oh yeah! time for a tirade and some poetry!

Hi folks, it's me... WBE (worst blogger ever).

I've been super busy with contracts lately and trying to shovel as much moolah into my RRSPs as I can so that I don't have to pay tons of tax this year.*

Anyway, I'm finally moved to post something after reading one of the most depressing articles ever about genetically-modified onions that won't make you cry. Worst line in the article: "we would like to see them become the household and industry norm within the next decade" (italics mine).

So who's up for an incoherent tirade and some poetry? YOU ARE? Great. I know that's what you come here for and I like to deliver. I've just the thing:

Onions make you cry! Get over it! Can't we let just a few things be uncomfortable? Does everything have to be so boringly easy and perfectly pleasant? We're already destroying the planet with our climate-controlled homes, drive-through bank machines and over-processed over-packaged nutritionally-void so-called food, do we now seriously have to fuck with the onion? How about putting some of that research time and energy into addressing any one of the more pressing concerns, like renewable non-polluting energy, working out some climate change solutions, eliminating human-made carcinogens from our air, water, soil and food chain. Or if you really are interested in genetics, how about getting involved in preserving the DNA of all those fruits and vegetables that are being whittled down to just a handful of varieties, or like, saving whales or something. JUST A THOUGHT, YOU ONION-FUCKING WEINER POOPIES.

I sort of imagine that a few tears and burning eyeballs are the price we pay for its deliciousness, for the depth of flavour it adds to so much of our food. I figure it's a fair price to pay just for the pleasure of smelling it frying in butter.

So as a bit of an antidote, I offer you "Ode to the Onion" by that poet, activist and womanizing genius, Pablo Neruda:

Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency,
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of Aphrodite
duplicating the magnolia,
so did the earth
make you,
onion
clear as a planet
and destined
to shine,
constant constellation,
round rose of water,
upon
the table
of the poor.

You make us cry without hurting us.
I have praised everything that exists,
but to me, onion, you are
more beautiful than a bird
of dazzling feathers,
heavenly globe, platinum goblet,
unmoving dance
of the snowy anemone

and the fragrance of the earth lives
in your crystalline nature.

Thank you for weighing in, Mr. Neruda. I almost feel better.


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*I'm all for the welfare state, don't get me wrong, but setting aside a bit for when I'm a crotchety paddling hiking skiing boozy geriatric is probably a good idea.