Guacamole

It recently occurred to me that there are primarily two ways by which you might die while preparing guacamole. Perhaps there are more, and perhaps even these two are more dependent on my own method of preparation than any practice so common that it might be considered a general danger to the public - a public to which I am always and ever more devoted, but especially to the young, the ignorant, and the just plain clumsy. Defenseless, it should be said, and whether that pregnability might be the result of lousy breeding, bad luck, or even some heinous but mysteriously unrecognized sin is of no concern to me. Let me first state that the addition of paprika as one possible cause of the catastrophe seems to me so ridiculous as to be hardly worth mentioning. The first method – brace yourself – requires a knife. One might just slip; probably not while making the slow and steady, circular slice by first sawing into the dark green and dimpled rind before orbiting the invisible oval within. That particular cut is made so deliberately that any resulting accident would itself really have to be considered deliberate. This is not entirely inconceivable; consider the frustration that must be endured when upon those 355th (the stem*, perhaps, having long since been driven under), 358th, 359th, and 360th degrees (mother … Fucker!), and now also the 361st and 362nd degrees, one discovers that one has not, like Magellan, perfectly completed the divine circumnavigation, but botched it completely. As if the good commander had landed, not in Sanlucar de Barrameda, but some 900 miles north – in, say, the dismally bright and sunny Torquay. You will step ashore where no crowd has gathered. On a blanket, a woman with her back to you hunts inside a basket for provisions; only her child looks up at you, a little confused but otherwise unconcerned. Having completed the beginning of a spiral (but without the patience necessary to turn it into a stunt involving the suspension of this hide among those of several other fruits in some type of Caulder construction), you would then free this lovely black egg from all that verdant placenta by first laying the shiny weapon on the counter, and then gripping each unequal hemisphere – yes, yes, very much like your brain – and plying it open without so much force that either end of the entire fruit is in any way squished. With the empty half lying on the counter, you would then avail yourself of your favorite metaphor one more time in order to set the future entirely free. First, one slow motion: a kind of feigned attempt, or perhaps a wave … down … up … down … up … further up (Adios, muchachos!), and then quickly, certainly, and very forcefully Down. There must be sufficient space, it must be quick, and it certainly should be accurate. But if you were not … if you were instead quite sloppy … hmm … a brilliant ribbon of streaming scarlet goes well with the green, rather like Christmas … one thinks of it as a kind of present, very sloppily wrapped … very sloppy indeed … it might be fatigue, it might be desire … who knows? Nobody really cares anyway … Or so you’d like to think. There is another alternative – not that it really amounts to anything different. They do care, and you know they do; so why would you then give in to the greed that demands such a small amount of the stuff that you would actually put the alpha and omega into your mouth in order to suck, scrape or even wash the abject, clinging remains down your gluttonous throat? It fits your palette perfectly; if only it would stay there. But it doesn’t. You breathe in, once. Once is enough, if it is forceful enough. Call it half a breath. Consider carefully the color of your face: bright red, dark red; purple, probably, and eventually blue, maybe even green.