Category Archives: enigma

Enigma (e-nig’-ma): Obscuring one’s meaning by presenting it within a riddle or by means of metaphors that purposefully challenge the reader or hearer to understand.

This is the most disgusting thing you’ll ever read. It will make you mad. It is a poison scented flower, a chrome plated bumper smooshing pedestrians on the road to salvation. It is a turkey stabbed and sliced and flagrantly gobbled in a dark corner of a white room. It is dentures shattered on the subway station floor, never again the take a bite out of crime or a chocolate chip cookie. It will make you sick. Your life will be changed forever.

This is my story.

It’s about cuisine that should never be eaten. It’s about chewing and swallowing and choking and swallowing, eating what you are. Eating yourself.

The tumult of my trajectory through life is like an earthquake that should’ve afforded me the opportunity to be crushed spiritually and physically. But that didn’t happen. I was in the espionage business. Nobody knew who I “really” was. I was a cipher with a gun. I am a CIA operative in Jo Burg, South Africa. I received my orders in a trashcan at the Nelson Mandela shopping mall, next to the huge statue of him. It was awkward routing around in the trashcan looking for my orders from Washington, right there where people dined outdoors.

Then, the inevitable happened. Two big burly uniformed men asked me what I was doing. I told them I had lost my car keys. They dug around in the trashcan and found my orders. They were innocuous. I was ordered by Washington to enroll in chef school. The uniformed men laughed. One got on his cell phone. After he hung up he said, “I’ve been instructed to take you to the stone cave.”

We took a cab. The stone cave was on the outskirts of Soweto where pigs roam free and life continues to be rough. They threw me into the cave, wished me luck and told me I was going to starve to death. They slammed the door and they both laughed and got in the cab and drove away. I started getting hungry. There was no food in the cave, so I just went with the flow.p, fantasizing about juicy steaks and apple pies.

After about two weeks, I actually started to starve—I was weak. I thought I had started to die, but I did not want to die. I thought “I’m made of meat. I will eat myself.” I rolled up my sleeve and took a bite out of my forearm. I was hard ripping a piece of flesh off my arm. It was warm, and tender, and bloody. It tasted like chicken. I figured both my arms would last a couple of months. I started looking forward to “dinner.” Although it hurt like hell to rip a chunk out of my arm, its flavor was “me, myself, and I.” It was the ultimate self indulgence. It was heavenly.

About one month later some kids found me in the stone cave. The joke was on me. The door had never been locked. I really can’t say how big an idiot I felt like. I’m the only person in the history of the stone cave to fail to discover the door was unlocked.

I went to a hospital and the doctor asked me what happened to my arms. I told him I had been eating myself in a cave. He yelled “Security!” and I was taken to a room with wire mesh walls for observation and medication.

I guess I shouldn’t have eaten myself. I have developed a fondness for my raw forearm meat that has outlasted my sojourn in the stone cave. As soon as I get out of this place I’m going to use a knife to cut strips like bacon. I don’t’t know what I’ll do when my meat’s gone and I’m down to the bone. Maybe I can find somebody to share their forearm meat with me.

Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.

Enigma (e-nig’-ma): Obscuring one’s meaning by presenting it within a riddle or by means of metaphors that purposefully challenge the reader or hearer to understand.

“It’s no mystery to me.” I lied. Lately, everything was a mystery to me. The time had come for the King to lose his horse. The ducks were walking backwards. The glue didn’t stick. The onion made me laugh. My ass was not in pain. The molehill was flattened by a UPS truck that veered off my driveway onto my lawn.

I apologize for putting it all this way: my plate is not full. In fact it is empty and chipped in two places: my bank account and my septic system. My bank account has drained and my septic system won’t. It flooded my basement. When the tide suddenly went out, it left the basement floor littered with mud-colored sheets of paper that had been stuck in the drain along with a big blob of fat.

But that’s not the real problem: Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m driving around in sub-zero weather with my windows stuck down. My daughter’s marrying some guy who makes sewage look like something that might be good to eat as a snack food. He makes my bankruptcy look like I won the Mega Millions lotto.

He whines. He has no ass—he looks like his ass was transplanted to his stomach which sticks like an ant hill with a belly button. His favorite saying is “Whatever man.” How’s that for somebody going nowhere? He wears sweatpants and a hoodie that says “I Shit My Pants” on it.

At least he has a job. He gets paid next to nothing for it. He strings beads for a living. He brags: “Bead stringing enhances my eye-hand coordination and concentration, fostering patience and problem-solving. As I poke the string through a bead, I implement its placement and improve my string handling.” This indicates to me that he has “issues.” I don’t know what they are, but he played ice hockey for four years in college. He was taken off the ice on a stretcher 19 times, and that was just at home games.

But that’s not the worst. He drools when he looks at my daughter. It isn’t a lot of drool—just a tiny line at the left-corner of his mouth. He wipes it away with his sleeve and makes a snoffling sound, like a boar with impure thoughts. My daughter has taken to kissing away the drool and making her own sow-snoffle sound. When this happens, I want to kill them both.

Somehow, I have to drive a wedge between them. This marriage cannot take place. I had to get him on video cheating on my daughter. I looked up M’ Lady Marvelous. I used to use her services when I was an alcoholic philanderer. I set up a motel room with CCTV and hired M’ Lady to pick the boyfriend up at the bar he hangs out at and spend a wild night with him at the surveilled motel.

M’Lady pulled it off—video and all. She said he was the best “bang” she had in her whole life. I started to worry. I sent the video anonymously to my daughter. It was beyond creepy, but I had to get this guy out of her life. She told me about the video and that it made her really mad. She wanted to know why the boyfriend hadn’t invited her along to the motel too. She said she felt betrayed and was calling the wedding off.

I thought I had won a major battle until she brought the next fiancée home. He dresses like a Flamenco dancer and writes poems in praise of General Jorge Rafael Videla. I’ve bought a gun.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.