corn story

Have you ever read Generation A? It’s this book by Douglas Coupland. He did Generation X, Microserfs — any of those books that you read after pomo becomes a part of your lexicon and before you pretend not to know it again. That’s assuming you never got into Bukowski. If you have, you can always get out.

Anyway, there’s this passage about the role of corn in modern life. Generation A is basically a story about millenials/Generation Y. It’s sort of about storytelling? But even though I lent the book to my English teacher for months, he only read the first chapter about corn. In hushed tones, he would revel in the phrase “bloated, footlong, buttery carb dildo.” In school.

He was a cool guy. But even at that time, I was like, “is this your first time reading something unassigned?” He put sticky note flags through the first chapter. There was no test.

Though, he probably didn’t have enough free time to get much non-canon reading it. But he was a big edgelord. Totally sympathetic, understanding, and progressive, but very edgy, just naturally. He wrote this poem about cutting into a peach that’s just classic. The reveal is that it’s about a peach. The cutting starts immediately. We watched Platoon in class.

This one time he tried to take a picture of my puke. The class stopped him, and I was disappointed in their behavior. The class’.

I ate shepherd's pie the day before with Ah-So sauce, which I only just discovered is a New England thing. It’s savory, funky, but the first two ingredients are high fructose corn syrup and corn syrup. Very sweet. Oh, and it’s bright pink.

That’s what made the ralphing special. It was a beautiful ruby-red all throughout: everything was drained of its color, then blushed with sauce. But each element was distinct, too: a mashed potato grain, a gravel of ground beef, and pale-pink corn kernels, streaked white as if marbled. Beautifully undigested, as if each piece became more like corn communally. I wish I had the picture.

That’s my corn story.