Sometimes I have dreams, simple aspirations that appear surprisingly translucent and pristine in a clouded mind perpetually stuck in a sky-darkening and bone-drenching monsoon.
These notions, these hopeful premonitions, they are rapidly identifiable and always intriguing enough to at least peruse. They are vividly decorated, oversized art books jutting out past the confines of their shelf, innocuously placed within one of the endless library stacks that house all my irrelevant and nonsensical thoughts, bunched up and catalogued in the most pointlessly random of orders.
These are dreams of a better future, hopes of a finer existence rising above the perfunctory mandates of civilized reality, caterwauling hallucinations of a world more intellectually challenging than intellectually challenged.
Currently though, all I can think about is goddamn corn syrup, and how it manages to slither its way into everything I do and don't want to eat.
Having just served my annual eight day-long jail sentence of Passover, holed up in the sustenance slammer and locked away in solitary food and drink confinement for reenacting the biblical shanking of leavened bread in the cafeteria slop line, thoughts of food have become my food for thought.
It's always a scream to try to honor your tradition faithfully while avoiding the urge to kill yourself or others after being pushed to brink of insanity, and it deeply saddens me that more people don't get in on all the fun. But then it might be easier to get food that isn't restricted for this important holiday of rebirth and remembrance, which, in turn, just might take the depraved joy and self-mortifying goodness right out of it, leaving Passover bland and uninspired like any number of Hallmark-approved holidays.
Theoretically, there should be enough edible objects available for my consumption to avoid any extraordinary unpleasantness, but the ubiquitous intrusion of corn syrup and its juiced-up, testicle-shriveled cousin, high fructose corn syrup, into the American gastronomical milieu has left me feeling like I just ran a marathon (backwards and naked) through a... corn field.
You see, maize is off-limits during Passover, and as a result, so is any corn by-product, no matter how molecularly distant or chemically altered it might be (corn syrup is less related to corn than I am to a cigar-chomping chimpanzee).
And the gooey plasma endlessly washes through our lives in violent torrents like the Zambezi (think the river of slime from "Ghostbusters 2"), glazing itself over all varieties of mass-produced, general foodstuff.
That explains why, for the previous eight days, I've been considering toting organic ketchup around in a hip-slung holster, been getting into arguments with overworked and uninformed diner staff about the contents of their unlabeled jam and coffee creamer and have been denied some of the most basic culinary pleasures, like crusty condiments, allotted to even Soviet Gulag detainees.
Of course I understand that this is my choice, my own conscious decision to restrict my diet in the name of cultural awareness. But even now that I have resumed gorging on fluffy, flaky loaves of rustic artisan ciabatta and funneling pints of yeast-laden, monk-brewed Belgian Trappist ales, I nonetheless long for the days when laboratory-imagined, cost-efficient sweeteners and other additives were simply being tested on animals and perhaps interrogation subjects, not backhandedly fed to law-abiding humans like low-grade trough contents.
It seems reasonable, at least to my oft-irrational mind, to envision a society where I don't get fooled into buying products touting healthy makeovers that not only take out existing natural sugar, but deviously add completely artificial sweeteners, like sucralose and aspartame, to their devilish recipe.
Nothing is safe - not orange juice, not even pickles (I recently bought a bottle of sweet gherkins that failed to prominently mention on the label that they were enhanced with Splenda, and a crime against my beloved pickles is a crime against nature and all mankind).
Do Americans just have such an insatiable sweet tooth that instead of simply consuming lesser amounts of expensive and nutritionally deprived refined glucose, we must forever be doping ourselves up with cheaply harnessed corn syrup and fake sugar substitutes like a black-tar junkies anxiously pacing outside of a methadone clinic?
I think we're just getting sweet-talked and hosed, our eyes coated and obscured by a hard caramel shell.
Just like a little heroin can't hurt anyone, neither can a little pure, all natural sugar. But the corn cartels, controlled by big cereal, the soda conglomerate and the agricultural axis of evil, have left us all constantly begging for just one more crystalline hit of the sweet stuff, even at the cost of our own health. And why stop? It's like taking candy from a baby.