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Mateuš Conrad Sep 2016
yes, i know he said he was a vegetarian, delicate counter-priesthood prince - a manner of vegetarianism that expressed an abhorrence of the practice of Eucharist, i too think the Eucharist as a metaphor is a bit porridge: i.e. yucky.  but as Wagner said to him: up north, either you eat meat or you lose the plot (loose - ß - again, not scharfes S - but die scharfes'zart - sharp-tender - already prerequisite of what sharpening omega meant for the w); mind you: salt & pepper to taste according to your own palette - if you're not a sugar ****** you won't over-salt the sauce... and you certainly will not overcook the pasta, halfway between dreadlocks and poodle hair: desirably experience bound al dente, and here comes Socrates with his knowledge of al dente: me no muffin! true that... like all these excess sugar breakfast cereals - ******* the outside, soft inside... or like the idea of ants having an exoskeleton... that's pure culinary theory - al dente exoskeleton; did i already mention salt and pepper to taste? yeah, the beef stock cube is salty, but not salty enough, given the already unsalted meat and vegetables: i cook, i take care of a toddler - Nietzsche keeps bragging: cooked by a cyclops.

who would have thought that a personal
revision of mama Italia's classic
could end up being so tasty;
Nietzsche is the foremost diner in my humble
abode: i just like the way he says:
who let woman into the kitchen?!
that's right, i deviated from the standard recipe
of mama Italia's cooking for papa don
Giovanni - honestly? in lonely times at
university when everyone was into ******
ad drunk debaucheries, and ****** fancy dress
parties? Aria Giovanni saved the day...
just look at the classic beauty, plump as a plumb
in between two cream bergs - such
exfoliation... where's that daddy long-legs
on the catwalk... come on! shove a malteser up
her *** like a suppository escutcheon - i'm sure
the salad leaves will keep her starving even more,
or walk her in Gucci with a drip-pole -
intravenous therapy while on the job -
but can you believe what only a quarter of a teaspoon
does to the Bolognese sauce recipe?
wonders... you don't add the carrot, or the celery,
among the vegetables you add button mushrooms,
and the three colours of peppers -
onions and garlic (a lot of it) as standard -
oregano, rosemary and thyme too,
some Italian five-spice - but the fennel seeds!
the fennel seeds! after i learned to cook i see
ready meals are diabetics in disguise,
and restaurant foods as defunct -
what? we're all expressing our capacity to
make choice, apologies if you made the sort of
choices you now hate... hardly a reason to
complain about my exercise in freedom,
i don't blame you, i'd have chosen differently
if i were you too... but there we go...
i'm cooking Bolognese from scratch because i like
to tickle my sense of smell and the buds of
the palette garden, i look at the sauce and
write fiction: the plot thickens...
                                                     and that's the great
3 minute microwave sequence on the other
side of the spectrum... because we're all so *busy
-
busy bees and that's merely the generation Y
dads getting hormonal treatment from tending to
babies - choices choices choices -
                                                          oddly­ enough
the mediocre work that goes on in those glass
shards - by comparison, the default argument is
pretty obvious: i too would have not invested
in caring for art, or as i once said:
you can't get good art and raise a family -
you can create good art that will support the family,
you'd end up being a great technician,
an artistic engineer - the standard model of bridges /
already in your head - is refining yourself
via plagiarism - you end up plagiarising yourself -
but come one! a quarter of a teaspoon of fennel seeds?
well, i'm not talking cumin seeds...
or maybe it was the turmeric powder that
coloured the onions yellow while frying?
2 tablespoons of garlic - for sure, enough garlic
and we're already talking Dracula -
~5 strips of bacon too -
                                          no, not necessarily involving
carrots and celery - why be boring?
this is me in my furore days in an organic
chemistry class at university - back to the esters
and perfumes, but this is raw, it's analytical
chemistry, it's nothing synthetic -
birds and the bees and some hippy buckles over
a giant butternut squash - which is why i find
people who ably memorise and recite poetry
are the same people who probably write polemics,
and do the peacock verbal dance for a woman
in a restaurant - rather than give her raw grub
of your own calibre - 1 cube of beef stock
dissolved in water - simmering for about 40 minutes,
tomatoes chopped - obviously tomato puree -
