UNREMITTING FAILURE

Monday Announcement

There are so many things we all love.  A glorious sunset.  Depraved loin conjoinings.  And, of course,  Toto's Greatest Hits. 

Unfortunately, life is not all fun and games.  And sometimes (like now) life wrenches the earplugs of the iPod playing "Hold the Line" out of your ears and says, "Guess what, Schmuck! It's Monday! Time to go to work!" 

It'll do you no good to complain, "Hey, I was just digging the exquisite professionalism of America's GREATEST BAND, all of whose members were elite LA sessions musicians!"

Because life doesn't care if Toto made the best music ever because Toto was (and this was the genius part) less a band than an exclusive fraternity of crack players with not a single sloppy Carl in the lineup.  It doesn't care that it's this exquisite musicianship that informs every song Toto ever did, including the likes of (in addition to "Hold the Line") "Africa," "Roseanna," and "I Won't Hold You Back."

Nor does life give a fig about your depraved loin conjoinings, which if you had it your way you'd be working 12 hour shifts at the porking factory.  Sex helps make life not suck so bad, which is awkwardly but exactly phrased.  But life doesn't want you rutting it wants you out there earning a buck, which you can't do (unless you're a porn star) with your cock, unless maybe you work in a restaurant and use it to stir the soup.

Well, We Can Now Go About Our X-Mas Bidness

In the knowledge that Thanksgiving is over and the Christmas season has officially begun.  This doesn't apply, of course, to you Jews and Muslims and Druids who don't celebrate Christmas.  You don't have to sweat the goddamn holidays, lucky you, although we hope you know you're going to Hell because you don't believe in a loving Jesus.  Anyway, this weekend the Mrs. and yours truly are going to go out and buy a tree, yeah we know it's early but we're leaving for Germany on the 12th so if we're going to spend some quality tree time we've got to put that baby up fast.   

Us, we like a big ass tree.  None of those Charlie Brown trees for us.  If we see a tree and it couldn't play in the NFL, we don't want it. 

We also like to decorate it with lots of blinking colored lights.  Yeah, we know that your basic white lights are "classier", but we don't give a shit.  We want blinking flashing X-Mas tree mayhem, with every color in the color spectrum represented.  We want to blind you.  We want our tree to look like an exploding Mexican whore.

We like that Christmas tree smell that fills the room, making us feel like we're lost in a snowy pine forest and there's no hope of our being rescued before we starve to death or get eaten by grizzly bears.  That's a good smell aside from the panic attack we get just thinking about it. 

And what would Christmas be without ornaments to put on the tree?  We have plenty which we've accumulated over the course of years, decades even.  We have wooden ones and glass ones and metal ones and even a few that are made of wool, imagine that.  We have Santas and rocking horses and angels and snowflakes and stars and moons and gingerbread men and wooden soldiers and a pickle, it looks good enough to eat.  You could eat that pickle ornament except it's made of glass and would probably kill you.

So don't eat the pickle ornament, please.

We could talk about Christmas all day long.  We could play Bob Dylan's new Christmas album real loud and make you a cup of eggnog and even slip some whisky in there, if that's your preference.  Because Christmas is coming and sure it's just a glorified exploitation of capitalistic consumeristic madness, it's awful really, shop til you drop, but that said there's some honest emotion to be felt if you just can get yourself into the Christmas spirit, meth helps. 

Your Ephemeral Permanence

Rankles.  It drives us nuts, the way you put your hands up before we can say, "Put your hands up!"  Dawn at the drive-in theater, all the popcorn has gone home, and now you say, "Want to see what's under my cowboy boots?"  Now you put your ear to the speaker and whisper, "1967 come home"?  After the screen has dried its tears and resolved never to love again, after the cars have all been sold for scrap, after all the young loves have grown old and full of regret, now we get to watch you turn yourself into smoke, your thighs like a Mexican honeymoon full of misunderstandings and death-defying sex, your mouth like an ambulance ride, your breasts better than any 70 Porter Wagoner songs, including the ones on 1969's Me and My Boys, which it isn't true the boys in question are Porter's testicles.  Oh that's really fine, like we couldn't have gotten mugged without your help, like you're the one and only person we've ever asked to kiss us and set us on fire at the same time, in your cheerleader's uniform with the fine blond hairs on your arms and the way you smile like a four-car accident, or a distant sun, or a Motown artist who died beautifully a long time ago, in a plane crash in the sea. 

