Background Knowledge
For the past few days, my parents have been watching a TV show where a group of British people try to survive on a tropical island. The show is meant to be adventure-entertainment, where the viewer sympathises with the struggles of the contestants in harsh conditions.
My parents have been spending the whole time laughing at how dumb white people are for not understanding everything from saltwater to coconut trees. I mean, what kind of idiot doesn’t know common sense things, like the fact that plucking an entire bunch of bananas will prevent the tree from bearing again, or that the smell of citronella oils wards off mosquitoes? The kind of idiots who didn’t live their whole lives on tropical islands in the Caribbean, it seems. Those poor, summer children.
But what else can we do but laugh? The harvest cycles of a dozen tropical fruit trees are the kind of basic knowledge you’d expect anyone with a brain to pick up. Everyone knows it.
****
During my time in the Bay, I learned that many Americans have a strange device called a “garbage disposal” in their kitchens. I never learned how they worked or where they went, because I prefer to avoid dark magic where possible.
But, the first time I heard someone turn one on, I thought I was going to die.
I’m from the UK and garbage disposals are terrifying. It took me years to learn that it’s actually okay to put your hand in one when it’s not on. I thought it was full of, like, blender blades or something.
Wait, wut? It’s not? You mean it really /is/ made from the pure essence of devastation and destruction, just like I always suspected?
Please properly secure rotating machinery before sticking your hand into it, such as by opening its breaker, rather than just at the switch, where practical.
Clearly its function is to eat hands, since its supposed use is just as easily served by just disposing of garbage in the garbage bin.
Since moving from the UK, I’ve always assumed the hand-eating was some regular sacrifice to the satanism that underlies most American cultural practices – though I guess it could also be some sort of in-house Gom jabber pain box.
Also, don’t drop forks into it.
Part of it is that America went from backwater rural farmers to world-bestriding home-appliance suburbanites in one generation, and a lot of farm types had distinguished between rubbish - waste from processed goods to be buried or burned - and scraps - organic waste to be fed to hogs or other barnyard animals, what we might consider “compostables” today.
Garbage disposals stepped in for hogs in consuming the scraps (and turning them into a sewage slurry, mechanically digested shit) that felt wrong to throw in the trash, became a sign of *properly* evolving from hillbilly to bourgeois
Like don’t put too much weight on that, but it was a thing.
Altar, side benches, and Tauroctomy
Mithras and Sol
Tauroctony
