I Ate iPod Shuffle

Above: Helpful note of caution from Apple.
(Formerly seen at the bottom of the iPod shuffle page.)

No need to make a big kerfuffle.
But yes, I ate my iPod shuffle.

The websites warned me not to, sure.
But sometimes one must ask: Wherefore?

Its sleek design was so damn sweet,
It just looked good enough to eat.

So icy smooth, so creamy white,
It applesauced my appetite.

So bite-sized, so petite and cute,
Made by a company named for fruit,

Its product name based on a veggie
(Prefixed with “i” to make it edgy),

And even the site I bought it from
Said: smaller than a pack of gum.

Such was the power of suggestion
That all signs pointed to: ingestion.

I hungrily sat down to start
My iPod shuffle à la carte.

I shut off my Sad-Cube-Drone Mix,
Impaled the ’Pod on two toothpicks,

And faster than a Mac reboot,
I tossed it back like escargoot!

It really tasted quite fantastic
(Apple’s peeps use primo plastic),

Evincing a refined bouquet
Of silicon and Chardonnay.

(Nutritionally sound, I think,
With RDAs of iron and zinc.)

And plus my tunes were spread — sublime! —
With rich Nutella! Also Lime!

(Unlike the bad taste left in, say,
The mouths of the R.I.A.A.)

In all, quite pleasing on the palate.
If less so to my empty wa-llet.

But soon that meal of small machine
Began to make me feel non-keen.

My stomach first began to churn,
Thus redefining Rip-Mix-Burn;

I then broke out in sweats and chills,
Got #oh-eff-oh around the gills,

And then began hallucinatin’:
I worked in tech support for Satan!

He growled to me in tones satanic
I’d soon be dead of kernel panic,

And then would, for eternity,
Help sinners find the “Any” key.

These visions made me cower and quake,
Like something out of William Blake —

(Tiger! Tiger! burning bright,
Searching hard drives in Spotlight,

What immortal hand or eye
Improved thy fearful G.U.I.?)

— My point is, I was suffering from
Severe ctrl-alt-delirium.

As I began to fade to black
(My best impression of Sad Mac),

I saw within some colored blobs
The floating face of old Steve Jobs!

His voice resounded like a god:
How DARE you dare defile iPod!

You’re not supposed to eat that thing!
Just swallow all the MARKETING!

Yes, choke down all the Day-and-Chiat!
But cough that iPod up, you shiat!

The iPod shuffle’s not a snack!
Don’t make me go get Wozniak!

Then faster than a broadband pipe,
He vanished in a flash of hype.

I came to, after hours of resting,
The iPod shuffle still digesting.

It’s since become a part of me.
That’s why I write so randomly.

(What really makes my girlfriend swoon:
She prods me right, I change my tune!)

I never heeded Steve’s command.
In fact, I think I helped his brand —

The ergonomic single-serve
And random-ordered hot hors d’oeuvre:

Next time you need a snacky-treat,
Think different — iPod app-e-teet.

Anthropomorphize My Quiche

We are at a B&B in Niagara-On-The-Lake. We’ve gotten the bit with the Bed out of the way, we’re now doing the bit with the Breakfast. The dining table is laid out with color-coordinated ranks of fresh fruit, a carafe of pulpy orange juice, somethingberry scones slumbering in a bowl nestled beneath complexly creased linen, thickish slices of upscale cheese the size of business cards fanned out beside a school of strawberries. Coffee’s in a pot on the endtable. We drink from earthenware. Our hosts are industrious in the kitchen; things sizzle and clank. The missus punctuates every sentence to us with an identical faux-conspiratorial twittery cackle; the husband responds to us largely through a series of volcanic lung-rumbles, as if inwardly excavating decade-old phlegm. It is an overcast morning but window-light still brightens the dining area, where the four of us — L and I, and another twentysomething couple staying in one of the other guest rooms — sit hungrily and sleepily at the table, awaiting eats. It is 9:30am on New Year’s Day, and L and I have to admit that we harbor a slight disappointment at not feeling hung over after last night’s celebratorily rapid consumption of a bottle of icewine-dosed Ontario champagne, tossed back by the multiple fluteful in bed whilst hooting and sputtering with tipsy laughter at a B&W Hollywood comedy from ’41. And such an early wake-up today: I awoke alarmless at 7:30am to the intoxicating scent of cooking sausage rising through the floorboards.

