No Rapture; Thunder Lose, too

But it was the birthday weekend for my son, Jack, and grand-daughter GK. Big love to both.

George Carlin speaks for me:

I want to discuss ketchup for a moment, or “catsup” if you prefer. I have some mixed feelings about this condiment and I just want to go ahead and get them out in the open.

(It’s very tempting at this point to repeat the joke from “Pulp Fiction,” but I’ll leave it to you to either remember it or not need to.)

Ketchup is the only condiment I know of that has been politically divisive. First, during the Reagan administration, the Department of Education or somebody decided, in their wisdom, to allow ketchup to be classified as a “vegetable” for the purposes of school lunches. Nutritionally nonsense to begin with and, since tomatoes are a fruit and not a vegetable, factually incorrect. In addition, the FDA controversially allowed the ingredients of ketchup to include a small amount of “bug parts” without including this in the label ingredients. Don’t worry, it’s small bugs and therefore the parts are even smaller. This helps keep down the cost of the product blahblahblah and who cares about your health anyway? What, you thought the FDA was supposed to protect the public instead of support the food industry? What are you, a naive bitch?

As far as I know, the only thing controversial about mustard is that the top of the squeeze bottle turns into vinegar if you let it sit in the fridge too long and you get this watery crap that comes out instead of the yellow stuff you want.

As a condiment, ketchup is really neither here nor there for me. Sometimes I like it and sometimes I don’t. I don’t put ketchup on my burgers or dogs and think it even sounds yukky. I like ketchup on French fries and onion rings, but not always. Sometimes I prefer Ranch dressing or BBQ sauce. If I do have ketchup on my fries, I’m one of those people who has to have a topping of pepper, preferably coarse ground, covering my two tablespoons of ketchup. I will take the top off the table’s pepper shaker in order to get sufficient pepper on my ketchup. If you don’t like it, don’t ask me if I’m going to finish those fries, n00b.

All of this comes to the forefront because today I threw out a metric buttload of those little ketchup single-serving foil packets that fast food places glob into your sack.

Now, as much as I sometimes like ketchup on my fries, I find ketchup in the car to be a very bad idea. Even if the car is parked and not moving, I don’t seem to be able to open three or four of those packets and put the ketchup on my fries without getting some red blobs on my clothes — sometimes on my pants, sometimes on a tie or shirt, and even on a coat or socks or the toe of my new, white athletic shoes. This is odd to me since I can eat ketchup at home or in a restaurant and 99.9% of the time never get a single drop on myself. It’s only when I try to use those little foil packets that it gets slung all over everything.

Are the serrated tops of those puppies individually greased up at the factory or does McDonald’s do that in their own kitchen? The reason I ask is that one of the prime times the ketchup gets on the front of my white dress shirt is when I’m trying to open one of those slippery things. Once opened, things aren’t much better: try to squeeze some out without at least a drop or two going at light speed towards my silk tie.

Since these packets are invariably on top of my food, I have to fish them out before I can get to my bacon cheeseburger with mustard, no mayo. Then, I gather up the remains from my open seat and dutifully put them in the center pocket part of the car between the front seats. Then, when I’ve accumulated a 100 or so, I take them inside and put them in the fridge. Eventually, they fill up one of the shelves in the door of the fridge. At that point, I realize that some of them are, like, from last century and I throw them all away. Seems like a lot of wasted time, effort and ketchup.

So, my question is, if we stopped wasting so much ketchup and the foil used to package the ketchup and didn’t have to throw them away by the metric buttload, could we have ketchup without bug parts?

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