The Chicken Coop

A comic about a job from the past with an analogy to the future.

Feb 03, 2025

I’m back after taking a month off to recharge my creative batteries, as well as mentally prepare for the onslaught of malarkey that will be pulled by the Orange Imbecile and his moronic minions.

As I return, I took a quick glance at my Substack dashboard and was pleasantly surprised. I finally topped 1000 subscribers! Thank you all for that! Now if only I could get folks to buy my books…Ha! C’est la vie. But that’s OK, I’ll settle for amusing (or horrifying) you all with my newsletter’s creative blather.

Speaking of books, I have a slew of stories to roll out now as I finish a major revise of my book, “Buckshot Sugar Plums.” The following comic is one of the new stories that will be added to the book’s new larger edition.

This story may disturb some readers since it addresses various uncomfortable truths about farming practices, but please bare with it. After the comic I’ve added further context to this nearly 100% true tale.

The Carnie Life.

As summer ended each September, my little hometown of Big Flats, NY would hold its "Big Flats Community Days" festival. Three days of fun that featured fried food, carnival rides, and games of chance like "Duck Pond," "Under and Over," or "Dime or Quarter" pitching games.

The games of chance proceeds would benefit the local Fire Department fund or some local charity. The games and rides were provided by a small traveling carnival company, who probably took a good skim off the games of chance.

The rides at the festival were the usual cheeseball assortment of rickety, barely safe, amusement rides such as Carousels, Tilt-a-Whirls, and the Spinning Teacups.

In 1977, on the last night of one festival, after my pal Jimbo and I had our wallets picked clean from playing "Under and Over," we were approached by one of the Carnies. No doubt he was watching our massive losses, and made note that we were now desperate teenagers in need of cash. He asked us if we wanted to make a few bucks helping him take down the rides.

Jimbo and I thought it’d be easy money, and being the dumb, obvious marks that we were, we agreed to help.

The carnie handed us both a wrench and ordered us to scramble under the Spinning Teacup ride to loosen its bolts.

Easy money, right?

Not exactly. What the Carnie didn’t tell us was that the unlit underside of the ride was covered in layers of grease!

This made using a wrench an impossibly slippery task, made even more impossible by the fact that we had to search around, in the dark underbelly of the ride, for nuts and bolts that were concealed by those layers of muck!

The Carnie yelled at us as we scrambled to find where to use our wrenches.

“No! Over towards the center! Along the ridge! Feel for it, you sissies!” He screamed.

Jimbo and I, realizing how oily we were getting, started to burst out in laughter at the surreal ridiculousness of this job.

“STOP LAUGHIN’ YOU HYENAS AND FIND THEM BOLTS!” The Carnie barked.

It took us about a half hour of constant struggle to find, loosen and remove all the nuts. Once we had completed that, we crawled back out from under the ride.

Jimbo and I looked at each other. We were covered head to toe in enough grease and grime to be easily mistaken for a couple of roughnecks fresh from the oil rig.

I don’t remember if Jimbo told me how his mom reacted his grubby condition, but my mother chewed me out like a tough Salisbury steak.

First, she screamed at me for causing her to use a whole box of Tide to clean my clothes, and then for being so dumb as to trust a carnie and work under a ride where we could have been easily crushed to death!

I showed her the oily $10 bill I got as payment but that didn’t help to ease her worries.

Pearl Diver

Once I quit the Eggboy job, my job search took me to the local mall, where I landed a job as a dishwasher working at The Flaming Pit, which at the time was the only restaurant in the mall.

Being a dishwasher, or “pearl diver” as my Dad called it, taught me a few important life lessons.

One was gleaning a unique insight into the dining habits of people and restaurant menu planning.

For instance, if you serve “A Pot of Dutch Port Wine Cheddar Cheese” as an appetizer, patrons will typically consume only a third of the cheese and half of the provided crackers.

However, your dishwashing staff will thoroughly enjoy the leftovers when the busboy brings the dirty dishes back to the kitchen.

(By the way, if you hold a get-together which has a tub of Port Wine Cheddar on the party platter, you can be confident that I’ll show up.)

The second lesson learned was in terms of branding and marketing.

Avoid using the word "Pit" when naming any food establishment. Due the unfortunate association of “pits” being the things where humans would toss garbage, feces, toxic chemicals, or young virgin sacrifices, the word “pit” tends to leave a rather soiled image in a diner’s mind.

Surprisingly though, despite everyone in Big Flats calling the place the “The Flaming Shit,” that restaurant operated for almost 12 years!

It closed down in 1981.

I’m pretty sure it was due to Ronald Reagan placing import tariffs on Dutch Port Wine Cheddar Cheese Pots.

Stocks, stacks, and Mad wax

After I swam out of the Pit, I moved on to working as a stock boy at Sears. It was boring for the most part except when it came to stocking dishwashers.

