Chemistry... 1st, and 2nd and 3rd and 4rth

Chemistry of Offensive Breath


1.

Earlier this morning Coralline was reading the "Final Solution" magazine. Everything she read from it gave her a pang of recognition. There was even a transcription of a conversation between a camel and its hump… That sounded dumb on the face of it. And up to a point it was, but then something clicked. Noam Chomsky couldn’t have said it better. One point especially stood out for her, kicking her face in, as it were. Camels, the writer said, were trained from birth to imagine their hump as a stigma. So that with them their class position was definitively established.

“Whoever possesses a hump — they are told by nature — that heartless bitch — is rather marked to function as a hump-ridden beast of burden for the economy. Contrariwise, a person let’s say who has a giraffe neck and a diamond necklace to enhance it, usually thinks of herself as upper class, regardless of what her actual work is, or whom she takes orders from…”

This concept of natural gifts or curses has been running amok in all societies of humans…

Coralline was a divorced gal. New ideas brought in a rush a thrill of possibilities for her. She had grown up unconscious of such huge stuff as philosophers’ stones and panaceas, and other deep ontological notions. She had only known about secretaries landing the boss, or humble but pretty nurses marrying the chief surgeon.

Just becoming aware of some of the oppression natural organisms lived under, did change her whole mode of looking at the world. She perused the magazine with a certain unction. She loved to learn. Another of the “Final Solution” essays, one bizarrely titled “An Appendix Extracted from an Ant,” affected her still more.

In it the author talked about how we are really not allowed to have any influence in our surroundings, if… (and that was an enormous if) we submit to the policies of nature. The economy be damned, nature was the task master.

Her coffee had gone cold. She rang the bell. The maiden came. “Nina,” Coralline said, “hot coffee if you please; I think I’ll spend the night studying…”

Nina, adjusting her tights, answered: “You don’t think about sex and riches anymore. Are you depressed…?”

Coralline was too immersed in her portentous reading to reply. She mumbled and kept on deciphering the truths buried therein, amongst the shiny luxurious pages of the chick magazine.

Later she phoned Maximine, her new friend. “I suffered a great deal when I first read it several years ago; all this Communist stuff, honey, it rots your mind.” And then Maximine pointed out with blinding clarity that the all “final solutions” create a perfect world, yes, but too materialist withal.

Maximine said, over the line: “Usually when someone says your hump creates your reality, they mean it in a literal sense, sort of like the slogan your platitude determines your crassitude or you are nature’s prostitute when bending to decrepitude, as though one could simply decide on the world that surround them just by trying to eject from this gilded or rusted cage called existence. No, my dear, self-involved denial carries you nowhere but to an early grave… What you must do is throw to the lions all books and printed rubbish and get thee to a make-up artist. Our thoughts and beliefs are rabid viruses…”

Coralline was not convinced by the elder woman’s rantings. Her inalienable right to hot coffee marked her sure of being able to converse with the sages, who in their ages enjoyed also the peace of spirit that brought them to understand the whole of it, the fabric of being, and so forth. Stupid people are killed, to put it bluntly, because they are unwilling to study the fine points of wisdom. If master of the universe, it is true that she could have put a stop to any silly unilateral invasion, or could have at least slowed down the murderous warriors who always show suck lack of the courage for they always go against the frail in order to rob them or make intergalactic slaves out of them. No; she would follow her common sense, would have for advisers only the best versed in stoicism and simple-vices. To stand up against the powerful one needs to beat them at ideas, and have incredibly huge followings. For that one needs organs of pollution that are hard to come bye without money. Without money you are a marked woman, and you pay for your courage with your life…

She woke up after a few hours. She couldn’t remember if she had drunk the coffee per se or if it had been drunk by a goblin or by the maid or by a visitor or by a secret admirer, or maybe it had just evaporated by itself, but this was generally her point: that our fanatical belief in the properties of natural life must be challenge in all fronts, for it causes people to be murdered non-stop or, by lack of solvable riddles, causes plenty of suicides. A lot of stupid people take for granted everything. An oilbath and a bloodbath are only equivalent when the light reverberates in just the proper way of life, which should be non-negotiable. That's what she meant.

She had been dreaming sinister excerpts of the end of the world. The voices were right out of the conclaves where the powerful of the universes concocted their “natural happenings.”

