Want Another Biscuit?
Breakfast was short that day, I had hoped it might not end, scrambled eggs and crisp hog bacon, bold black caffeinated coffee stoked my internal engine, oh, the new day had started so fine, so grand, so sublime.
“Want another biscuit?” she asked, as the skinny waitress sashayed past.
“Why yes, yes, indeed, but this will have to be my last,” said I, Mister S. Ass. “Don’t want to grow and expand into the size of an enormous rhinoceros’ ass.”
She sort of grinned at me, in a weird-sort-of-funny- way, at the time, well, I could not see why. But, I’ll get to the why, at the end, (that’s why you write these poems my dear friend), and then, perhaps you’ll understand, I trust you will not laugh at me then, and only then.
“Can I call you my Dear Friend?”
Let’s remember that for the end…
Alas, this is the beginning of this tale, about water, skin and buttermilk biscuits, and in the end, a great white whale. So let me begin to recount what I learned, that I’d like to share with you my Dear Friend?
“Yes? You’ll still be my Dear Friend, at the end?”
Fresh water’s the nectar of life, we swim in it, we splash our giggly babies in it, we bathe our carcass’ in it, we do just about any and every ‘thing’ possible within it, and yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking Mister Dirty Minded one, we do, do that, even that! Yes indeed we do, do ‘IT’, as they say. (But let’s not belabor the point today.)
We need our water fresh, clean and pure; we have other smart people to figure out how to filter dangerous minerals to make it even more and more pure, if you can be more of more? “I’m not sure?”
Pure for me and you, Dear Friend, so we can drink it to live in this magical world, it is of course, since we’ve been told by our high school chemistry teacher, Mister R. ISTY, that being Mister Robert “I’m smarter than you,” snot nosed kids, “Listen to me!” he begged.
Did you have a teacher like him too? I bet you had more than one too.
It is, Hydrogen Oxygen Hydrogen, or as it is said, H2O, but some contrarian might read this and say.
“What you really mean is HOH, two parts Hydrogen and one part Oxygen, HOH just to put a fine point on your prose, dear Mister S. Ass, I’m sure you will hammer forward, recounting this story for us, as best an ass, as an ass you are.”
“Thank you Mister S. Ass, Junior? (I suspect, but, I digress. Sorry, I was interrupted by another member of the up and coming Smart Ass class.)
Water, this chameleon it can be, cloaked as a liquid, solid, or gas, covers seventy-percent of our home planet, approximately two-thirds inside our collective Car-Cass, it seems this stuffs even hidden within our skin, in our nooks and crannies, making up our organs, all held under our epidermis’, dermis, dermis, yeah it’s true, all in and out of us it is, every where it would seem, inside me and you.
We need to drink it, to quench our thirst, otherwise, we get dizzy, and die, and I can’t imagine anything worse.
“Yes, H2O, Mister Junior S. Ass in training,” said I, Mister S. Ass. Thinking, H2O must be quite important, that is what my superior mind has decided should be reported.
Water comes in many other forms, rivers, creeks, streams flowing to and from a major tidal source, some comes to the party as fresh water, of course, no salt found here, but most water is different, in a salty way, in turbulent oceans and seas, a place for fish to live, until we pluck them from their aquatic home, and we eat them in some delicious new way, baked, blackened or deep fried.
“All these methods I have tried, but, sorry, I digress, I guess it’s my superior pride, here on display with my jesting repartee.” (I smugly laugh.)
So then, the question at hand was asked.
“Want another biscuit, Mister S. Ass?”
“Oh, no thank you said I, I’m still quite full from breakfast time,” said I, Mister S. Ass. But I stopped in mid-sentence, thinking what harm can this be? Then I stopped her and said. “But maybe, yeah, why not, just a corner before lunch. And maybe just another for just before church, and maybe another for after, never can be too careful, don’t want to get caught in a hungry lurch.”
But I wondered why, why the odd question, what does these three all have in common, water, skin and biscuits? Why all the bother? Well then, if you must know, what else could this all mean? Then let us carry forward, okay then, on with the baking show…
Biscuits, as we shall learn, made with buttermilk, or if you’re boring, Vitamin D milk. (Just be cool cat and use full-on, high-test stuff, nothing like skim, or two-percent, not those liquid’s that approach close to nothingness…sorry about that, I’ll not get lost in some existential verse again, just showing off my superior mind for you, my Dear Friend.)