The fruit we seem to enjoy most are the grapes. The green ones have a subtle tang of sourness to the taste and possess skins of such resilience that any mid-grape bite yields an errant spurt of juice into one’s chin; the red ones are massive and sweet and almost plum-colored and look black on the inside even though we know their flesh is the same pale color as that of the green ones.

Our first cooked component is a hot sweet soupy clementine-and-grapefruit gunge that tastes surprisingly agreeable but after a few moments of fork-prodding begins to resemble the aftermath of an organ harvest. Secondmost, a plate materializes bearing strips of bacon that look like time-punished 35mm negatives piled beside mini-torpedos of sausage slathered in something translucent and gooey. Third: the missus approaches with a pie platter clutched in potholders and gingerly sets it down on the table. A tall, thick, robust-looking quiche lurks in the tin. The missus chirpily expresses her hope that it came out all right, and she tiptoes backwards from it, eyeing it carefully, then retreats to the kitchen.

Quiche. A quiche. We are about to eat a quiche. A very particular silence descends. We stare at this quiche. Perhaps hoping for it to fall right there in front of our eyes, shuddering like a punctured zeppelin and disintegrating into sludge with a great upward exhalation of fluorocarbons. Free associating, I abruptly recall Eddie Izzard’s succinct characterization of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as having slowly collapsed like a flan in a cupboard. I do not mention this aloud.

Though this is my first B&B experience, I suppose my breakfast expectations had been something more along the lines of, say, phalanxes of gourmet crêpes wildly Pollocked with various strange syrups and sugars, or a teeming heap of hearty pancakes and eggs served atop berms of ham and hash browns, or at most some sort of Byzantine omelette, an artful sheet of silken yolk folded around a continental mélange of obscure and mysterious vegetables julienned past recognition. Quiche, however, I have always been ambivalent about and unappetized by. It is not my thing. The mere word unsettles me; it sounds like a sound, possibly the sound of a fork sinking mushily into it. It sounds: unsavory.

The missus returns with a machetelike utensil and divides the quiche into slices, lifting out immense yellow quivering slabs of material. We four obligingly pass our plates but wear subdued expressions of gustatory trepidation. As L passes me my portion, the tip of the slice splits and falls open, prompting L to exclaim that your quiche has a mouth. My stomach turns over. I take the plate and implore her to please not anthropomorphize my quiche.

I set the plate down. My mouthed quiche gapes helplessly up at me. It trembles on my plate. Steam pours from its little eggy maw. It does not at all look poorly made, and I shall not malign the missus’s cooking skills in the slightest, but, to reiterate, quiche is not my thing. It is, however, all there is in terms of a main breakfast course today. I sigh and dutifully devour it; the taste is nothing too terrible — the standard gloop of eggs, cheeses, creams, crust, and assorted veggie debris — but the soft, quasi-jelloish, firm yet boggy texture of the stuff makes my palate recoil in a dark unease. I pack in the whole slice but do not ask for seconds. Already it is feeling gurglingly heavy in my stomach.

I help myself to more spurty grapes, a few more swallows of coffee and OJ, here and there a fork-tine of honeydew and cantaloupe. The four of us graze and make leisurely small talk, among ourselves as well as with our hosts: jobs, hometowns, holidays, traveling, immigration, natural disasters. The sausages’ moist coating turns out to be some kind of syrup or honey or glaze, sweet and decently-matched with whatever suspicious meaty mass the sausage casings contain. I have no memory of the bacon, though I am certain I ate at least one strip. The juice and coffee vanish. We leave the remaining half of the quiche in the pan to die.

Eleven hours later, back in Buffalo, slaves to our cravings, L and I zip out to the local IHOP and scarf down twin breakfast-for-dinner courses of bad-but-good eggs and bad-but-bad bacon-and-sausage and potatoes and toast, chased by a bottomless nonearthenware mug of hot and toxic joe. Is what I’m talking about.