Forward Thinking
On Monday, I ate some pepperoni. This sort of pepperoni wasn't listed in any of the recalls, but it was made by the brand currently in the news for making a bunch of people sick and killing more than a couple of them in so doing. I can't say for sure that it gave me a case of listeria since no tests of any sort were performed, but I am suspicious because on Saturday morning, first thing upon waking, and without any warning, I immediately crapped my pajamas.1 I quickly moved the proceedings to the standard venue for explosive diarrhea, where the worst of my illness resolved itself over the course of the morning. For the rest of the day and into the evening, I had a slight temperature, along with a headache, nausea, fiery, fiery indigestion, and a vague sense I was continually on the verge of an encore pajama performance.
Later that night, I had a long and detailed dream in which a group of people and I rented a beach house together. I recall there being about seven of us. Nobody that I know from the waking world was in the dream, but I was well acquainted with everyone in the dreamworld. Sure enough, I came down with food poisoning in my dream, too. One by one, the others began to fall ill along with me, and that's when we discovered there was only one bathroom to share between us. As we were trying to figure out how seven people with diarrhea were going to weather the storm with only one toilet, it dawned on us that we had booked live bands to play a party at the house that night — and we had already sold tickets!2 The place was filling up with strangers who were drinking pint after pint of beer, and the timer was ticking down the seconds before all those India Pale Ales would have these people lining up to use our only bathroom as well. We'd have to restrain ourselves. It was a fiasco.
Speaking of fiascos. These companies need to stop thinking quarter-to-quarter in their efforts to appease The Shareholders.3 Nothing will ever be enough for those people.4 I mean, sure, cutting corners and ignoring basic health and sanitization measures probably saved some money, which directly amounted to higher profits over the last few months, but it made a lot of people sick, and as a result, millions of pounds of food had to be recalled, there will be lawsuits, and even worse for The Shareholders, the general public found out how disgusting they run their food processing operation.5 Personally, now that I know, I'm never buying any of their products ever again so long as I happen to live because I can't trust any company's pledge "to do better" after the sort of nastiness worthy of a novel by Sinclair. I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.6 How's that going to look on the quarter-over-quarter report year-over-year? A reputation in ruins.7
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In my defense, I was taken entirely by surprise since, to the best of my recollection, no such thing has ever happened to me before, which makes the episode worth mentioning if you ask me. ↩︎
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My dreams often run quite long and feature extended plots, meaningful dialog, and vivid details. Frankly, I'm only 85% certain the waking world isn't just one of my more elaborate dreams. ↩︎
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Why A Record Number of CEOs Are "Resigning" - How Money Works ↩︎
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The Shareholders can't be sated nor satiated. They can never have enough. Greed drove them mad long ago, and there is no way back from it. They have become preta, hungry ghosts, devouring the world. ↩︎
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Ars Technica: Blood puddles, mold, tainted meat, bugs: You know whose inspections are horrifying? ↩︎
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I can imagine various contrarian friends and family inexplicably eager to play devil's advocate and argue something along the lines of, "None of this is really all that uncommon in meat processing plants...," which is a moot point, should you find yourself making such arguments in defense of coagulating puddles of gore left splattered about the place and mysterious fluids dripping from ceilings onto unsuspecting ham. Suppose we do accept the process of making sausage as necessarily filthy and inhumane. It does not follow that we're obliged to consume the outputs of such an industry, particularly if the sausages it produces make us shit our own pants for breakfast. ↩︎
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Apropos of nothing, here's STAR TREK: ACID PARTY. ↩︎