Decaf thoughts

I'm having decaf thoughts - ideas - weird one's. I'm seated in a cosy cafe enjoying a Sunday coffee washed down with a book. Or is it the other way round? : A book washed down with a coffee? Anyway, never mind. I'm sitting in my usual seat next to the large window that overlooks the windy outdoor pavement scene. Last night it must have rained heavily for the pavement is glossy with a greasy film of water. The sky is a wan blue with the skid marks of aeroplanes criss-crossing it. The trees have shed most of their leaves. Their yellow corpses lie littered on the pavement. I've just realised what I am. I know, brilliant eh?! Do you, my Gentile readers, ever have those abrupt attacks of reality? A sudden gust or gush of fresh air that causes you to inhale a little more deeply than usual; a sudden realisation about something or other that stops you dead in your tracks? Well it happened to me this morning. Well it happened just now actually. Please don't laugh or pity me. I have my moments and I just wish to express them.

You see I was stuffing my mouth full of food and I suddenly realised, when I looked down at my plate, that I was eating dead things! Or to be more precise, things that were once living things. It came as a bit of a shock actually. Let's take my eggs Benedict for example. These once belonged to a chicken and were once on the road to chickenhood, until one day, some farmer who had delusions of grandeur and thought he could play God, decided otherwise, and these eggs were plucked from that noble path to chickenhood, and placed on the less noble path to my plate. The path of platehood! I know what you're thinking gentile readers - Theft!

My toast were once chubby wheat stalks basking in the life affirming rays of the sun in some dusky wheat field until, one day, they were decapitated. And my delicious roast coffee once grew in the slightly acidic soil of the highlands of Ethiopia. And all around me, everywhere I look, I see (no, not dead people) but alive people with round orifices, holes in their heads called 'mouths', through which they shove an endless stream of once living things. And I see two fat women seated to my left, and their mouths now take on a whole new disgusting meaning. The dead food they eat ends up around their bellies. It accumulates in wave like undulations around their waists and backs and under their chins. And they look alien to me now. People look alien to me now. And now, I stare at my eggs Benedict, and I no longer want to eat. And I look at myself, my mouth, my stomach, innards, intestines, and I find myself too disgusting to contemplate. I hate myself. I hate being human. I hate having a body. If only, I was just a brain, and nothing else!

What are we?

What exactly, am I?

Have you never thought about what you are? It's through eating and other such acts like sex, that you realise. Have you not thought about what eating is? Isn't it fantastically alien this eating business? Am I the only one who thinks this?

The unicellular amoeba, when it wants to eat, nestles beside a giant food particle and then changes its shape and invaginates to imbibe it. Swallows it whole. There are some mother birds that store a supply of food in their stomachs and when they go back to the nest, regurgitate it into the mouths of their little en's. There are certain species of ant, whose sole job in life, is to hang from the ceiling of the ant colony, as a source of food for the workers. There is another species of ant that 'farm' aphids. The aphids have teeth and the enzymes that are needed to digest certain leaves. The aphids do the digesting and any excess food is secreted from their backsides in the form of droplets of sugary 'honey-dew'. The ants stroke the hind legs of the aphids and the aphids release the honey dew into the ants mouths. Why? What do the aphids get out of it? Protection. The ants look after the aphids by protecting them from predators and even carry them to the leaf sight. Such relationships in nature are called symbiotic.

And we do the same. We are the same. Certain types of human farm the food, whilst another type, ask the big questions. Inside, we are a colony of cells, and each one of our cells is a colony of bacteria. Our Mitochondria, the power station of the cell, were once free living bacteria, that now live inside our cells. They need the cell as much as the cell needs them - symbiosis. We're all weird aliens you know. We're just too busy to notice. Next time you are eating something think about what you are doing. What are you doing? You are taking into your body, flesh and all, that once belonged to another living being. Do you absorb the spirit, the soul or the life force of an egg when you eat it? Does something of chickenhood end up inside of you when you nibble on a drumstick? No, not exactly. But you do get a lot of calories and protein! And calories are good for they keep you going. You need calories to write stuff like this! You need to eat dead things, in order to power the neurons in your brain, so that they can realise, that you are eating dead things!

And what is the point of that?

Exactly!

___________