More of What I’m Working On

It’s four o’clock in the morning and I am hungry. But, if I eat now, I’ll just want to eat at three o’clock, tomorrow… and so on… until I’m eating breakfast right before I go to bed. If I had breakfast at night, there’d be no need to sleep at all because sleep is simply how we kill time between supper and breakfast.

But, I’m so hungry that it hurts; fortunately, the unsettling noises coming from my stomach distract me. Sometimes I like to think of the stomach noises as a Greek chorus for my life. Sometime I like to think of the noises as coming from a twin that my body absorbed in utero. And, then there are times when the sounds of my churning stomach as poltergeists and my digestive tract as cursed… and I didn’t like the looks of that chili, either… I’ve been listening for quite a while and I think I finally understand their complex language. Aleutians have thirty words for “snow”; stomachs have thirty words for “jalapeno poppers”.

The longest I’ve ever gone without food was four days… partly for spiritual reasons and partly because I felt I was developing an eating disorder. My grocery list consisted of cookies, ice cream and laxatives. I was starting to look at all-you-can-eat restaurants as a dare. Yes, I had a “sad cookie” and a “happy cookie”; plus, my daily planner alternated between “binge” and “purge”. I think what clinched it, though, was while eating dinner one night. My dog looked up at me and cautioned, “Hey buddy, SLOW DOWN!”. But, chewing was for the WEAK!!!

When I fasted, I didn’t miss vegetables. Frankly, I’d rather be beaten to death with a bunch of mustard greens than eat them. Beets are what food would taste like if it was synthesized by an alien whose only experience with food was viewing it through a powerful telescope. I like cabbage, mostly for its versatility. You can do a lot with cabbage; but, never make a cabbage a civil court judge because, no matter how solid your evidence or how proficient your lawyer is, he’s going to find in favor of the cabbage.

I think the biggest problem with eating is that, more often than not, food is involved; in fact, most of the calories that come from eating come from food… the other two percent being carbon dioxide and argon. The Dilemma of the Uneaten Non-Food, as it was later called, was first offered by the Stoics; but, there were no takers… which really hurt the Stoics… but, somehow they endured because what choice did they have? Later, St. Augustine of Hippo tried to craft a response to the dilemma but, after 400 pages, had only proven that clouds are capable of committing sins. Erasmus made the assumption that food was only a construct; however, his argument failed to take into account the existence of condiments.

Later, Francis Bacon attempted a response and created the terms “unfood”, “foodish” and “parafood”. This caused such an uproar that Bacon was forced to sleep on Descartes’ couch until the mobs dispersed. Hegal tried to solve the dilemma using Avogadro’s Number and some old pizza crusts. He encountered a roadblock when he found that Avogadro changed his number.

Ultimately, Fichte solved the issue because ultimately is the only way Fichte did anything. He set up a thought-experiment… two rooms separated by two centimeters of platinum. In one room, a man tries to eat unripe cherry tomatoes with a cheap plastic fork. In the other room, an identical man throws twelve pound bowling balls into a pit filled with hyperactive children… The link between food and eating was established for the rest of time. Take THAT people who think philosophers are wasting their time…