Let us move forward shall we, to the sifted flour, no lumps to be found here, add a pinch of salt and, not to be left out, our other Dear Friends, Doctor and Misses D. A. Baking Powder, very important folks no doubt, kissing each other with a pinch of sugar and using some butter and shortening to help their journey happen sooner.
The D is for double, A is for acting, fancy change agent acids, added to this glorious fusion.
(Sorry to say, the happy couple is not part of my way, neither a smart ass, no, not in anyway. Sorry, I digressed again, it will not happen again.)
Doctor and Misses Double Acting, married to science, are kneaded gently and folded together and flopped on a tin conjugal bed, and as one with experience might expect, he starts out fast, but then she goes slow, she’s not in a rush, just warming up the pre-heated oven of love, and as one might expect, after all the build-up and heated moments of self-rising food lust, after all this transacting, ten minutes later, our biscuits blow-up.
(Remember, do not prematurely pull them out, or you will miss the magic no doubt. You see, the quiet warm moments must last, so they can create some carbon monoxide gas, and those extra moments creating wonderful baby bubbles inside.)
Yes, baby bubbles I said, some big, medium or some small, we love them all, formed for us inside the dough.
Something the smart ass baker will claim was formed with the help of Mother Nature. Alas, a biscuit we have, we can smother with butter, syrup, molasses, or whatever we like, topped with bacon, egg’s, ham, maybe all of them at the same time?! OH the little children scream with delight!
“Yeah for buttermilk biscuits, yeah indeed,” the obese little buggers all happily screamed.
In reality, my Dear Friend, the biscuit‘s just a biscuit, fat, fluffy and golden-brown, you see it is just a conduit to lure Mister Big Flatulent Artist to roll into town. He’s bulbous and round, our biscuits just a blank canvass for him to begin, to help satisfy his narcoleptic cravings, then after he slugs them down, he rolls over stuffed, all happy and proud, his own self styled food lust, he collapses to the ground. Then he’ll crawl away from town. (Back to sleepy time, post carbohydrate binge.)
So, again you ask, “What’s all this about?”
“Want another Biscuit?” someone hidden in the back asked.
“Or, are you just being yourself, Mister S. Ass?” someone else asked.
“Why yes of course,” I said. Thinking they know me well, S is for smart, quick as a whip, winking my eye lash, this collection of desperate objects, all bouncing inside my superior head. “Of this I’m quite genuine.”
But alas, someone in the back of the room had to ask.
“Who anointed you to write this sort-of-poem like thing? Don’t you all think we’re trapped inside his weird brain?”
“Harrumph, harrumph,” went the class, all seemed unified in disagreement against me. But I was not to be undone; I’d started a journey with my Dear Friend, which will circuitously come to a fateful end.
“Me.” I felt superior with my quick answer back. “I’ll say this as I pass a little personal gas, I’m a certified smart ass, I’m allowed to do these things, you see, it’s written in my life’s handbook,” said I, Mister S. Ass, king of the world in my orbit of the smart ass.
“Why?” another potential smart ass asked.
(I’ll explain the why, my dear friend. It’s all part of my hidden greater plan.)
“It started the day I was born, my life’s handbook was a bit worn, you can blame my Mom, she got it for me on day one, bought a third edition hard copy on Amazon dot com, and to be clear, it’s on page three, see, read right there, and, if you like, you can have your own copy to study, to think, to debate and fight about or do quizzes with your friends, to figure out who among you might eventually qualify to join our ranks, as a sergeant-first class, in the grand army of The Smart Ass.” (Sorry, I digress, a hardy chuckle to clear my parched throat. It’s hard work being a smart ass. Sorry, I need to pass some more gas.)
“Excuse me,” I said to the crowd. “Don’t try,” said I, Mister S. Ass with a hint of self-pride. “Let me leave no doubt, the effort for you, will be in vain, you see, if you have to study to be one, well, you’re not really one of us, now you all know this to be true?” My superior mind is now fully engaged and in complete view.
“So then, don’t waste anymore time, to think you actually thought it might happen, oh please not in my lifetime.” (You can insert your own chuckle here, but let us move on. There is important work yet to be done.)
Now to the answer to this riddle, that has seemed to be laced with moments of rather interesting drivel.
Water, skin and buttermilk biscuits, three odd things needed to create ONE, (not three in one, in a biblical sense, but three INTO ONE), as in a BIG HUMAN, as in, one bulbous mass, pounds and pounds of fatty-human-flesh. Some are yellow as a school bus, some are red as a scolded lobster, some are white as boiled chicken meat or some darker than midnight, but not to fret, this lecture crosses all races and creeds, bigots and racists need not intercede, because this is an analysis of our interplanetary GINORMOUS disease. (That has no known cure.)