The lowly speakers emerged to announce that nature will never be gainsaid. But of course could Coralline may have been the only member waiting for the trite news to spread who knew that all was a ridiculous comedy…? That nature was a sham…?

On the other hand, what folly to pray for courage…! Coralline’s orifices needed filling… Biggest of all, her mouth. Many blind spots appeared before her eyes. She fell vaguely faint. Her failure to grasp the forces of traitorous nature, led to many of her difficulties now… She attempted to stand and fell upon the muddy rug. The blitzkrieg of ideas coming to her little head with the speed of a bunch of stampeding elephants had left her feeling foolish…

Dragging along, she cursed herself. She tried piping up, but no sound came out of the dried mouth... Nina the maid who knows for how many hours had been absent, maybe gallivanting with her beaus… All perfectly decent persons can turn into monsters as easily as cheese molds. And there's no reason why one should in just a few thoughts follow a certain chain of reasoning that, when subtly incorrect, at the end of the chain, prove that at the end of the day we’ve just become another of the numberless insidious intellectuals that prattle away in irretrievable nugacity…

She at length reached the kitchen and ate and ate.


2.

“Since you are on your own, you’ve grown so conceited, Coralline!”

Maximine was rebuking her while briskly walking down the avenue. A new sage’s scowl was adorning Coralline’s wide brow. Trails of exhaust gas kept drifting into their grim faces.

“I have a niece,” Maximine started again, “she’s a corny, cockeyed girl, very ugly, glasses, adipose, you get the picture, an intellectual type, and smelly, her breath…! A sky gazer to boot. Goes out by nights but not to any party or dump where the oil-rich void their greedy contingency plannings, if you know what I mean, far from their greedy wives, stoking the fires of their dying libidos, conjuring up their forgotten dreams of vestals and houris, and above all letting loose and distributing the excess avoirdupois of their plenty stoked wallets, but no, she’s up into the cold freezing top of the hills looking at Venus and the Martians in their dirty synergies and syzygies…”

Coralline scratched her head, she said: “What…?”

“Of course the poor girl is rat-poor,” Maximine emphasized, “she’s not alimony-stricken, to coin a phrase, filthy rich as you are, so that you can avoid all the strictures of those commoners who need worries to stay alive, worries that only add deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars, and instead you can devolve all your leisure into bleak reprisal, let’s say by studying the stoics and their tricks for dying while in the meantime killing with boredom and unproductivity the bulk of their relatives… Fatalities galore, the woes of the friends, the guffaws of the foes…”



“As a matter of fact I do, winched like a jade,” answered Coralline, quite firmly this time. “Come and let’s sit down over this patch of dry moss, Maximine, for what I am about to tell you shall of all evidence be surprising news to you indeed…”

Maximine was alarmed. “You want to commit suicide, that it…? And I’m not sitting down where the damned dogs happily turd away. Let’s get into some of these watering holes, as the toughs call ‘em.”

It was a dreary haunt for down-on-the-luck gays. Sloppy, fat and stinky men were dancing and prancing, atrociously dressed as atrocious women. The lacquers were all scratched, dimmed, peeling. It was serious oneiric fun, though. They sat down, watched the spectacle with growing grievances…

Coralline bitterly remembered: “My husband’s lover, and mine…”

“Oh, I know…!” Maximine heartily sympathized, “it was horrible, such dire debaucheries! Your lover his lover! Such shock!”

“I was transmogrified into a fallen leaf; ready for mulch.”

“Tell me about it. Don’t I know? What a pity, though. Such a handsome Chink!”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I know. A circus contortionist! The things he could do! The snakings, the slitherings, the emballments…!”

“The embalmments…? Was he a mortician also…?”

“No; I mean, the way he shrunk himself into a little big ball of substance! Tell me, did he really ever manage to quite put himself whole, you know, inside of…”

“I hate to talk about it.”

“Just a few details I failed to get, come on! Even the balls of his feet, I mean…?” Lascivious bitch, Maximine prodded.

Coralline was quiet for a piece, though you could see she was slightly trembling: a marksman’s trifling target. The obvious lechery of her counterpart, the dismal atmosphere, her thoughts last night of impending finitude and choking existentialism… The tears started to flow…

Maximine waited, slavering over her cold cognac. And then her heart of fire thundered, imploded, pure napalm relinquished with rapturous compassion: “Speak, speak!, damn you!” —she finally implored.