Poem

Of course you have a family.

A mother and a father.

Unless you're an orphan.

Then you just plain fucked up.

Here comes an orphan now. 

Ye Gods, look at the hideous hat she's wearing!

No wonder her parents died!

Our Researches Into Life Thus Far

Have revealed the following:

• Shit, we don't care what people say about it being inanimate, can follow you around.
• All things being equal, it would be better never to have been born.  However, we reconsider this conclusion every time we eat a chili dog.
• Anybody who says "Death, where is thy sting?" has never stepped on death in their bare feet.
• It is better to look on the bright side of things, i.e., you're better off an idiot.
• Nobody ever succeeds in communicating their inner truth to anybody else, or in other words, we all die complete strangers to one another.  Nobody has the faintest idea what you've gone through in your life.  You're like a hockey game to an effete Proust scholar.  He looks at you, and sees not a game of violent beauty, but a bunch of guys who can remove their teeth at will.
• Underwear is overrated.
• Meat is murder.  Meat tastes so good.  Ergo, murder is delicious. 

The Drowned Lake

A relative came to identify the drowned lake. 

The guy in the morgue pulled back the sheet. 

"That's him.  Where did you find him?"

"In the ocean."

Silence.

"He never was a good swimmer."

"Most lakes aren't."

"It's true.  Just because you're a lake, that doesn't mean you have the faintest clue about basic water safety."

"It's a statistical fact that it's your large bodies of water that are at greatest risk of drowning."

"I hear you.  Ponds never drown.  Have you ever heard of a drowned pond?"

"No.  Because they take precautions.  They wear those inflatable sleevelets. They don't wander too far from shore.  They wait thirty minutes after eating before they get back in the water."

"Oh well.  Look at those bathing trunks.  He must have been a real spectacle."

"Lakes.  They have the worst taste in beachwear.  He left a cutoff Skynyrd t-shirt up on the beach. Good thing he wasn't wearing that."

"Amen to that.  Well, can I take him home?" 

"Sure.  You bring a bucket?"

The Miracle Worker

The other day we went to see our shrink because we were in crisis.  We told her we feared we were going mad.  We sat down, a book fell out of our pocket.  She said, "What are you reading?"  We replied, "Strindberg." 

She said, "No wonder."

Turns out we have one of those shrinks who'd prefer we read affirmational literature. If she had it her way, we'd have our nose sunk in The Little Prince.  She doesn't understand that we require our diet of unedifying literature.  A regimen of healthy-minded books would scuttle our spirit and threaten the very underpinnings of our psyche.  It's our unremitting pessimism that keep us going. 

That said, we're thinking we should try to read something positive.  Some Thoreau, perhaps.  He hung around a pond doing nothing except communing with woodchucks and in his mind the great outdoors were a vast and wonderful church.  What a schmuck.  Scratch him off the list.

Our whole philosophy of life is contained in Samuel Beckett's "I can't go on.  I'll go on."  Because, seriously, we can't go on.  Every day we get up and we can't go on.  Life is just too horrible.  We look around us and we see nothing but failure and vulgarity and despair.  Yet somehow we go on.  It's simply impossible but we do it.  We're a miracle worker. 

And that's positive.  Living for us is a physical impossibility yet here we are.  Breathing, albeit painfully and with serious reservations.  We realize that every breath we take makes us a sucker.  But we continue to go along with the joke.  We're the butt of the joke but we're happy to laugh along with the joke.  Even though the joke isn't funny.

Today we got up and it was the first time in a week that we didn't immediately think we should be in a mental hospital.  For us that's cause for a celebration.  If we weren't a reformed drunk we'd buy a case of champagne and get shitfaced.  We can't do that, but last night in our dreams we got drunk and wandered the vast grounds of an outdoor beer garden, beer in hand.  It was great.  We were shitfaced and the sun was coming up and we planned on getting even more shitfaced in the new and glorious dawn. 

We had rivers of booze in front of us, and then goddamn it, we woke up.

We Hope Everyone Had a Nice Thanksgiving

Excepting of course those of you who don't celebrate Thanksgiving, being foreign commies.  What's wrong with you people, anyway?  Thanksgiving too good for you?  Are you a bunch of radical vegan turkey lovers?  What is it, exactly, that keeps you from joining us?  All you have to do is buy yourself a big tom turkey and roast the fucker! Then add some stuffing and gravy and sit down to a dinner gargantuan enough to sate Caligula!  It's easy!

