Words For My Enjoyment

If you’ve read my book The Lost Blogs, you’ve probably read the Jim Jones entry in there.

Jim Jones, for those just joining us, was a cult leader who convinced hundreds of his followers to drink poison-laced fruit punch, thereby instigating one of history’s biggest mass suicides and landing his name and actions in the history books for all time to reflect upon.

So if he could get hundreds to drink homemade fruit punch, then why is it that nobody wants any of my free cheesecake?

First and foremost, let me give you a little history on my cheesecake-making story. About a week ago, I decided I wanted to make a cheesecake, so I looked in some cookbooks and determined that in order to make cheesecake I would need a slew of ingredients which included (but were not limited to): cheese, cake-stuff, a crust of some kind, a bunch of eggs and some sugar. Simple enough, right?

Little do the books tell you, but when they say “mix” they don’t just mean “use a fork to squash everything together.” And when they say “mix a block of cream cheese” with the ingredients, they don’t mean “use a fork to mix a block of cream cheese in with the ingredients.”

A cooked cheesecake, mixed by a fork, surprisingly has lumps.

That being said, my cheesecake turned out fine on the outside. It looked perfect. On the inside it might have had some lumps and what not, but people consume in this world because of how things look on the outside, not what it looks like on the inside. And yet, at every turn, to each person I offered a free piece of cheesecake: I was flatly turned down.

Which is total gender racism, or gendeesecakerism.

If I had been a woman holding a cheesecake, walking around offering free pieces to people, how much do you want to bet that everyone would have gladly grabbed a piece from me? But since I’m a man, and since it’s rare to see a man walking around trying to give away free pieces of cheesecake, people’s minds just focus in on the worst. They worry about things like, “is he trying to poison me?”, “there must be something wrong with that cheesecake” and “nobody gives away free ANYTHING anymore.”

And yet there I was, trying to share my love of mashing blocks of cream cheese into a mix of other ingredients, with the rest of the world.

And still — nobody wants any free cheesecake.

It’s that whole fear of the homemade, I think. And maybe that’s why I won’t hold all the feet of these cheesecake-denying fools to the fire. Because if you were to come up to me and offer me a free cooked pastry or baked item of some kind… Unless you were a close family member, I would most likely have to say no. (Or I’d accept it, take a bite, chew while you were watching, then spit it out onto the ground, instead.)

Which I guess makes sense in regards to you not wanting any free cheesecake.

Here’s a list of food items you could prepare that I would actually accept, actually ingest and actually not worry about it:

• Fruit (washing it, then handing it to me)
• Cheese (from a package, you’d remove to wrapping)
• Chips
• Beef Jerky (which can survive a nuclear holocaust)
• Brownies (don’t ask me why, except no one can screw up brownies)

Here’s a list of food items you could prepare that I would NEVER, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCE, ever ingest:

• Baked goods
• Meat
• Chicken Cordon Bleu
• Linguini in Clam Sauce
• Beef Carpaccio
• Really Creamy Tuna Salad Warmed By The Sun
• [Insert Your Favorite Item Here]

If you won’t eat my cheesecake, then I’m going to stick to my guns on this.