“Such a pollutant, peripatetic, personable phallus as a single man — a moist pliable prong with a face, that was him, a trunk with a comely physiognomy. Damned pederast all told. Compacted as a concertina, and then, inside, expanding like flames. The phycomater with which spends inside turning into plastic, like if with contact with the phthalates inside the womb, plastifying into pipes and cables of some new being… Ah, no, it’s too iniquitous, too wicked!”

“I’m amazed nonetheless at how you keep your perfect composure… Despite so many contretemps. Putting aside the congenital costs of consanguinity and the dreads of contagion, there’s the irk of wounded pride… Ah, my dear, don’t I understand…?” Maximine was picking at the tarnished chrome plating bordering their lame table, with her sham commiserative words trying to extract further confessions.

“Ah, the calamitous consequences of being born into this cage. We are in it but helpless chess pawns, the cuckold and the prostitute, and the tiger and the elephant. Like a tricked loadstone, each of us keeps leading the van, but, internally, don’t we wonder whereto…? Over the flaccid bourns around which our private motherlands must bristle in confusion, nothing, but a rather rapider death looms.”
“Indeed, but… God, you’ve gone so deep in a few days! It’s so dangerous unfathomable deepness… Those dark thoughts! My dear, wishes of suicide arise like fumes, sulphurous volcano of the soul.”
“Suicide…? I’m not ready for suicide, I’m just haunted by a pushy rage that sizzling whispers to me hidden means by which one could maim the fucking creep so that he loses his job… But I’m in such a two-mind quagmire. On the one hand the decorous revenge, on the other all the teachings of those beautiful clairvoyant philosophers… How can one ever forget the first rule of the stoics, you take command of yourself…?”
“Yeah, but pardon me, ladies. I’ve overheard passages of your interesting conversation, and couldn’t help but…” A burly man-woman interrupted, his drab dress full of malodorous stains. “Look, talking about quandaries. Just measure mine, if you please. I love the excitement of speed, ok? Nothing I love more. I’ve got a new motorcycle. A darling of power untold. And sweet on the eyes — my, the princess of the roads. I’m just a flaming motorcyclist in love with his machine. Yeah, but what’s one to do with his darling of a resplendent vehicle…? You arrive at the airport, your mother’s dead in Elmira and you must visit with the rest of the family already intent in scamming you because your heterodox inclinations… So, I’m going to the door of the airport. The employees therein always despaired and diseased, no hope of improvement, only fast deterioration… We all have seen them. All gone old and smelly and cancerous in a jiffy — hideous tumors abounding… And they complain all day about their crazed schedules… I’m not going to go to them to solve my motorcycle problem. On the other hand, if I leave it outside it will be immediately stolen, or vandalized by vandals, or just punished by Jupiter… What to do, the hell if I know. Inside the aircraft no way they want it. Too valuable, or whatever… I could sell it cheap to you two rich ladies, you just keep it for me, you use at your convenience, I see by your dainty hands how careful you’d be with the darling machine, then I’m back, and richer also, and I buy my unspeakably sparkling mounture at a premium, you bet.”
“I hate to puncture your pretensions, sir,” Maximine carefully spelled. “But have you considered the so-called counterpenalty proposal…?”
“Eh…?” The burly fellow was nonplussed.
“As when one is compelled to commit to predawn procreation, the payback can become prohibitive. I’m a compulsive concertgoer, and so is this fair dyke here, my partner in crime. With the rest of them elegant scoundrels and popinjays we attend the premieres, never as poor craftsmen and penniless wonders, you bet. None of us acclimatized to misery, really. The graceful curlicues of the line resembling in nothing a cast of characters in police custody… Just the preacher or the priest, the swindlers out of depth with swindlers bigger than them by miles of altitude. See them plucking convulsively at the collars of their asphyxiating coats…?”
“I see nothing. Want to buy or not…?”
“Could you commit a maiming…?” Coralline asked.
“A maiming…?”
“Just some breaking of the legs…”
“Of a human…?”
“A semihuman if you will. A forsworn Chink.”
“Well, let’s talk… Name’s Willie the jackal, who always proceeds in all seriousness.”
“Fine. Here’s my card…” Coralline was about to give him her card, then, when Maximine jumped and snatched.
She laughed in a demented laugh. “Non est sana puella!” She screamed.
“Who speaks spic…?” Aggrieved, the tough gay motorcyclist retorted, red-faced too.
“Latin and Greek, my dear. Only things one learns of profit at school. The leading classes rising to lead, plus as a thoughtful gratuity offering off a poetic say of what are they at... Perí philías kai symmakhías… About friendship and strategic alliance with the classes d’en bas. That’s froggy for you, also useful at a pinch. Crimes crapuleux perpétrés sous des prétextes patriotiques… While the exempt were cocufying the poilus… But you surely know the rest of the story, sir. Would not they then remember one of (in all its concomitant apparatus) the poetess’s exquisite compositions of old…? You tell me.”
“Crazy bitch. Are you making fun of me…?”
“Sir, I wouldn’t dare. My dyke friend, fair as she is, wants to maim my husband. When we are in bed, Fred and I, monotonously crisscrossing his most boring feats of the day and mine, and then going about through every secret vista of a same single item, while perhaps the other one already sleeps, for at heart we know, Fred and I, that everything we say are lies, you couldn’t picture a more helpless puppy. Now my friend in her jealousy would castrate or else unleg him, but I most vigorously must differ… Our purposes are at loggerheads. Sir, the request that’s been made of you is by no means ripe… If something adumbrates maybe later we’ll call again, thank you.”
“Your fucking brains are too ripe. Repellent broads.” Disgustedly, the aging hooligan at last retreated.
Coralline and Maximine had a breath at leisure now. For the while they had been holding at a minimum the pumping of the available air. They discussed a little about the weird chemistry of offensive breath.
“Man, the mucky odd fish surely stank.”
Then it was noon, as usual time to dine. And pretty merry it was too;
the servants kind and competent, the food you could condescend to even eat it, and, on the other tables, the dilapidated office men, and the farmers in town with their cowlike wives providing a mass of anecdotes and scurrility. Everybody so stupid, observing here and there the usual empty ceremonies, with the drinking of healths, the preaching to the choir, the kicks under the plates, the retchings and the climate change crisis, and the funereal burning of the candles…



