The Culinary is the Political is the Personal is YOUR FACE!!! OMG, YOUR FACE!!!

Citizens, we are appalled at the state of food today.

It is as if some culinary commissar had issued diktats in favor of bland homogeneous pap. “Food should be colorless and inoffensive,” say the vast herd of restaurateurs. “It should have scent, taste, and texture, all standardized for maximum efficiency of consumption. But it should not taunt the blind nor tempt the innocent with riotous hue, luxurious sheen, or other visual debaucheries more appropriate to the harlot’s bed than the dining table.”

We of the Collective could not agree less. Bring forth a profusion of Day-Glo orange meats and shocking blue grains. Let the dance of spice and savor titillate the eyes as it does the tongue.  No more meek sandwiches and salty crisps forgotten the instant they’re consumed. Declare war on your sleeping senses! Rouse them from torpor with every kind of shock and surprise!

The sensual is the surreal, citizens.

Ascend the Throne, Claim Your Crown, And Declare 2009 “The Year Pork Bellies Had No Future”

Citizens, we cannot begin a newer world until we are done with the old.

This is a world of staid conformist toadery, where lickspittles and Communists of every kind run rampant as though the circus were in town and they’d just been given advances on their allowance.  People seek to dispel their demons with fairy dust concocted by chemists, when the answer stares them in their self-bloodied faces: live well! Live like there’s no yesterday! Live wild and weird and free, like the wind in a dead porcupine’s quills.

We of the Collective have found that opportunity knocks but once before heading down the hall to that guy with the lazy eye and the cookie-crumb-crusted gut. Does anyone want to see that sublime beauty in the arms and on the lips of that slovenly beast? No, of course not. So while there’s still a “Vacancy” sign lit over your grave, get up off the sofa and answer the next time she knocks. Maybe clean the place up a bit – polish the turtles, wax the candles, sharpen the radio. Freshen the pepper in the grinder and grind the good salt for a change.

Carpe that Diem, citizens! You only live once, and you can’t be Sean Connery’s butler. The Hooters Girls aren’t coming to save you from your sloth, and there’s no Chippendales Peace Prize just because you got the high score on “Pac-Man vs. Qbert”. You won’t win the heart of that delicious young man down at the pool by fading into the background behind the wallflowers and discarded Toblerone wrappers.

The future belongs to those who understand and embrace the absurdity of all existence without trying to fondle it. Risk is as illusory as any other certainty: it is a cup of bitter tea that packs on the pounds as fast as pure lard. If you want to run the race, strap on your shoes and step toward the finish line instead of staring down your fellow Wikipedians over the history of “Knight Rider”.

Your destiny is no more than the end of the path you’re walking – there’s no map to mistake for the territory, there’s no prophecy worth more than the quatrains you wrote to impress you tenth-grade girlfriend. Carve the message in every tabletop, tree trunk, and treasure chest you see. Burn these holy words on the inside of your eyelids to flash their hot neon truth at you every instant, waking or sleeping: make your fate.

Make this your year!