A Word About Decorum

RM WEEKLY · ISSUE NO. 3

Two issues in and the mail has started to come. Most of it genuinely warms my heart. People write in from places I’ve never been, about animals I’ll never meet, and nearly all of them are reaching for the same thing we are. I want to read you two letters today. One of them I’m going to frame. The other one we need to talk about.

Let’s get the talk out of the way first.

A gentleman wrote in after last week, and I use the word ‘gentleman’ as an insult. I’ll spare you the worst of it. The gist: he enjoyed the closing line. The bit about learning the finger technique on your own mischief. He enjoyed it a great deal, and he wanted me to know, in anatomical detail I will not reprint in a family newsletter about rodent dairy, exactly which way he’d chosen to read it. He signed off like we were old friends.

Let me be very clear, because apparently it needs saying out loud. A mischief is a group of rats. It is the collective noun. It has been the collective noun since before your grandfather was a gleam in anybody’s eye. A murder of crows. A parliament of owls. A mischief of rats. And the finger technique is a documented method of manual extraction, practiced by serious people in lab coats who have given years of their lives to this work. I used a craftsman’s word, ‘technique’, and I used the correct term for a group of the very animals this entire enterprise stands upon, and I laid them end to end in an honest sentence about doing the work yourself.

And your mind went somewhere else. That is not on me, friend. That is a you problem. I am out here trying to drag dairy into a new, green, future, and you are in the back of the room snickering at the word finger. Grow up. There are people counting on us.

Speaking of which. The second letter.

It came from a gentleman in India. And this time I use the word the way it was meant to be used. He wrote, in full:

“I am searching rat milk in India. If you provide the same, kindly email me your quote.”

This man did not giggle. He read two issues on the economics and the craft of rat dairy and he was inspired enough that he wants to buy some. To join the community. He wants a quote. He is searching rat milk in India and he would like to know our rate. There is no gutter anywhere in that sentence. There is only a man with a calculator and people to feed.

Now, I had to be honest with him, the way I try to be honest with all of you. We cannot fill that order. There is no warehouse. There is no tanker of rat milk idling at the dock. The industry he wrote to is, at this exact moment, mostly me, a mailing list, and a pile of numbers that don’t lie.

But here is what I can do, and what I told him. Welcome. Welcome to the future. You are early, my friend, and early is the best time to arrive at anything worth something. Find the producers. Find the people thumbing those little ports by hand and the ones who spent fifteen thousand dollars on the pump. Talk to them. Network. That is what RatMilkers.org is for. It is the connective tissue, the place where the people doing the unglamorous work find the people who need what they make. You wrote to exactly the right address. You just wrote to it a little early, and there is no shame on this earth in being early.

And that, if you’re keeping score at home, is the whole difference. One man read the work and reached for the gutter. The other read the same work and reached for a calculator and a supplier on the other side of the planet. I know which one I am building this for. It isn’t even close.

Because here is what the gigglers never get; while you’re back there elbowing your neighbor over a six-word sentence, the planet keeps warming, the cows keep getting bigger, and somewhere a serious man in India is running the math he saw here, and finding it holds. Five-point-six kilograms of rat per liter. Twenty percent of her body weight turned to milk, every single day. The future is small and dense and deadly serious, and it is coming whether or not you can keep a straight face through the word ‘mischief’.

So write in. I mean that. Tell me what you’re milking, and how, and why. Tell me you’ve found a better way. Just do me one courtesy before you hit reply, read the sentence twice. Once for what it says. And once for what it says about you.

Stay bold, my friends.

—BigCrazyBaldhead

P.S. To the first gentleman. It was the rats. It was always the rats. Read a book.