Speaking of the turkey, whose name is synonymous with mouthwatering slices of juicy white meat, yesterday we were thinking that things would be completely different if he had a less appetizing name.  For instance, say turkeys were called furkeys.  Then no one would want to dine on them.  Furkey sounds disgusting.  It would be the universal consensus of all right-thinking peoples that the furkey is a dirty animal and shouldn't be eaten. 

"Furkey? In my mouth?  Are you nuts?"

"Ugh! I'd rather consume snot-glazed buzzard balls!"

"Or gnaw raw oppossum tail!" 

Late last night a Thanksgiving miracle occurred.  We drove back to Washington from York, Pennsylvania, and finally parked our rental car on the street around the corner from our house at around 10:30.  It was raining and miserable and we were sorry to be back in the world capital of the American Idiotocracy.  We thought nothing would be able to cheer us up.  Just as Mrs. UF climbed out of the driver's seat of the rental car her skirt fell off.  Her eyes got real big and as she looked at her skirt lying on the street she emitted a subsonic squeak or shriek and made that classic 1940's movie move to cover herself with her hands. 

Later she described the laugh that we produced as the most evil sound she'd ever heard.  And she predicted that we would be paid back in spades for that moment of Schadenfreude.  And she was right.  This morning we had to get up and go to work.  She got to stay in bed with the dogs. 

We have to say that yesterday was the nicest Thanksgiving we've had in years.  It's nice to be with your family and realize you actually like the members of your family, every single one of them.  We got lucky in this life in so far as we know plenty of people who wouldn't sit down to eat with their family without a hand grenade.  There are families out there where every member fights for the right to carve the turkey, just so they can gain control of the carving knife. 

The only bad thing about Thanksgiving yesterday is our brother Jeffers wasn't there.  He ate Thanksgiving dinner with his wife's people, who are Polish and Cuban and live in Northeast Philadelphia, where the rowhouses stretch on forever into the bleakness of the car honk traffic circle night. 

He was missed, as were his wife and kids.  It's just not Thanksgiving without a poet at the table.  Especially a poet with a goatee and a heart of beer. 

The other person who wasn't there yesterday was our niece's boyfriend, Shaman.  We like having Shaman around because he's named Shaman, which is a simply wonderful name to have.  Yes, it's disappointing he doesn't wear eagle feathers and have a bone through his nose.  And yes, we're always asking him to do something shamanistic, to demonstrate his powers over the spirit world with a small leather bag full of bat bones or the like.  He just looks embarrassed, and explains for the umpteenth time that his parents were hippies who gave all their kids weird names, like there's a kid out there now with the name X. Tecumseh, go figure.   

You were missed, Shaman.  There was nobody at the table to ward off the dark spirits with a set of special sticks carved from the roots of the mandrake oak, which is a tree we just made up. 

America: We're Permanently at War!

Some nations are never at war.  Other nations are intermittently at war.  What makes America great, and we think everybody will agree, is that America is ALWAYS at war.  We're on a permanent war footing and that's great.  People like us when we're at war.  They like it that we're out there killing and bombing.  Everybody likes a warlike United States.

We've been at war since 2002!  We're still going to be at war in 2022!  It's great!  We're fighting a permanent war on Terror!  We were fighting last week and we'll be fighting next week, you can count on it!

People, and by people we mean people from other countries, come up to us all the time and say things like, "You people (meaning us people in the US) are just going to be at war forever, aren't you?"  To which we respond, "Yeah--ain't it great?"

We must never tire of the cost both human and economic of being constantly at war because being constantly at war is fun.  Liechtenstein should try it.  Monte Carlo should try it too.  Everybody should try it.  Just pick a country (or in our case a couple of countries) and start shocking and awing!

America should be proud of its troops who mindlessly follow orders.  Without them we would never be able to fight without letup for years on end.  They make it happen, as do the politicians who support them and the people who support both the politicians and the soldiers.  Lots of the soldiers have been killed.  They're our fallen heroes!

If we honor them by fighting to keep on fighting, we may well be able to keep on fighting forever! This will keep the armaments makers happy!  The body bag makers too!  We must keep fighting with all our might!  We must never stop fighting!  We must never, ever, give Peace a chance! 