500 grams of mince beef -
                                                ever think that poetry
could reinvent journalism and also the way of
writing recipes? FENNEL SEEDS! that's what goes
in first, you roast them in chilli infused olive oil -
let them sizzle for a bit - and yes,
you pour some oil into salted water where
you'll be boiling the spaghetti - the oil means the
spaghetti won't stick together, plus pouring
oil into a saucepan of boiling water is the other
famous pastime of chemists... the former?
watch paint dry. i'm pretty ****** sure i missed something,
like mama Italia missed something to keep
the recipe a secret - well... there's Parmesan cheese
to garnish and fresh basil -
                                                and if i were raising a family,
i wouldn't be listening to the dead skeleton's album
dead magick... oh sure, the reward would be:
i'd have a little crowd at my funeral, some gibberish
about how many people knew me so well... but really
didn't... the whole street profession...
                i never got the idea of solitude and how it
might be sad from the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby song -
don't know never became an impressionable counter -
oh yeah, Darwinism helped! it helped a lot
in creating a world view, a world view that said:
don't touch this ****... leave them to it:
these people are more influenced by opinion columns
of newspapers than philosophy books -
in England, where, i dare say, the daily telegraph
is actually respectable, as is the guardian -
and the central of the two opposites? tickling
tabloid, i call the times posh tabloid, because it is
a posh tabloid: i like the way fame
desired for sales becomes toilet paper
the next day... or the newspaper on the street
that gets the footprint on the plastic surgery escapades...
love it! mm, yes darling! lovin' it!
Mateuš Conrad May 2016
much of the time Nietzsche was wrong,
in that claiming systematisation in philosophy
is a form of dishonesty,
perhaps, but for people having to wake up
to an alarm clock at 7 a.m. for several years
there's hardly any dishonesty to think about,
no long lost dream...
what bothers me is the supreme (apologies
for the adjective) usage of maxims in
the English speaking world - they're everywhere,
it's almost parallel processing of the maxim
and an advert snail (slogan), Achilles did
indeed lose in Zeno's paradox (fair enough
it was a tortoise and not a snail... but i
did mention slogan)...
English society hardly reads, hence it stresses
maxims, extracted from texts like it stresses
advert slogans... plenty of soul-mates about...
it doesn't read, hence it pressure to pretend it reads
by the process of regurgitation...
but it doesn't regurgitate what's necessary:
a unique interpretation, heretical, it just regurgitates
****, maxims... i find great dishonesty in the maxim,
it's a flimsy truth that attracts no bothersome
experience, observationally speaking... it's true,
but it's hardly experienced... that's the greater dishonesty
Nietzsche claimed paired-against systematisation;
any number of maxims can disorientate a man,
systematisation places him in a cohort,
in that great summer of 1961... re (i.e. repeat)...
in that great summer of 2005... re (  "        "     )...
English society doesn't read because it's saturated by
the virus of advertisement... the iconoclasm of
fonts, the swirly and curly coca cola insignia...
the proof that it doesn't read is the French work ethic...
and the fact that it's too eager to regurgitate maxims...
it's basically stating a philosophical bulimia,
although a bulimia of having eaten an anorexic's
daily allowance of a malteser and a lettuce leaf,
puking out more acidic saliva than the content of
what the oesophagus just constricted down like
a boa into the lake of Hades know as λιμνη ασιδωρ;
grapes of wrath? more like sour grapes, or simply
gooseberries. honest, they don't read, they just
maximise what's intended when it isn't intended,
they have no narrative, and if they do, they narrate
with images like some obscure rekindling of
Egyptology from the Suez clan of those ******* Africans
who built graves so high that it took the Eiffel tower to obscure
them. so no, Nietzsche was wrong about systematisation
being dishonest... what is dishonest is his excessive
maximisation, overly utilising maxims, truths that
very few will experience given the σ paradox
in practical saying: no plumber can or will experience
**** or skydiving, horse riding, **** ***...
i.e. the totality of all possible experiences... hence the
by-product of the σ paradox is the observer,
who utters many truths but experiences only a fraction,
a dividing summation, as in Nietzsche's case,
a descent into madness - σ of course refers to the mathematical
understanding of anti-phonetic encoding: sum of, total.
‘You’ll make it worse’

