I think my being poor is the result of gluten sensitivity. ‘Cause it couldn’t be the Rooneys.

Many so-called people, perhaps even

you, seem stuck on the extremely random idea that the reason I have no money is that I don’t have a job.

This is the kind of low-life, white trash, neo-liberal cant I’m forced to deal with these days.

The mouth-breathers who spout this kind of nonsense, when not being Heimlich’d after inhaling Cracker-Jack toys or having spittle wiped off their chins by a member of the Victorian Order of Nurses, are so hyper-retarded that, come election time in the fifty-third state, they’ll be holding hands and scampering down the oil-slicked beaches, dodging the spire of the CN Tower, and do-si-do-ing around the tar-dipped walrus carcasses—all the while illuminated by the occasional incendiary pelican or flaming gannet—before swanning into the pale-skinned-and-rich-people-only polling station to register their TrumpVote® for the fifth time.

gluten free
This is the face of gluten-sensitivity-based poverty.  Not pretty!

And there He’ll be, all monkey glands and Teflon sinews, hand on His mechanical Frankenstein heart, facing all the wrong directions and warbling “Up, up and away in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon”, which He will have announced via Twitter as the new ‘Murican national anthem.

And who would notice?   Exactly.

Anyway.  Being poor is something that just befell me, swooshing down like the petrified trunk of a giant sequoia released from its crane to pound my cranium to blini-like thinness. My poverty is only too obviously the result of a sensitivity to gluten. Or gender dysphoria.

I’d have included PTSD, before all those spots were taken by millennials who’d just discovered the existence of another person.

I haven’t been eating my acai berries all that regularly either, mainly because I have no idea how to pronounce them, which is why I kind of preferred pomegranate week. But really, what could be a more likely culprit than gluten. Whatever gluten is!

Mostly we don’t know, but are ecstatic to have something, anything, around whose doorway we can trail the withered vine of our failings, psychological, physical and even moral. (Whatever moral is!)  If we had known about gluten at the dawn of civilization, what feats might we have achieved, what disasters averted!

Imagine: If Genghis Khan and Alexander and General MacArthur and a few of the testier popes, and maybe their wives and kids, or even Charles Manson, could have chilled out, dude, on some kasha, maybe, or hungry-man portions of teff pudding served in elephant-tusk bowls, I sense that history would be different—possibly with a few million more people around, and none of them screaming.

But, alas.  From village oven to Wonderbread factory, slathered with yak butter or smeared with Nutella—which, like Heinz Ketchup, has a shelf-life apparently designed to survive interplanetary travel—we’ve stuffed our maws with the staff of life only now to discover, too late, that we’ve been falling, not flying.

And I think what most of us regret, considering all our gluten-dogged efforts have been futile on this Airbus to Doom, is setting our alarm clocks earlier so we could get up and “change the world” or even just “be more productive.”  That’s certainly two hours I’ll never get back!

Anyway.  So here I am, trapped in this severely gluten-sensitive poverty cycle—and you’re damn right I’m wanting just a wee bit of sympathy—a cycle which gives me WAAAAY too much time to think about if I’m the right gender, though I must admit I do keep asking myself: the right gender for what?

And the bloating! Oi ve voy! My distended belly has to be seen to be believed, unless it’s not actually coeliac disease at all, but phantom pregnancy.

Whoa! Gender dysphoria suddenly at peak levels!

With the “no-job” myth debunked, I find my brain cells pumped and the veins in my temples throbbing fit to bust as I tackle other, more mysterious problems, like: Who are these vaguely familiar people in my house?  They keep saying “roomie”, though for a while I thought they were saying “Rooney” and was faint with hope that one of them would maybe sing the descant part to “That’s Entertainment!”

On that strictly empirical basis, then: A roomie is the person who barges in, eats all your food and then disappears, leaving you with a pile of dirty dishes, high blood pressure, sand on the bathroom floor, broken glass in the hallway, and an eviction hearing, ’cause they hope you’ll forget about the rent while re-applying your BandAid.

Roomie is qualitatively different from fake-friend, cause a fake-friend slips through the doorway but never barges in, and never leaves; a fake-friend will forget to give you a birthday present and never just “give you the money instead”.

Like a church roof that shines bright copper once its oxidised patina of green is stripped away, I can occasionally break through my thin coating of despair with a gleaming ray of hope. Is amnesia all it takes?

Then I would encourage both of you, roomie and fake-friend, to work yourselves up to forgetting where I live, and after even a single day of blessed silence and solitude, I and the black-suited minions at the Assisted Suicide Council will be happy to send you a medal.

Expect to pay C.O.D.

~

2 thoughts on “I think my being poor is the result of gluten sensitivity. ‘Cause it couldn’t be the Rooneys.

  1. 107 words in one sentence. Nevertheless it just cascades off one’s tongue like a fresh mountain stream.

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