Bison

Where the buffalo roam crime is up 40 percent.  This is because buffalo are an inherently criminal class.  This is something you never hear when people talk about the tragic slaughter of the buffalo, on the Great Plains, where people went around shooting buffalo for sport.  That was terrible, but so is bison crime, now that the bison are back.  The bison made a big comeback and that's good.  Buffalo are as American as Buffalo (the city) and it's good to have them back.  But: you're walking around the Great Plains minding your own business and a buffalo holds you up.  He takes your wallet and your watch and he runs off to join the rest of his stampeding herd making it hard to ID him to the cops.  "Which one was it?"  "I don't know.  He had horns.  And a faint lisp." 

Odd fact: Go to Buffalo and you won't see a single buffalo.  Except in the zoo.  There's a buffalo in the Buffalo Zoo and he'll give you an earful.  "The whole city's named after me and where am I? The honorable namee?  Behind bars.  It's a sick joke.  Thanks for nothing, Buffalo." 

It's ironic, but what are you going to do?

You can't just let buffalo roam around the urban landscape like big horned squirrels.  They would trample lawns, small children and Smart Cars.  They would saunter into coffee shops and monopolize the conversation and demand large lattes for free.  They would run red lights and gather beneath streetlights to drink malt liquor and sing buffalo doo wop.  They would ride taxis and then refuse to pay the fare.

A pigeon is not a buffalo and the pigeon we talked to this morning explained the difference.  He said, "I've got no beef with society.  I'm an urban annoyance, sure.  I get underfoot.  I flutter.  I approach people sitting on park benchs and I look at them expectantly.  But I don't stampede.  We're not stampeders, us pigeons.  It's not part of our upbringing.  Buffalo stampede.  We congregate.  See, there's a congregation forming over there right now.  Excuse me." 

We remember being born

How could we forget?  The doctor kept crying, "Get out here, you little bastard!  Come towards the light, you little prick!  Vacation's over! Now starts the suffering part!"  And words to that effect.  It was very disconcerting.  Frankly, we'd have just as soon stayed in the womb.  But we were being squeezed out, like toothpaste from the tube.  And on top of it the doctor's shouting, "Show yourself, you little fucker!  The world's waiting!  Brand new kidneys to punch!  Get out here so I can slap you!" 

We tried to crawl back up in there, we tried never to be born.  But it's impossible.  The entire universe wants you out of there.  The whole system's designed to flush you out into the open, where they can put the boot in.   

"Welcome to the world!" cried the doctor.  "Where Eisenhower's President and the A-bomb's king, you freshly minted sucker!" 

Mrs. UF took the dog for a haircut yesterday

We got home, there was the dog, no haircut.  We said, "What happened?"  She said, "He fought them off.  All of the dog groomers, everybody they could send at him--he took them."  We're talking a five-pound chihuahua here.  We said, "Didn't they put the muzzle on him?"  She said, "They tried.  He was like a hairy snapping turtle.  He gnashed and writhed.  He was a gnashing, writhing hairy snapping turtle."

We looked at him.  Pride overwhelmed us.  It choked us up to think about how much hate there was in our little five-pound buddy.  He was five pounds of fury.  They tried to take the hair off him, but they failed.  In the end, they had to say forget it.  There was too much rage in that little dog.

We picked him up and hugged him.  His little heart was still beating in jungle combat mode.  He was Rambo, with a tail. 

Mrs. UF said, "Even as we were leaving, he took one last snap at them.  He was furious.  His eyes were wild."

"He was frothing.  Shouting, using human words.  He said he'd be back, to take care of them all.  To exact his revenge.  He said, Welcome to Cape Fear." 

If you want to fuck up your band name

Put "Blues" in front of it.  It's an instant buzzkill, guaranteed to evoke images of harmonica belts and dudes playing "slide" guitar. Of ersatz blues-respecting authenticity as expressed by eight white guys: Carl, "Billy", Ed, Sandy, Dave, Dave, Dave, Jim, and "Windy." 

We should know because we were an original member of Blues Anus.  We were the only band in history that had more harmonica belts than people to wear them.  We practically radiated devout respect for the blues "form," as expressed by such Delta geniosities as Memphis NutraSlim, Blind Lemon Leprosy, and Black Albino Whitey. 

