Pooparder Anti-Clockwise

Mind, out. Into a void, lost behind the kettle and the melted cheese covered toaster oven. Catapulting down a dark brown tunnel, must have been built in the 70s. Stars flashing by, mind racing. Racing ants of all sizes in a rush to conquer the melted cheese and build a home for the self centred queen of the hill. Then hovering too confused to pick a path, a path of destruction or construction, don’t want to be whistled at by the construction workers, men at work on the destruction of the mind. Indecisiveness and confusion sucks it away into a vacuum with the ferocity of an Electrolux.

Floating in the vacuum, the peaceful vacuum. No noise, no chaos, no pressure.

For those of you who don’t know dim sum is a form of Chinese tapas, but it is often eaten as a lunch. I usually go with someone who knows what they are doing and as the trays of food come around they can pick off the good stuff. If I am left alone panic sets in and I risk ordering chicken feet and pig ears. Now if you go into a dim sum serving restaurant you will usually notice most tables have at least one Asian person at them, but generally the restaurant is dominated by Asians…may the majority rule. And then in comes the white guy, with some Asian colleagues, a dim sum virgin. As he comes through the door he is all relaxed and smiling, but that is soon to change. He weaves through the restaurant floor to his table and sees what is being eaten. Almost everyone is staring at him as well, what is this white man doing in here, is he lost? The burger bar is next door. That smile is slowly walking off his face and going down the road for a manicure as a new expression comes for a visit, fear. “What am I about to eat?” Everything is hidden inside “dough” and “sponges” and he knows some of the strange things that the Chinese like to eat. “Oh no I’m going to get food poisoning and die!”

Then the ordering starts and none of it is in English. He still doesn’t know what he is about to eat.  “What you don’t know might kill you.” His colleagues reassure him it is just chicken, pork or shrimp, but he knows better. It all looks so alien and oh so colourful. The fear has settled in for the afternoon and is relaxing nicely by the pool, it isn’t about to fade into the distance along with the morning fog, the only thing to fade is the colour in his face, like a freshly bleached pair of underwear, still a sign of the 5 o’clock shadow, but otherwise very white. By the time lunch is over you know he is going home hungry.

Can you see the fear? The fear that slowly crawls across the icy road, blue from the reflection of the clear sky tinted with a fakeness that almost goes beyond recognition of that which was made perfect at the hands of science. And the fear approaches, racing the snail, but slower than an Italian tank in reverse fleeing any sign of trouble. It raises its head and flashes a blindingly white smile, and immediately you know this fear has a good dental plan. Its head drops once more like a teenager going through puberty and it continues its slow uncoordinated march  across the road towards you.

You know the fear has come from far, its Nikes are well worn, and no matter how much continental breakfast hopping you do it keeps chasing you down, it will always be there following you, waiting in the dark to jump you in a dark alley and drop in a garbage skip with the vagrants and unwanted circus midgets. When it finally does catch up, what are you going to do? Beat it with an old and rusty iron? Throw empty Gatorade bottles at it? Blow a vuvuzela? You can’t continental breakfast hop forever. Are you going to face that fear, bare your, not such a great dental plan, teeth, put a skirt on it to show it who wears the pants in this house or are you going to roll over Beethoven and take it like a man, whimpering and curled up in the fetal position screaming “I want my mommy”. 

Somehow, someday, somewhere you will need to face those perfect teeth, those worn out Nikes, that cloud of fear and pretend it doesn’t exist.

Back where I come from in my little house on the prairie I had never seen a weigh station or even a weigh station road sign along the freeway.  The first time I saw such a sign after leaving the prairie I was naturally inquisitive regarding the contents of a weigh station.  What possibly confused my understanding even further was the fact that it seemed to be located very close to the state border.

Naturally the conclusion I came to regarding the use of a road side weigh station located so close to the state border was that the weigh stations had been set up to prevent overweight people entering the state of California.  It seemed like such a logical solution to keeping a state fit and healthy, just keep all the fat people out.  You weigh them at the border and if they exceed a certain weight, or maybe they even use the Body Mass Index (“BMI”)number to determine the cut-off point.  After thinking for a while what a wonderful idea this was it then occurred to me, what if you live in California and you left for a business trip, maybe a Twinkies sales conference in Las Vegas, would you be able to get back into California if you exceeded the acceptable BMI. So not only did it keep larger than life inhabitants of the planet out of the state, but it also prevented them coming back if they grew larger than life while living in California…brilliant.

Alas it turns out that is not what these signs were intended for at all. Oh well, maybe one day my idea will be put into practice.