Take This Bottle

a flash

I want to tell you about the time I tried to give away a bottle of mayonnaise that I didn't want.

The trouble was that I had opened it, and used a little bit. I can't remember whether it was with tuna fish or ham, but I know I made a sandwich with just under a tablespoon of it. It tasted fine. Good, even. But the quality of the mayonnaise wasn't the problem. If it was simply bad, I would have thrown it away. The problem, as it turned out, wasn't the mayonnaise…it was me.

It gave me diarrhoea, fizzy gravy shooting out of me like one of those YouTube videos where they put Mentos in Diet Coke. I knew it was the mayonnaise because I have an established track record with tuna fish and ham, so whichever it was I actually had, I know I'm fine with it under normal circumstances. Ditto the bread.

The cap went back on the bottle and the bottle went back on the shelf. I had just seen a documentary about how we throw away so much stuff that there's now a massive island of garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and I resolved not to add to the problem. Well, obviously whomever ended up with the bottle would most likely throw it away eventually, but it wouldn't be on my karma at least. Yeah, I believe in karma. I'm spiritual that way.

So I waited until the following Tuesday when Jim came over for a drink and a chat. We sat in my kitchen and talked about movies and traveling and women, not necessarily in that order or for proportionate time-scales. Jim is one of those bizarrely healthy people that never seems to get ill or fat - he just ages gracefully while we all rot from the outside in. It's frustrating to be friends with someone like that for a long enough time that you see it happening and compare it to the reflection you shave every morning.

After a couple of cups of coffee and some spirited chit-chat, I asked him if he wanted the bottle of mayonnaise. I didn't really segue into it, I just took it down off the shelf and put it on the table in front of him.

"Do you want this bottle of mayonnaise?" I asked.

"Why would I want that?"

He looked at me with a slightly perturbed expression, as if the very thought that I might ask such a question or offer such an artefact had called into question all his other assumptions about me made over the course of our entire friendship.

"I don't want it," I replied. "I thought I did, but I don't."

Jim used the very tips of his fingers to turn the bottle ever so slightly as if it were an explosive charge. He recoiled.

"You already opened it!"

"I know. I tried some and it gave me diarrhoea."

"Then it's bad. Why would I want it? Why the hell don't you just throw it away?"

For some reason, I became quite defensive about my decisions.

"It's not bad! I didn't want to waste it!"

"But it gave you diarrhoea!"

"It might not give everyone diarrhoea. I just can't eat mayonnaise."

"How do you know?" Jim asked with a wave of his arms. "If you don't try another bottle of mayonnaise, how can you tell if it's any mayonnaise or just this mayonnaise that gave you the shits?"

Jim looked at me with an exasperated expression as if explaining something elementary to a stubborn child.

"That would be the scientific thing to do," he concluded.

And that's how I ended up with a second bottle of mayonnaise, opened and with one tablespoon missing, and another day of explosive diarrhoea.

Science is bullshit.