Art Imitates my Cranky Disposition

I am going to elaborate on the injustices perpetrated against me by my ungrateful bones and unfaithful innards. After all I’ve done for them in the last few years, I deserve better.

My diet options are being chiseled away at an alarming rate by organs that arbitrarily decide they will no longer perform the functions for which they are intended.

I’ve given up a lot of delicacies over the years. I waved a fond farewell to liver and onions, chicken gizzards, wieners, potted meat and spam. Then it was mushrooms, carrots, legumes and nuts. No more peanut butter, bratwursts, aged cheese, or un-distilled alcoholic beverages. Goodbye my precious beer. I tried not to be too disappointed when shellfish, crustaceans, beef, turkey, chicken, asparagus, spinach, and cauliflower sailed over the horizon, never to return. And the list goes on.

Just as it seemed that I might learn to live happily alongside dry lettuce sandwiches on stale bread, unflavored water and air, the gods saw fit to crumble my brittle soul with words that I prayed would never come.

Please, oh mighty Zeus, I beseech you, do not render my last delicious condiment verboten, do not take away the only taste sensation that separates me from culinary oblivion, do not cast me into the bottomless pit of grocery doom. Take anything, take my homemade buttermilk cathead biscuits, pluck my pathetic testicles from their shriveled sack, just leave me be with my glorious vinegar you dirty bastard! Please! Not my precious vinegar!

It happened, vinegar is gone, and along with it all of the things that vinegar makes so incomprehensibly gratifying. Cheap yellow mustard, ketchup, even mayonnaise, gone. The giant sour dill pickles and pickled jalapenos, they have vanished from my life. Sauerkraut, olives, German potato salad…poof* Cucumber salad, deviled eggs, vinaigrettes, all gone. Malt vinegar, rice vinegar, cider vinegar, vinegar vinegar, they are no longer for me.

Think of something you really like to eat. Chances are it has vinegar in it. Chocolate ice cream has vinegar in it and so do big, fluffy, buttery sweet cinnamon rolls. Think of a warm glazed doughnut, fresh out of the hot grease canal, that’s right, vinegar! The next time you find yourself in synchronized passion with the one you love, arms and legs entangled in delirious ecstasy, quiet whispers giving way to uncontrollable wails of elation, you can get down on your knees and thank vinegar for making it all possible! Don’t ask me how or why, I don’t know.

This was the last piece of pottery that I made prior to that day when sweet innocent vinegar was torn asunder and unceremoniously ripped from my embrace. I was still happy then, I can see it in the reflection of the copper and iron that dance across the shiny surface.




Then I went to my dark place. A place where apple juice and popcorn are all I have left. It can’t be too long before they come for that too. I don’t care, take it, I’ll eat lawn mower clippings and dirt.

So this is what my clay has come to.