3.

Angel of death, she thought… If you would rather not be again the last to drown, to its unwinged rump now... you... must... hurry.

Angel of… Inform my deformed form… Winded and winched like a jade, I thee thus beseech…

Coralline was in the bathroom, sitting snugly at the commode, somnolently perusing some essay by Schopenhauer…

Nina the maid, the fresh vixen, who had been suspiciously out of breath when her mistress (“the learned hyena”) had arrived home, now peered from the door ajar to the bathroom…

“Would you like,” she started, “for me to enumerate the times the Magic Palmist has called…?”

“Who the dickens is the Magic Palmist…?”

“You tell me, it was a gruff voice of an old woman, I thought. Plus she seems to relish her disagreeable job.”

“All this is shameless arbitrariness. How could you tell…?”

“Look, whoever is caught emending nature, trying by dirty tricks a release of sorts from the deserved miseries of this world, sins again the maker or mackerel of the whole shebang…”

“Are you under the impression that mackerel is the feminine form of maker…? My god, that’s a kind of a sardine!”

“Sardine yourself. A red herring you are giving me, and stinking red also. Plus: A mocking laugh that could be heard for a mile yet as she sliced and splotched the words of the righteous, says the Bible some place, remember, is the sign by which the malign is made manifest. When poor Walter the wildebeest came to talk to the magicians at the temple about his sexual problems, and he had his whole family in tow, he was also laughed away, and told that he was a liar to top it all, and that his home town had been in consequence obliterated.”

“Walter the wildebeest…? You are silly. That must be in some other fairy tale!”

“Poor Walter! The damned unbelieving priests of the magical temple, anti-idolaters that they were, wouldn’t believe maps or other idolaters’ marks of evil possession. When Walter the wildebeest came back the next day with a few pages of some old newspapers of the biblical ages, where three or four articles stood published over the years…, and dealt with Walter’s town, and named some outstanding members of his family... The batch of clippings must have been one of his most prized treasures, proud that he was of his family, poor but dignified enough, not like some folks in the dissolute cities… But then the infidel anti-idolaters said: These are all lies. And with a snap of their claws they snatched the papers and went to the table over the corner… And they yelled: ‘Tis all wrong, those towns sure deserved obliteration. And forthwith they scratched off the names over the maps and the newspapers and wrote on top instead an awful spate of nonsense…”

“Indeed!”