We didn't just play the blues with reverence.  We actually "lived" the blues we played.  We bought a sharecropper's shack and we lived in that sharecropper's shack after we had it airlifted to our suburban neighborhood, where our all white neighbors gave us dirty looks because we were "living" the blues a little too authentically for them, by which we mean we'd let our mule shit on their lawn.

And we all had "old ladies" and drank "ass pockets" of whiskey and bottles of Tokay while sitting on the porch of our sharecropper's shack as the night fell across the tobacco fields, or rather Bob Early's Cape Cod across the street, where Bob was busy scraping mule shit off his driveway. 

While we'd be listening to the great Suburban Sonny, his "Busted Sprinkler Blues."

It's Amazing, the Shit People Eat

Food, they eat food.  They put it in their mouths and they chew it.  Then they swallow it.  Actual food.

We do it too.  We eat food, actual food.  Meats, potatoes, vegetables, Twizzlers, those caramels with the white creamy centers...

Carrots.  We actually eat carrots.  Can you believe that shit?  Carrots.

Last night we ate carrots with red pepper hummus.  And a Hershey's chocolate bar.  And some peanuts.  And some Twizzlers.

You'd have thought we were starving. 

Yesterday we rushed into a restaurant where our friend was eating lunch and we shouted, "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

He said, "I'm eating."

"Yes," we replied, "But look at what you're eating--FOOD!"

That woke him up.  He looked at the food on his plate, then he looked at us, and then he said, "My god, what have I done?"

Food-eating has reached epidemic proportions.  Everyone, it seems, is doing it.  Everyone is eating food.  They're eating it in secret and they're eating it in public and they're eating it in Puerto Rico where the Puerto Ricans, crazy mouths that they are, are eating everything in sight.  Is Puerto Rican food really that good?  Or are they just eating to eat?

Are we all just eating to eat?

Whatever happened to doing the right thing and starving to death? 

The Wrong Side of Norway

There is a right side of Norway and there is a wrong side of Norway and on the wrong side of Norway even the moose have criminal records. 

They walk around with fingerprint ink on their hooves. 

They walk around plotting crimes, that is when they're not visiting their probation officer.

"I have never seen," says the probation officer, "a crooked moose from the wrong side of Norway go straight.  You're dirty, moose, and it's only a matter of time before you're back in hoofcuffs." 

On the wrong side of Norway you have fjords, bars, titty bars, moose bars, pawn shops, antler bars, cheap chinese restaurants, crooked italians, and illegal pachinko parlors.  You have neo-Nazi moose and tattoo parlors and ratty six-kronor a night motels.  You have crime and filth and despair amid scenic nature the likes of which you've only ever seen on postcards. 

In a cheap room in a cheap motel on the wrong side of Norway a moose lies on the bed.  He is waiting for a man looking to sell a gun.  You don't have to tell him that life is not a bake sale.  He has seen the forest and he has seen the city and the only difference between the two is the types of hats men wear upon their heads. 

Everything he needs to know about life he learned by looking at a stuffed moose head with hats hanging on its antlers.  This was in a taproom on the wrong side of Norway.  He played the pinball machine, drank a few beers, smoked.

Down the mean streets.  Down the dirty days. 

A moose walks into a bar.   

Who Was The First Man to be Struck By Lightning?

And live?

What did he tell the others?

After they huntered and gathered around him, and helped him put the fire out in his hair?

We'll bet you he said, "Oh my God, listen up.  I just figured out how to make alcohol." 

Grandma Responds

Jimi Hendrix was a nigger.
Jesus Christ and Grandma, too.

Patti Smith, Rock'n'Roll Nigger

"My dear. Oh my.  Heavens.  I don't know what to say.  Except that Patricia always was a lousy poet."   

Childhood

... and I sank back into time, back to hideous childhood, when life lay before me, strange and frightening, when everything oppressed and constrained me...   August Strindberg

We did not have a sunny childhood either.  Our house was like a petting zoo filled with violent animals.  Everywhere you put your hands, they got bit.  We lived in a dismal and isolated section of Pennsylvania that was economically on a par with soviet Romania.  Social scientists would arrive in white jackets to study our vehement backwardness. 

Our village was situated in a dim ravine lousy with wild dogs.

There were several families in our village that walked on all fours.  They sniffed at the railroad tracks and howled at the trains.  How we would laugh and dance about them in our lederhosen made of birch bark!

