Fried potato

"I would like a potato."

     "Yes ..."

"Fried in butter to crispy."

    "And ..."

"With this sauce."

     "And ..."

"Nothing. Salt and this green sauce. That's it. And let the weight of the potato sit in my stomach as my acids tear the pieces to minute pieces and then pass the bulk of stinking mush along through my digestive system, disrupting what is already there, with large gaps between ingestions pushing it along with force by pressure that exceeds slow and steady rhythmic peristaltic motion."

The system breaks down food, extracts nutrients from it, and converts them into energy.
Healthline.

Really?

I thought that energy had already been converted from nutrients. Energy that had died or is passing. Now we are doing that all over again.

The energy was already there, already converted from nutrients. The plants and the animals that we consume already converted nutrients to energy, their energy. Now their energy is dead material. Dead energy. Even with plants we consume dead and dying material that already extracted nutrients from soil or from other plants or animals, and converted it to their energy. Now our material, our energy. We are the same as bacteria in this sense, and as flies and as fungus and vultures that live on dead and dying material, energy that is expiring. We do the same thing. We eat dead things.

Ew, sometimes I just hate myself.

I dislike this scheme.

The idea that I live on dead shit and turn that to living material just really, ew, I just hate that.

Couldn't I do better?

I'd have to eat life. I'd have to eat things as they are living. Eat the plants as they are growing, eat the insects as they are crawling, as animals do. Eat animals as they are living, that would be given up right off. The idea is to live off only living material. To convert only living energy to living energy.

     "But it dies soon as you eat it."

"Shut up."

This is why philosophers always spend the first five hundred pages defining their terms. They're anticipating all the other philosophical assholes protesting every word. The way they do themselves.

It's such a drag. Everything we eat is dead.

I am still waiting for those Colorado peaches of summer that run down my face when I bite into them. (I bought a bag of four peaches a week ago. Took one bite. Threw away the whole bag.)

But they are all dead peaches. Peach corpses. Piled up in a box. Boxes sent across the country. I'd have to climb a peach tree and go out on a branch and eat the peaches as they are growing in order to stay true to consuming only living energy. Come to think of it, the way that we did in our dad's back yard with cherries, with apples, and pears, and with plums. Dad did the same thing that I did, he planted the seeds from the fruit that he ate when he was my age back then. I knew his earlier efforts as trees. He saw his boys climbing the trees that he planted. Barry and I climbed them. They're BIG! And we ate the fruit right off the trees as they were living, stretched out on the branches stuffing our mouths with fruit just as the birds and the insects do.

Fine. Your dead-ass potato will be cooked twice.

That way it will be crunchy. Crunchy with butter. And no cheese, no hamburger, no shrimp, no seafood, no chicken, no sausage, no mushrooms, no nothing. No herbs. Nothing. Just this sauce.

The sauce. To blaze a fiery trail through my G.I. tract so its evacuation is notable as its ingestion such that it can be timed, fire in, fire up and down and back and forth and all around then fire out. And I'll be all, "That was uncharacteristically fast."

Psych! It's not that hot.