That’s when I got to tool around on the little forklift in the stock room.

The forklift was necessary since Sears managers wanted to stack dishwashers —heavy concrete stabilized dishwashers—as high as was humanly possible.

I can’t recall how many times I was nearly crushed to death while loading, stacking, or unstacking those dreadful appliances.

But again, when I told my mom, the head nurse at a local ER, about my job she chewed me out over its hazards and wanted me to quit.

For some reason, my Dad saw the job as perfectly acceptable.

I made my mom happy by quitting and then got a job at the Sam Goody Records store in the mall.

I remember my Dad being somewhat sad when I told him there wasn’t much danger in handling records and CDs.

Cabbage Patch of Denial

Once I went off to college in Buffalo, NY, I moved up the wretched job ladder.

Thanks to The Manpower Temporary Placement and Dead End Job Agency, I worked in a Leather Tannery for a week, until the overwhelming stench of formaldehyde was too much for me.

After leaving that job, I moved on to work at a car radiator manufacturing plant, where I transferred freshly spray-painted radiators from one room to another. Again, after a couple days, the paint fumes became unbearable.

These odoriferous gigs made me realize that my nose and respiratory system are far too sensitive for industrial applications.

Therefore, I got a job at JCPenney’s Department store as a sales associate in Sporting Goods and Toys.

With perfect fateful timing, I began my job to unknowingly coincide with the release, and immense unhinged hype, of the Cabbage Patch dolls.

None of my previous work experiences had prepared me for this; the onslaught of frenzied parents in wide-eyed desperation to please their precious little darlings’ tyrannical need for one of these bald-headed hunks of hormone-disrupting and cancer-inducing soft plastic.

I was confronted with anger, screaming, pleading, denial, and crying. Essentially, I'd see the five stages of grief whenever I would return from the back storeroom with news that the next shipment of dolls hadn’t arrived.

After the parent finished blubbering their disappointment and demands to “speak with the manager,” It gave me a fair amount of pleasure in suggesting that perhaps their little princess would be happy with a “Rainbow Brite” doll or a “Mr. T” action figure.

How parents' faces twisted in a whirl of emotional pandemonium was absolutely priceless.

Back to Eggs

While other jobs in my youth fade from memory, the Eggboy job has managed to still float in my brain, thanks to a combination of PTSD and reading far too much since then on factory farming practices.

As I was working on this comic, twirling around its storyline, I began to see the chicken coop and its horrendous conditions as allegories.

While George Orwell wrote “Animal Farm” as an allegory about Soviet Russia under Stalin, the abusively cruel conditions of a factory egg farm could be an analogy for humanity under oligarchy, which I fear our country has now slipped into thanks to evil, sociopathic billionaires like Elon Musk being allowed to hold far too much power over our government.

That’s unfortunately why this analogy works so well.

Oligarchs want the majority of humanity to stay in their little cages, eating what meager sustenance keeps them going to keep squeezing out those precious eggs of profit for the Oligarch; be it through lousy working conditions and low wages he’ll profit from, or scams that pilfered a chicken’s life-savings, or any number of debt traps constructed to make sure those chickens stay subserviently in their cages. The Oligarch wants those birds to keep spitting out those wonderful golden eggs until one batch of used-up, dead chickens is cleaned out of the cage and replaced with a fresh batch of hens to abuse. It’s a vicious unending cycle.

Another way to look at this is to call it a return to Feudalism.

It makes one wonder if people in the United States have become indolent and forgotten the past. For example, how have people forgotten the founding of our country? When our country was a small string of colonies struggling to break free from the rule of a Mad King and the oligarchical corporation that was squeezing the colonialists of every crown they could produce.

My how history repeats, but on a larger, more nightmarish scale.

I tend to think that one of the ways to fight back against the dark future that confronts us is to refuse the chicken cage they want to trap you in.

Instead, be the difficult stubborn hen that’s escaped the coop and lives in the nearby field. Be the hen who likes to hide its eggs under thorn-laden bushes, so if the Oligarch wants the eggs they’ll get bloodied in the process.

You may have heard the history that Ben Franklin once suggested we choose the Turkey instead of the Eagle as our national bird. But it’s rumored that one day, while looking at his backyard chicken coop, he initially considered the rooster. Then he noticed how the rooster cowered before the hens and later suggested they be the choice during conversations with Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson told him to stop sniffing chicken manure.

But give this a momentary thought. If we had chosen the humble chicken as our national bird maybe it would have discouraged abusive factory farming, and by extension, greedy capitalism or corrupt government, or any predilections for a return to feudalism.

Hmm, I wonder.

It seems like a chicken or egg causality dilemma to mull over while I try to be as free-range as possible during these times.

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