I as corporate captive pursue design and synthesis of catalytic hyperlethal ecdysteroid mimics. I ship 1100 miles north to the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. (Working on an island tightly circumscribes thermonuclear cauterization scenarios.) Corporate patriarchs freed me from orotund concerns of habitation and ingestion by arranging for a dorm room, and meals at the UVic Commons. I survived student food service at Michigan State University, didn't I? (I was young.)
So appalling is UVic food (Cajun stir fry tofu) that when religious rabble advertised free dinner - but ya gotta stay for the lecture - I went. It was an extremist cult preying upon catastrophically compromised minds and shattered metabolisms of undergraduates toward Fall semester's end. They were the most arrogant and bizarre berserkers God could dish up purportedly starting some 5800 years ago.
They were the local Reformed Chosen People singing song of songs about neurosis, ablated foreskins, and potato pancakes (latkes) to the masses. How lucky "we" are that Abraham didn't slip his obsidian blade on the down stroke and invent the hemilateral orchidectomy while he whittled his son Isaac's penis in celebration of Yahweh's unusual sense of humor.
It was within a fit of insanity or kwashiorkor that after a thirty year pause I emigrated toward home cooking and its sanctimonious bilge rot devotions. An average potato latke has more calories than a sack of sugar mashed into a crock of butter. Its flavor echoes deep fat fried cardboard (depending upon how many times the oil was reused and what was pyrolyzed in it). Awesome dollops of sour cream or applesauce modulate the taste as it greasily slips down your gullet. A quick hour grubbing at the feeding trough would secure enough calories to see me through my remaining months.
It was all you could eat, for free! It moved something deep within me, and not just my small intestine. (Consider the Talmudic Jewish dilemma of a free Christmas ham with a $50 purchase at any local supermarket. We buy.) Insidious aspects of my ghastly religious experiences yet remain.
I was raised in the proper manner to which my parents were made victims by their parents, Orthodox (though their operational religious tenets could have been written on a pencil eraser with a Magic Marker). Orthodox Chanukah is a five hour onslaught of religious atrocity, genocide, rape, desecration, murder; how nice Alexander of Macedonia was and what Nazis (mixed metaphors notwithstanding) the Romans were; miracles and other sideshows; the names and addresses of everybody involved, the grades they got in high school, and who their mothers were, especially Antiochus.
The Maccabee brothers feature prominently, and not just because they had noses the size of double-bladed axes and never dated shicksas (sleek blonde Episcopalian females with warm soft skin mostly not coarsely bristling with laser depilation opportunities). The Maccabees killed Romans like a guy at a baseball game holding a beer eats salted peanuts. They pleased their merry blood-sipping god Yahweh.
The Reformed version of this gig ran 3 minutes 12 seconds flat including prayers, candle-lighting, and a retelling of the story in its Reader's Digest condensed atrocity form. The Maccabees weren't even mentioned. Our hosts then unveiled about 140 lbs of potato latkes prepared at the local Community Center (where we cherish grandparents who smoke cigars or have bladder control problems), five gallon tubs of sour cream and apple sauce, 26 dozen donut holes from Tim Horton, and three carrot sticks. I was first in line. The other forty people would share what remained, if anything, plus the carrot sticks.
The masses descended, awed by the gustatory sinfulness of ethnic cooking. Doubled paper plates shone transparent with absorbed grease as hearts and minds deferred to stomachs. The multi-national collection of scrawny undergraduates eating as though their lives depended upon it, a not unrealistic appraisal, included a salutary abundance of blonde females sans moustaches wearing crosses. The hidden agenda burst upon me.
Judaism, this dinner aside, is not a proselytizing religion. I suspect that a certain collection of circumcised good boys have had enough of their mothers directly and in redux. In a Chanukah miracle marvelous to behold they were hunting amenable flaxen-haired bimbettes to share in the writhing of the two-backed beast. Unsuspecting distaff nominees would be inundated with a proffered social life they never knew existed (like discovering boiled tripe at dinner). Perhaps they could snare an incipient doctor at the starting line, for mother, and savor what 10% off could not diminish.
I filled my belly and rediscovered my roots. There awaited me at home an exotic delicious non-Member of the Tribe all my own! Our mothers-in-law fester and burn, peremptory Mosaic monstrosities staring down a faggot hafling god-on-a-stick. The Wicked Witch of the West died for Uncle Al's sins. Do evergreens die for yours?