Woods on A Snowy Evening,” I’m like—that is so not SEO-friendly. You should retitle it “Millions Contemplate Suicide Each Winter Due to S.A.D. You’re Not Alone.” Now that’s relatable. That’ll get clicks.

That’s where my vindication lies. Pretentious poetry is so badly marketed and unappealing no one will ever read it. The author claims that her lackadaisical dithering is what people “need and love.” Me, on the other hand, I know what really matters is not what people need and love but what people want. And I give it to them (Evidence? My 2 million subscribers.)

Please like, comment, and subscribe to my channel. If you want to learn how I make 2 billion a year from passive income, sign up for a free preview of my newest course: “Data-Driven Dollars.”

1. “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”