The Wake

Concerning String Cheese
Sweat has made my hair coarse and wiry. The ink-stained 100% cotton t-shirt feels like a burlap sack on my exhausted body. I just returned from a day working at an industrial screen printing factory. Between stacking empty bottles inside boxes and resisting the thought that, through a horrible series of events, this could end up being my life, my entire being is tired. I need to take a shower, but I don’t have the energy. Instead I shamble over to the couch and shift my weight so that I fall into what I hope will be a comfortable position.
I consider the string cheese log, which I hope will provide the necessary energy to move to the bathroom. As it lies on my chest, I think about peeling it into its namesake shape before deciding that’s too much effort. I bite the end off. It tastes different, worse, like the filaments are actually bonded together by essence of nasty. Only pulling the fibers apart can destroy these bonds.
This teaches me a valuable lesson. Apart we shall fall, but together we will stand because we taste gross.

The Salad Conspiracy
There is no workable definition for what a salad is. No unifying ingredient or principle provides a boundary between salads and non-salads. Nothing could conceivably pass in potato salad, garden salad, jell-o salad and fruit salad. Only a lack of specific arrangement unites those salads, but not all foods considered salad share that trait. My parents are adamant that a plate of alternating tomatoes and cheese arranged in a circle counts as a salad.
Because of a lack of any criterion that needs to be met for a food item to qualify as a salad, every edible substance is a salad. Hamburgers are a bun and ground beef patty salad; cereal is a salad specially suited for the demands of breakfast. When asked “soup or salad?” the question really is “salad or salad with an excessive amount of dressing?”

Want Salt With That Orange?
It is halftime at a youth soccer match. Winonan tradition dictates that players are furnished with oranges at halftime. I devour them. The orange quarter is positioned in my mouth so that I cleave the flesh from peel in one bite then smile revealing the rind covering my teeth, a citrus mouth guard.
The orange juice coats my hand. Children like me are the reason for the invention of the trough bib. Being their normal state, the sticky condition of my hands doesn’t faze me.
The time to rally ourselves to victory with a hands-in-the-center cheer arrives. One of my teammates tells me “Don’t touch me your hands are icky!”
I will never eat halftime oranges again.

Disappearing a Culture - With Only a Sppon
Nostalgic for the middle school days when I would read all the writing on juice boxes for the amusement of my easily amused tablemates, I turn the tapered skunk-trapping tube around. It is vanilla yogurt. I cannot stand the fruit flavored yogurts because of the wads of frozen matter suspended in them. Yoplait claims that they are fruit—lies.
Near the bottom I find a proclamation that the yogurt is a living and active culture. Thinking about the organism in my mouth I chew it unnecessarily. As my teeth crush it, I think of the yogurt begging for mercy. Request denied, on the grounds of deliciousness.
The amorphous nature of yogurt helps it survive my jaws. But it won’t survive the vat of acid that is my stomach.