“Don’t believe me?” said I, Mister S. Ass. I slightly turned my head for effect and coughed with a faint smirk sneered across my perfectly coiffed face.
Like lemmings on a collective fast trot to no where, unaware, gravity will win when caught alone in mid-air. They all fell in line, behind me for our field trip to a sensory deprivation death.
“Come walk with me, we’ll laugh together as I point out some of ‘them’,” said I, Mister S. Ass, the one with the superior mind. “I’ve noticed them in big-box-super-stores, usually covered in bolts and bolts of non-silky spandex clothes, or, for that fact, any stretchable garment will do, they seem to roam freely here, as human ‘free-range’ debris. I suppose you can say, see them sloshing into the automobile section, sporting goods too, or god forbid, yes, women’s shoes!” said I, Mister S. Ass. I smiled at them all, proud of what I had taught them at the mall. (But another moment has come for me to digress.)
“One has to wonder about women’s shoes, why all the fuss?” asked I, Mister S. Ass.
For these massive, mountains of food luster’s, why buy something they’ll never see, without the assistance of a floor length mirror, the visible light of the store will be required to project the relative tiny shoes, in relation to the massive, flesh mountain that could hide a black hole, shoes that might otherwise substitute for a child’s summertime swimming pool.
But the terror has no bounds, as you shall see, on hot, dry Saturdays, to my emotional disgorgement, I saw a bathing suit with an obnoxious orange imprint, draped over, a Big Human, Bulbous Mass. (Yes, it is true, I am not just to being an ass, as I normally do. Sorry, again, as I digressed on a digress.)
“Using a tenting method I deduced, something usually attached to a clipper ship’s mast,” said I, Mister S. Ass. “Yes, I’m not making this up. I shall rely upon my previous evidence to prove my point. Seen them with my own horrified eyes, they’ll likely tell the story at my wake, of the day I saw them in their natural habitat, near an Alabama lake.”
(But, maybe at this point I should digress some more, because the one great stretchable human organ, is our baby soft skin. At least mine is velvety smooth, as you might expect.)
“It can ‘nuclear mushroom’ to an incredible size, I’ve seen the result with my own superior eyes, it expands to epic proportion, not just reserved for Neolithic creatures that used to roam the land and forests,” said I, Mister S. Ass. “But the actual, living, breathing, I shall call them, ‘people’, but because I’m just part of the academically lazy tribe of The Smart Ass, and not in Darwin’s intellectual class, who I’m sure he would devise a Latin word or phrase, note one of his journals to define these known ‘species’, then likely get selected for sainthood after he cures the ginormous disease that dots our planet.
(“Wish I could,” said I, Mister S. Ass, under my breath, from the jealous and envious part of the tribe of The Smart Ass big tent.)
Now, as the story goes, “I was minding my own business, driving here and there, looking at a bountiful forest, flowers, plants, the occasional, chirping bird with its wings out stretched, it was glorious!” said I, Mister S. Ass, “All of God’s creatures, happy at play, living out their lives, under a clear, cloudless blue Alabama sky.”
But unbeknownst to me, our family was on an accidental safari, (most great discovery’s are by accident after all), and this is where, “I observed them in nature, it was not so long ago, no, not in a big-box-store, or a restaurant with a neon sign that reads.
“All-You-Can-Stuff-In-Your-Mouth” buffet.
“No, I was in a public space, paid for with our tax dollars, nature protected for all of us by government’s grace, near a lake, which was the intended center of our journey, I must admit,” said I, Mister S. Ass.
Then alas, I made a turn, we took the third fork in the road and went down the wrong brightly lit blacktopped path. All seemed usual, all custom afforded to those I was with, normal courtesy I extended back to them and they to me, then, I spied something in the distance and slowed down like a highway voyeur inspecting a nasty car crash.
“Oh, what could it be?” someone in the back asked.
Perhaps it was the shadow cast, wide, along the river bank, a prehistoric predator hidden in the depths? No, it couldn’t move particularly fast, but then, more of them emerged from the bright sunlight, in numerous locations around the natural park, some on the land, some in the lake, there were so many, in my panic I lost count. At times, the sun seemed to disappear, my vision started to fade to black, sort of a momentary lunar eclipse caused by all the herd of human pacaderms slothing about.
“They’re over there, over there, and yes, yes, over there too,” said I, Mister S. Ass.
