July 21, 2003: air quality concerns, fish

i have to sneeze so bad today. there's an area just behind my nostrils and above my mouth and throat, kinda where they all meet, that makes me wish i could shrink cheese graters and snort them like a line of cocaine. either that or ice. maybe both at the same time, like good-cop bad-cop, one to do the scratching and one to do the soothing. scratch n' sooth would be a good name for an early 90s hip-hop group. or for something that was sold in an infomercial. what if there was a hip-hop infomercial? and the hype man could be that guy who's totally amazed at everything the product does? i'm calling it right now; 2015, jay-z does infomercials.

the air conditioner broke last night. someone (my roommate? his girlfriend?) had turned it down to 65, but i don't know if they turned it down because it was broken or if turning it down was what broke it. in any case, it doesn't sound so good. usually when it comes on, it makes this kinda rumble and a loud whine, that eventually calms down and becomes a hum, such as air conditioners are wont to make. now, there is only the whine from the beginning. i just hope that my roommate turning it way down in an effort to make it work did not kill it forever, literally beating a dead horse. well, i guess not literally literally, but it's more like actually beating a dead horse than, say, continuing a fruitless argument.

you know what i don't like? people who don't like fish. i hate to be the one to say it, but there's something wrong with you if you don't like fish. it's not like i have a prejudice; if i were hiring one of two equally qualified candidates, and one of them didn't like fish and the other one did, i would totally hire the black one. and if they were both black, i'd hire the woman. and if both were women, i'd hire the hotter one. but this is all just hypothetical. the reality is that not liking fish says something about you. fish represent the bridge between animal and vegetable; there's a reason that they don't count as meat in europe. they are the universal food. jesus divided the fish and loaves because these are the only foods that all civilized people eat. commerce is not the only reason that the world's oldest cities are by the ocean; fish are the cornerstone and origin of civilization. but i'm not saying that people who don't like fish aren't civilized; they just don't respect where civilization came from. fishing is not like any other method of food production; you don't exactly cultivate fish on the one hand, but on the other you don't exactly hunt them. fishing in the ocean is the last example of hunting and gathering on which people still depend. if it was the beginning of our society, it is also our link to its origins. and not liking fish means that you deny the precariousness of our situation; you don't pay attention to where things come from, assume that food just comes from the restaurant and supermarket and that it always will. you like the effect of civilization on your food, the slow elimination of taste from our vegetables and livestock as they steadily increase their size, the ever-more-obsessive compulsion of our sanitization. fish are not sanitary; they're slimy and gross and smell bad. but they are also less likely to be genetically modified or raised in factory-like captivity than any tomato or chicken. basically, if you don't like fish, you'll be the first to die when the lights go out because you're trapped in an evolutionary backwater, like a big fat diplodocus who figures he's set, because trees are going to be this tall forever, right? i mean, it's one thing if you object to the practices of the fishing industry, overfishing and killing dolphins and what have you; that's one thing. or if you just don't like to kill animals; i disagree, but that's something else. but to turn up your nose at fish just because you find it to be too pungent, too strong, too seasoned by the sweat of generations of your antecedents who struggled to build a world where fish would be plentiful, never suspecting that their children would have children who'd be picky, whiny ingrates like you? i'm sorry, that's just wrong. my sister is a prime example.

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