On food (an experiment)

I wrote today’s entry as a response to a challenge: A friend chose two sentences at random, & the idea was that I should begin my entry with the first sentence, and end with the second; and I should try to write enough text between these sentences to fill about 3 or 4 notebook pages. The opening sentence that he assigned to me was:

“The most normal things in life become the weirdest.”

And the sentence that my entry should end with was:

“Only authors are allowed to be so opinionated.”

In short, my job was to write words to fill the space between these arbitrary start- & end-points. And the only other constriction was that I had just an hour and a half to work; thus I had to write fast. So here’s the result:

Dear diary,

The normallest things in life become the weirdest things in life. Just think about it: The act of eating — how much normaller can you get? It’s why the U.S. is packed full of food instead of spirits; because the law of prohibition banned spirits, which is why our churches are not spiritual, and all churchgoers are gluttonous. This proves the point that eating is normal. It is even sanctified by our savior, because he cried out: Eat me.

But now let’s take a closer look at this fetish. How did it get started? Who was the first man to put something in his mouth and swallow it? What did humankind eat before eating was born? And when exactly did fish grow eyelids?

Think about how strange the concept is: You reach out and take a chunk of reality, you press it against your stomach with true love, and your stomach absorbs it.

For instance, say we find a porcupine in the forest. First we name the creature; then we secure it with a lasso and swallow it whole. Now it becomes us. No longer are there two beings in the forest who are strangers to each other, whose cultures believe different things about Christ Jesus — one assumes he said ‘resist not evil’ and the other thinks he said ‘I came not to bring peace but a sword’ — but thru the act of stomach-touching, the twain become one. This is why God lifted his sanctions against marriage, and erased the parts of his memoir that considered it a crime, and instead declared the new law “eat, drink, and be married”.

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his food: and they shall be one flesh.
(Genesis 2:24)

Now I used a porcupine for my example, cuz that is a beast whose hooves are cloven and who chews the cud, thus making it kosher (you don’t wanna eat anything that’s not kosher — on the day that you even touch non-kosher food, you die); but many other examples also suffice. Take ham:

Admittedly, it’s not so simple as I stated above: you don’t just place the living ham in your gut, and let it marinate overnight. First you have to get your digestive juices out. Using a brush, apply a generous coat around the outside of the carcass, so that it forms an overlay. Once this dries, repeat the application process; then step back and view your results. You should see a full baby pig, with a nice thick skin. Look: it grew four legs and a snout, two piggy eyeballs, and there’s an apple in its mouth. You apparently slew and braised this beast while it was in the act of digesting a creature itself!

So now that we’ve prepared our foodstuff, and even the foodstuff has fixed upon further foodstuff, we can hold it close to our stomach. Make sure to avoid its tail, because that thing resembles the male human sexual organ. God is against all male human sexual organs, cuz he’s always enraged. He insists that you refer to him NOT as “the male human organ” but as “The Male Pronoun”; and he only eats blood. (Pure blood from his firstborn is preferred.) So you’re gonna wanna hold the pig to your stomach for about thirty seconds, to be sure that it is fully digested. Now you’re ready to become one.

I didn’t even think about it when I began writing, but this topic is broached by Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, at the beginning of section 20, where the poem asks:

How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?

Here, I’ll explain. Once you’ve captured whatever creature you were hunting, and the beast—horns, pelt, & all—is safely enstomach’d, begin by separating the muscle from the fat:

The muscle is the tougher parts of the flesh. You’ll use that to build your physique, so that your “bod” can look “toned”. (The term “toned bod” implies luxuriousness in the loins, and definition of the bosom.) As it is written:

“I ordered this bodybuilding machine...”
—Officer Sunshine (from the 2013 film Wrong Cops)

Also:

“Think about all the equipment you could buy, to bulk up with.”
—Officer Duke (Ibid.)

In summary, you take the parts of the beast that are heavy, dark, and tough, and you label those “muscle”; and you shelve those in your strength sector. Then you take the fat, which is the funner, more flavorful portion of the creature, & you use that for girth. Work it in wherever you want extra padding. I like to arrange it around my belly, and in my thighs & rump.

Then, with the rest of the animal — the parts that are neither tasty nor pleasant to eat, like the horns and the pelt — use can use those things to make clothing, and build huts and bridges across your metropolis. Whatever your landscape seems to be missing, give it a whirl. There’s almost nothing you can’t manufacture from the spare parts of food.

What I’m trying to point out, via humor, is that digestion cannot be attained by simply cradling a marsupial in your purse. If that were the case, then everything I said above would need to be revised. (We churches don’t change our doctrines willy-nilly, just because our current beliefs are proven wrong, or a better idea becomes available. That’s not how we do things.) An organism must be held for a minimum of half a minute, close to one’s chest, in order to count as digested. It must make it into the end zone: that rectangular area at the pit of the stomach into which the food is gestated back into life:

It’s the same reason why, when a maidservant becomes inseminated by the Lord, she is said to be carrying a newborn “in her stomach”. — And it’s considered impolite to attribute the crime of lust to the upper classes; therefore, when an embarrassment occurs (say, the Creator is caught in the act of rutting with his own crafted Creature), we carefully avoid referring to the act as “rape”, and never terminate the pregnancy; instead, just file the prank as a “virgin birth”.

P.S.

You’ll note that I quoted from “Song of Myself” above, near the entry’s midsection. Now, “Song of Myself” is just the Poem of America, so it actually isn’t able to eat any food. You have to puree whatever you feed it; then administer the nourishment directly into its text, by way of an eyedropper. But even then, the food’ll basically remain on the page (or onscreen, if it’s an e-book) indefinitely, cuz poems lack assholes. Only authors are allowed to be so opinionated.