Notes from a Crab Massacre

Notes from a Crab Massacre

1. No neutral observer would recognize the human as anything but the villain, here.

2. Who first attempted to eat a crab and more importantly who didn’t stop them?

3. Crab meat. Crab… muscles?

4. Uses for shell fragments? Maybe grind them. Crab flour. Crab paint. Check Etsy.*

5. Uses for green goo? Wikipedia says another name for this is crab mustard, and another name is hepatopancreas. Even if you use it as sauce there’s too much of it. Check Pinterest.**

6. What secondary urge does this ritual satisfy? It’s much more intimate than just eating together. So then what tertiary urge? It is pure dominance and SUPREME othering of a species with eyes and arms and legs. Hm. Eat more crab; switch to the claws.

7. Starship Troopers, the movie, was badly misunderstood. There’s sort of a critical consensus about this now but… idk, it didn’t really get a fair shake the first time around and there’s certainly been no large scale rehabilitation. The insectoid enemies are essential to both the jingoism of the book and the cynicism of the adaptation — war is still nonsensical even IF the enemy is the unfeeling crab as which he has been represented.

8. “Cockroach meat.”

9A: Sudden crush of realization that each decontextualized bite of crab meat in your life was in fact an entire crab until about month before you ordered that dip

9B: No way the machines separate the slime and organs from the meat THAT well. Make note not to Google crab processing.

10. What if superintelligent large crabs ate us? Would we protest, being unable to conceive of their process of moral judgment? Surely.

11. How would the crabs make fun of our bodies? Would they laugh at our creases and protrusions or would they be more respectful than we are?

12. Certainly they would be better at tearing us apart than we are them. And less discriminating about which parts go into the Crab Mouth.

13. Would they even eat us in the first place, being so much more morally developed? The answer to this question is not obvious, which is terrifying.

*Crab Shell Powder, $5.99: “Protection, Removes hexes, Reversing, Conjure Bag, Reversing Return to Sender Spells”

**Hmm.

Update: A reader points out that the crab-eating event is not usually called a “boil,” which is true. “Massacre” is the customary and correct term. We regret the error.