COO-COO COMESTIBLES

There’s rumor of a bumper sticker that appeared in California a while back: “If you can’t eat it or screw it, kill it.”

Makes perfect sense to me. Humans will eat damn near anything.

Who was it that said, “It were a brave Man who first eat an Oyster”? Yeah. This thing that looks like a rock in the water? Let’s open it up. Oooh! Looks like it has a loogie growing in it! Mmmm, tasty. Get me more Loogie-Rocks!

And what about eggs? Hey, ya see that round thing that just came out of that chicken’s ass? I wanna eat that!

From there, it’s not a huge intellectual leap to caviar.

And lobsters! Giant undersea cockroaches! I want me one of those.

We humans eat some strange things, even if we’re not Booger-Eating Moh-Rons (to quote Denny). But leave it to grade school kids to eat really bizarre crap. When I was in sixth grade, I sat behind a kid who kept a huge jar of mint-flavored mucilage in his desk. Now, mucilage is that thin, runny glue that we used to use in grade school to...glue shit together. It was glue: that was its job. I had never heard of mint-flavored mucilage until I saw this kid’s stash – why, after all, did it need to be mint flavored? It was glue, fer cryin’ out loud.

My question was answered one day when I saw the lad open the bottle and take a deep draught from it.

Agggghhhhh! What the fuck?

Maybe that glue was brain food, helping ideas stick in the kid’s head. Years later, he graduated #3 in our high school class and ended up going to Caltech. For all I know, he has a Nobel prize today, all by virtue of his disgusting glue-drinking habit.

I suppose it could be worse. Twenty-five years ago, when She Who Must Be Obeyed and I were house-hunting in Atlanta, we were staying at one of the local Marriott hostelries with two-year-old Elder (then Only) Daughter. One evening we saw that she was chewing gum.

SWMBO and I looked at each other. Neither of us had given her any gum.

“Where did you get that?”

“Under here...”

It should have been no surprise when she directed us to a Mother Lode of wads of used chewing gum...all parked conveniently under the hotel room’s chair, right there at Toddler Level. Aaaaaaggghhhhh!

Somehow, she survived. Somehow, we all do.