“Poor Walter was appalled. Defeated, he retreated with his head on the mud, pelted besides by the loud and mean guffaws she spat at him, the righteous wildebeest.”

“Well, thank you for the tale well told, and now warm my bed, please. I’ll be finished in a sec or less…”

“Shun the witch, shun the obnoxious witch forever. Nothing good will ever come of her… This is what I have to say.”

“Ok, I’ve heard you. Next time the what…, the Magical Palm-reader calls send her packing. Tell her I have a better interpreter of the occult powers…”

“Laugh, laugh. Laugh your soul to the embers eternal…”

As Nina disappeared, Coralline got up, wiped herself, looked at the bottom of the commode… It is merely apparent, she thought, though, damn, does it smell ugly. But as there is a huge difference between a mistake and a crime, so between what’s discarded and what’s kept. As she flushed, she had a vision of all the Christian clergy, perfectly in order, chanting in a deadening monotone that the real purpose of life is suicide. And that thwarting the act or even quarrelling against it can’t be either ascetic or reach a ethical standpoint of even moderate heights.

She went to the console near her office; she unwrapped a few of the little packets of make-up products she’d bought that evening with Maximine, she was trying a new delicately perfumed lipstick when the doorbell rang. She on a reflex stepped to one side of the console, she flattened against the wall…

Learning about morals from the best philosophers of Europe makes you very wary, chary, distrustful of the whole world. Her freshly manicured nails were nervously dancing over the red buttons of the console. Nina was at the door. Murmurs of conversation reached her as vibrations of doom. At length the door snapped close again.

“Nina, who was it…? So late!”

Nina tried her best to look busy. It looked as if her zeal must be instigated by some secret connection. One of her many beaus, surely. She ignored her mistress at first. Then she faked ignorance.

“I’d bet you are wet…” Coralline said.

“Waging is against the strictures of the scriptures, plus the extraordinarily active fanaticism with which the clergy of the monotheistic religions encourage not wagering is supported both by the bible and the rest of the organum…”

“Whatever. Let’s go to bed, and we’ll see…”



4.


Coralline had Spengler in mind (or at least a second or third hand version of it) when she said, in front of the mirror, as she was washing away the sticky residues of three orgasms enjoyed eight or more hours before, “There is a good girl who covets nothing better than the smiley prospect of a late soft swift euthanizing of the spent self…”

Feeling thus virtuous, last night thrice brought to death in the flower of her age by the skillfulness of her lovely maid, dweller at the present in a cloudy worry-free afterbliss, she would have had to look a long time to find another woman more barren of ill-boding ideas than she.

She thought that as her obscurantist neighbors, silly congregants, televisionally bereft of all wits, with a belief that a shirt or shift taken off a sick person and thrown into a portentous well of shimmering rays will prognosticate his fate... In the program seen in passing the other night, when the garment floated the person was supposed to recover, when sinking he should die a thirsty death… How unlike the unpoisoned raven (ravens never believe the rubbish the religionist cabal feeds the witlings mesmerized by the screens), the studious raven, who, when thirsty, filled bye and bye, with pebbles, a pitcher half full of rain-water, up until the liquid could be reached by its beak… And if anybody should have witnessed such resourcefulness and filmed it, alas, and made it available to the credulous public, there you have it, another stupid miracle. How quickly would then the devout rush to kill the raven, maybe as one by the devil possessed, or, a contrario, in order to carve its miraculous bones, each chip cut off from it to be put into water, and then that water would cure men or cattle of their diseases... Plenty of rackets like these popping non-stop… But…

Smut-gray bones… Chipped… Coralline felt an increased anxiety about her collections… Indeed, that was just the dream she’d had. She was back at the University. The year was over. Everybody had vacated the edifice. Now the cleaning crews, plus the spooks at Naval Intelligence (which was definitely running some sort of treacherous operation, as always), had invaded the premises. She had been caught. “The fuck you doing here…!” And harsher yells backed by submachine guns pointing at her, angry guns eager to fume. She was only saving the beautiful books of the beautiful philosophers of old, barbarously left soaking in the clogged toilets by the imbecilic students who had finished their pseudo-education and who now were all in for the asthmatic grasping, loose in the jungle, panting for the greed and the apoplexies, dying of insatiable voracity and cloying stinginess, with no need anymore for sophronema and sophrosine, and common sense, and fortitude, and eupepsia and eubiosis, and the grasping of the authentic realities…