she said.  But now her eyes
were fixed to Matt Damon’s ****,
hands full of Malteser mess.

My chubby digits do my walking
a finger-tip rub round the rim
takes the itch away.

I must have got bitten round her mate
Skanky Tina’s.  More hoover – less cat.
X     STA    CY

Now I’ve caught the edge.
pull back the scab and
in the popcorn bag.

Blood.  Oh my God, blood.
It starts to well, then trickle
down my leg toward the sofa.

If   I   can     balance      right
kitchen towel   just    too     far
wait, the pizza plate.  Perfect.

Tissue soaked in tomato grease
fits the bill just right.
‘What the Hell are you up to?’
Did I ever tell you about the time I nearly died? I was young, at that age where all my memories blend into one entity, never knowing where one memory ends and another begins. I was in the living room watching cartoons, eating Maltesers. I inhaled one by accident and it stuck in my throat. A perfect time-pausing fear overcame me and I sat frozen in place. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. I just sat there, terrified to move. I don’t know how long I sat there for before running into the hallway, thirty seconds maybe, up to a minute, but it felt like a lifetime.

My mum was in the kitchen with her back to me. I couldn’t scream so I just stood there, waving my arms. She never turned around. So I stamped my feet, jumped up and down, then she turned, assuming I was messing about and trying to annoy her. I think she was about to shout at me but she saw the blue of my lips and ran over, turned me around and started trying to dislodge the sweet.

Then the fear left me, replaced instead by this creeping darkness coming in from the corners of my vision. To this day I still can’t quite describe it adequately, but I will try. The darkness had a form, not like a shadow, but 3-dimensionality. It came from behind my then started to cover the carpet beneath my feet then creep up the walls and down the hallway. I was not afraid of it. It was so warm, so inviting, like silk wrapped around your shoulders, the velvety hug of a soulmate after you’ve suffered a devastating loss. The darkness drew me in when I had no fight left in me. I was ready.

The Malteser flew out of my mouth and bounced down the hallway. The darkness fled immediately, the fear rushing back in and I ran to the toilet and threw up, crying like I’d lost everything. I’ve heard people say that depression feels like you’ve lost someone, then realising it is yourself. That feels about right, I think. I still think of that darkness now and again, when the nights are cold and I’m by myself. I think of all the people terrified of dying, but they don’t know. You are embraced by the universe, as if time itself will mourn your passing. It feels good.
I am living with myself
My past as a loving father
And my present
As a loving woman, and father
Of my beautiful daughter
Today
On Father's Day
I received two cards from her
Both said Happy Fathers Day
But one had the Transgender flag
Covering the front of it
The gift of Malteser Truffles
Were also very welcome!
And i was kind of grateful
That they were not pink
Some traditions do need to be maintained😅
The significance
Of the transgender card
Is the inclusivity of it
Not just for me, but also my daughter
That she can now easily buy a card
For a trans parent
Without it having to be a major issue
I'm aware how lucky i am
And that there are younger people out there
That would love to get a card of this ilk
from their parents, birthday, xmas....
An open hearted gift of love
Breaks down many a barrier
saw a blue/white/pink pigeon
it landed on my balcony
i made no assumptions as to it's gender
it then took wing
and flew away

by Jemia post op transwoman, and father

— The End —