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Fried bread
[ 5 minute read ]
Opinion
Thanks for the memory
I just cannot fathom why people eat fried bread. I tried it last night and it made me really quite ill; I ended up sticking my fingers down my throat and throwing it up so I could sleep. If I rearrange my thinking I might direct my questioning a bit more towards myself and avoid blaming other people for my actions; I cannot understand why someone who knows how much a factory-sliced piece of wholemeal bread weighs would consider surrounding it when, after frying it, it weighs more than three times as much as one of the slices still in the bread bag.
Someone in the past called me an idiot to my face, that is how stupid I must have appeared at the time; he had no fear of being wrong because he believed that I am so dumb that many other people would have expressed their astonishment at the level of my doltishness out loud, and by now I must be believing it for myself. On that day, I was being silly but he didn't know how I was being so. I am allergic to wasp and bee stings and definitely hornet stings. I got stung by one of them while I was towelling myself dry one morning before going to a forklift training course. I had to cycle sixteen miles to the town where the college was. After about eight miles I had difficulty breathing because my tongue and throat was swelling up.
'Blast!' I thought, 'I am in the middle of nowhere and there is not a house in sight. Perhaps this is why people carry mobile phones.'
Hmmm, I had to just keep cycling. At that time I didn't know I had a bee, wasp, or hornet venom allergy but I did know what an anaphylactic reaction was. Erm, I might die if I lie down and wait for a rare passing car. I cycled on, slowly. When I got to the college I was lucky to find a young woman who suffered from hay-fever who gave me two anti-histamine tablets. The swelling had not gotten worse from when I recognised my mortality, which is why I didn't go to the hospital, and I had waited three years to get on the fork-lift training course. What the poison-dwarf of a fellow who called me an idiot to my face didn't realise was that every day that week I was thoroughly overdosing on anti-histamine. It makes you dizzy in your thinking; Lots of things do! Except fish.
'Poison-dwarf' is not a portmanteau of my own invention. I read it somewhere. I am trying to recall where; it is on the tip of my tongue. That is what overdosing on anti-histamine is like. I am someone, just like everyone else, who is confident that I can start a sentence, when I talk, and the middle and end will match the beginning. I suppose my memory was afflicted, and although I can't be sure, the end of my spoken sentences were just blurred echoes of beginnings that offered no conclusions, during the whole of that week. 'You're an idiot' was probably quite fitting.
His statement cut to the quick though. Something I noticed a long time ago was how emotionally vulnerable I am when I have a hangover. I don't know if the mental processes I use to protect myself are quiescent then or what, but I am convinced that my marriage suffered, not because I was drunk but because I felt every insult and barbed thrust my wife cared to air when I had a hangover. And, right there is the thing; her words were barbed. They stuck in me and changed the way I thought about me, my life, and especially her. My wife had a penchant for trying to cut my legs from under me; pent up frustration I imagine.
I really am foolish though. Why would anyone eat a piece of bread so saturated with oil that a question formed in their head as to the validity of the idea to eat it, and still eat it?
'I didn't think....'
'You just didn't think, that's it, isn't it?' My dad would interrupt me.
It is possible that I am not allergic to wasp and bee venom and I was stung by a hornet three times. I did have three marks on my upper arm and it did swell up and turn an angry itchy red. Maybe the venom dose was just a bit too high and my body wasn't ready for it that day. A hornet flew into me at three in the morning. They are so fast and heavy you can really feel it, and they are loud!
It is a conjunction of events that have wounded me so deeply. The idea that I have never recognised that the world perceives me to be lesser than they perceive themselves to be, never occurred to me before I was called an idiot to my face, by someone I then regarded as beige, vanilla and limited. A positive lesson I learned is that I should not indisciminately dismiss opinions. Unfortunately, while emotionally vulnerable because chemicals were interfering with my thinking, similar to when my wife twirled out her invective like someone spinning a rotary washing line too fast, I was whipped in the face by a careless statement that has stayed with me for years afterwards.
Jim Carrey, in the film 'The Mask' (1994) said, after being invigorated by its power, 'Someone stop me!' Hear my bleat - Someone stop me. No, really, someone stop me eating fried bread.
From now on, the place where I shall keep my confidence checking, as in inhibiting, thoughts will be in a mental drawer labelled 'Fried Bread'.
I gave myself a day-mare a couple of days ago when I remembered sailing five miles from the estuary of the Medway river in Kent to Southend in Essex in a seventeen foot sloop with no engine and no sailing experience or training - I did read a book on sailing though. It might have been useful if I had been stung by a wasp, bee or hornet and the chap from the forklift training course was standing on the jetty where I bought my boat.
'You're an idiot!' Oh thanks! You may have just saved my life. If my life had been saved by not attempting the crossing and I somehow came to know that, I would have no choice but to be eternally grateful to a 'poison-dwarf' (not my portmanteau) who insults people. It is with much regret that I must now shake the hands of my future enemies for potentially saving my life. Someone once said if you are threatened with attack, supposedly physical, do something strange or weird because it throws them off track. How surprised will verbally abusive people be when they get a handshake and a double cheek-kiss? 'I hear you! I hear you! Thank you so much!'