Manatee like creatures ‘sort of swam’, others obviously drank beer, smoked multiple cigarette’s again, and again and again, a smoky haze hung around their gargantuan noggin, all under the watchful single eye, of their skinny master’s, leaning against their supped up pick-up truck nearby, wearing their customary garb of the ‘wife-beater t-shirt’ tribe, with mandatory cut-off blue jeans, combing their fluffy mullet, sharing with me the same, clear, blue, beautiful Alabama sky.
But thankfully being Mister S. Ass, I grinned and thanked god. (Again, and again and again.)
“At least I’m not like them,” said I, Mister S. Ass. A great chuckle erupted in our safari car, if the day was not so surreal, and it had been a planned trip, I would have gladly paid a guide a healthy cash tip and said, “thank you for an amazing journey my dear friend, the rest of my life, I will never be able to top this again!”
You see, I think I should explain something here.
(Self-discovery is hard work, even when it’s not an intended insult. I say to you, dear friend, I hope you will not think me a shrew for my awful views of those that I am clearly superior too.)
So we left the Alabama Park, laughing along down the road we went, for a congratulatory massive meal, oh, and then that fateful question reappeared.
“Want another biscuit?” the waiter asked.
Seemed like an innocent thing to say.
“Why yes, thank you,” said I, still dreaming at the time as, Mister S. Ass, the world’s number on smart ass.
(I had had a full day, making fun of others, so nothing makes me feel so superior, so self important and well, I felt quite regal, almost giddy at this point.)
After getting back home from the accidental safari, where we had observed a herd of human buffalo grazing along the unintended safari road, I made a fateful mistake. I decided to shower, to clean off all the accumulated stink.
After my shower, standing in front of my expansive bathroom mirror, accepting I’m still quite superior, the man-catch of all time, my wife should thank me, I thought in my simple mind.
(But then the earth quaked under my fat feet. Likely a karmatic Heaven sent note, addressed to Mister S. Ass, a member in good standing of the tribe, The Smart Ass.)
“My cotton towel had fallen from my white pasty frame, so, I turned to pick it up off the floor,” said I, well you know my name by now. “It was only brief, but what I caught, was an unaccustomed glimpse.” A great sigh, I need to close my eyes. The moment caused me to be briefly paralyzed.
I froze very still, no quick movements, quiet as I can expected to be, didn’t want to disturb what I saw. Don’t panic and get scared, no need to act shrill.
“Is that similar to the homosapien elephants from the accidental safari?” I whispered. It was weird, I sensed one had snuck into our bathroom and it had caught my stare. It seemed to be looking at me from some far away time portal from hell. Then it occurred to me, the awful truth, I had cast the shadow on my own, just like the herd near the lake. It was I, who was a massive fat fruit cake!
“This cannot be me?” What was I to say to all this pasty white truth? All laid bare, right in front of my expanded naked posterior of a caboose.
Quite full-in-body I was, belly round, a pear shape had emerged, from my once athletic physical form. As if I’m hidden within a cream colored cocoon waiting for my monarch butterfly to be birthed from me soon. Struck by the thought, next Christmas, I get to play Santa Clause at the Big-Box-Mall, without any additional padding to trick the children into thinking I’m the jolly-old-one from up north.
Troubled with this revelation, of the additional pressure against my skin, of my pasty white natural cummerbund that I had earned, with a fatty tissue of a full body cloak I’d become, I’ve had to make some changes, and so, the next time I decided to dine out. And the fateful question was asked. (What for it smart ass.)
“Want another biscuit?” The ubiquitous skinny waitress asked, with the lilt of a smile across her thin, smart ass lips. I coughed for effect, for my Dear Friend.
“No thank you, I don’t want to be an even bigger ass,” said I, Mister I’m sorry, formerly of The Smart Ass tribe.
Then I sat next to my dear friend. I frowned and shrugged a few times and took in a deep breath.
“So, I guess I learned that I’m not so cool,” said I, imperfect person looking in the mirror that night. “Are we still dear friends after all?”
And my Dear Friend looked back at me and said.
“I’ll always be your dear friend, particularly now, because you’ve learned not to call someone a big fat cow!”
“That’s true,” said I, Mister not so thin guy.
“But it’s these times I look forward to the most, because now you know, which friends love you, even when you burnt your own toast.”
“I learned a lot today,” said I, Mister humble pie.
Then my dear friend put his hand on my shoulder and hugged me like a brother. And then he said to me, in a rather humble manner.
“These sorts of problems would never exist, if we simply remembered, as the good book sort of says, to just love one another, no matter race, or creed or color.”
NS
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