Career opportunities were few and far between.  There was a coal mine.  That's where our father worked.  It was backbreaking work, but there was hard liquor available all day long.  The mine entrance was one perpetual whisky exhalation.  The men would go down in the am and come back in the dts.

We studied in that dire pile of bricks known as the village school.  It was backbreaking work, but there was hard liquor available all day long.  You should have heard us sing during music class!  We hit the high notes, our voices angelic and pitched dangerously toward the shitfaced!

It's amazing, looking back on it now, that we ever made it from school to home, and back.  There were so many terrible archery accidents! 

Fortunately there was Protestantism.  The grim tenets of the scourge Luther taught us to hope for nothing and be grateful for our few joys, which were probably temptations of the devil.  In the grey morning we would walk to the accusing church, which stood in a gloomy clearing, its hard bells tolling. 

"Some of you are damned!" the minister would cry, extending towards us the misshapen claw at the end of a withered arm.  "Most of you are damned, actually!  To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that ALL of you are damned!"  

Back at home, Sunday dinner would commence.  Before eating we would pray, pray that one of us might die so there'd be more to go around.  Then we would eat, ravenously, our boiled potatoes.  Father might tell an amusing anecdote.  It might cause us all to cry.  Then mother might accuse father of being an alcoholic, and father might hurl the rump roast out the window. 

Birth Order

We're a firm believer that where you are in the birth order makes all the difference in your life. 

Take us. 

We were born smack in the middle of a flurry of babies (our brother Barry's a year and a half older than us, our sister Lynne's 11 months younger) and what basically happened was, and we think this has played a pivotal role in our existence although others say we're making too much out of it, our mom forgot she gave birth to us.  There was so much happening, so many babies screaming, that she completely forgot our existence.  We were a clerical oversight.  She did not know us, when she saw us, from Adam.  She would say things like, "What is that strange baby doing here?" or "Whose baby is that?" 

As a result, our survival was left entirely up to us.  Fortunately we were quick for a baby (we had lightning reflexes even as a neonate) and deft at stealing food.  We also had a startling ability to scale sheer surfaces.  Otherwise we'd have starved.  We stole apples, and heads of lettuce, and large chunks of cooked meat, and ate them while crouching in a corner.  If anybody approached, we would growl. 

Until the age of three or so we were completely feral.  We learned how to speak, but unfortunately we did so by listening to the dog.  We spoke perfect Chinese pug.  We also learned how to walk by watching the dog, which helped to explain why whenever dad would see us saunter across the living room he would say, "Who shaved the pooch?"

When mom finally came around to the fact that we were her child, she knew she had some making up to do.  But by that time we were already fiercely independent and used to scratching at the door to be let out.  She had to do a lot of yelling before we stopped doing our business on the lawn.

Children are remarkably adaptable creatures, aren't they? 

Diet

Growing up was hard.  People were out to get us.  These people were otherwise known as our family. But we perservered.  We ate whenever we could, and we grew strong.

We had to eat what mom cooked.  And what mom cooked was overcooked.  She would cook a roast beef until it was the consistency of a football.  And woe betide you if you refused to gnaw your share.

That said, our youngest brother, by dint of being the baby in the family, got to eat whatever he wanted.  It was such an outrage.  Especially since all he ever wanted to eat was hamburgers and french fries.

He ate hamburgers and french fries at every meal from the time he was four until he was old enough to vote.  During this lengthy period he ate not a single green thing.  Not a green bean or salad green or even green jello.  He ate hamburgers and french fries with a lot of worchestershire sauce on the hamburger. 

You would think a diet like that would have turned him into a congenital idiot, or conjoined twins even.  But no.  It turned him into a poet.

No wonder we're bitter.  We were forced to eat green stuff and look what happened.  We're not a poet.  We do not have poetic thoughts.  They were killed off by chlorophyll.  Our insides were a jungle of foliage, foliage that strangled poetry in the bud. 

Vegetarians are fine people but they cannot be poets.  Show us a vegetarian poet and we will show you a poet who eats Big Macs under her bed.  Vegetables destroy poetry, and rot your soul. 

We'd be willing to bet that Shakespeare never ate a single green bean.  That the very sight of one would have caused him to recoil in horror.  He ate meat, meat and french fries.  Or as they called french fries in Elizabethan England, merkin twists.