As the man who has no wife is no cuckold, so the surgeon who has no fool to operate on is no murderer, and the soldier with no bombs is no drooping morbid killer and no December mushroom has a chance to survive in the congealed resilience of snow… And a moan can piously sink, if anything, through haunted centuries. Whilst the swiveling fringes of the cellophaned salve of a fatuous groan will startle a staggering shudder out of the veins of a walker suddenly faced by the awaken bear… Ah, damp tropical breezes… The strange (and oddly apropos) nightmare still nonchalantly gnaws at the lasts of my clogs as I trudge along, loaded with the saved shit-dripping books of the my revered hoary thinkers… Without books we are but untaught beasts whose bestiality appalls the very essence of the trees… There, behind those coarse-barked boles, a shifting presence of a princes in veils, teasing, in flight… Or I’ll start (fate willing) something with her… Boy, the vaudevillian deviless, how she fixes me! Wait, lovely vision, wait! Damned books, how they encumber and hamper my progress! Still trees, my lone friends, I know I am the only one to witness this unique phenomenon: the gentle shedding, the slow descending of that last dead leaf… No, no! The phantasmagoric presence melting in the brumes… There is an ontological need for a crisp pronouncement that would now stop the ineluctable process of the precious vanishing… Ah, crazy cornucopia of perpetual predicament…! It is preposterously comic, horned deviless, now I’m about to get you, now you’ve gone miles afar, by my debilitated hand forever unreachable…

Coralline was startled when Nina popped in.

“Hey, Nina, what a fright!”

“Your stupid old fortune teller waking me up again…? Didn’t you hear the phone…?”

“The tap must have been running… Listen, Nina, I was thinking… As somebody not married can’t be made a cuckold of…”

“Yes. What?”

“Neither the unborn can bewitch you to follow them to the no-end well…”

“Is that another one of your dreams, ma’am…? I’m taking a shower now.”

Coralline had to shout now over the din and the steam of the falling water. “You know how I hate to pontificate and be cute… But the careful fall of that single leaf, as sternly witnessed solely by me, epitomizes the irrepeatability of anything. Time will not come back, nobody else will ever see us, united by those faintly screeching seconds, leaving on the always clean slate of eternity those receding but unmistakable marks of having actually skated together for an amiable while…”

“I don’t hear shit of what you say!”

Coralline stood silent. She thought how true it was that we only hear want we want to hear. One’s parents’ coitions are heard even with the loudest songs on, sound of musics of all sorts being always sunken by the sighs of clumsy caresses, the whines of closing passages being battered and rammed, the grunts of cold phlegms being circumnavigated round the creaking bed…

She had the willies all of a sudden. A shiver walked her spine. She willed herself to think of something else… Sex and murder, they gel. In those shitty circumstances, who could ever find the proper skein of lethargic mysteries her pain intrinsically needed to achieve at all any substantial soothing…?

Not even the useless chorus of notables… — those arbitrarily chosen philosophers of old to the rescue, now snot-gray and dripping with toilet matter, in a knot…, at a side, like spitballs, maggoty journalists all around in a pile, waiting forever, with their in-grown implanted mikes and cameras growing as the spikes of strange teratogenous little crushable beasts…

Not even them, the reasonable enough sages, managed to unfold any kind of sensible litany… They themselves were also too astounded... She was on fire, doomed, marked… On fire. For light or arson… For the best and the worse use... Ah, now! That cued for her the suddenly remembered exquisite compositions of old… Would she too, ever so calmly, now expect to see herself, or rather her swan neck go pose itself on the huge hand of the butcher, maybe sometime soon… It never is too late… Like this, my beauty, ever so slowly... With the assassination of Oswald king of the Northumbrians in yon dungeon dark, nabbed by the scruff of the neck and brought to a makeshift block…

“Hey!” Nina woke her up from the delightful reverie. “Breakfast in ten mins, is there consensus in the pews…?”

“I’ll be there, dummy, count me in. I’m starving and ready therefore to sing panegyrics to whatever gets cooked.”