Truesday: Friesday

You can take a piece of whatever it may be:

- Racist hiring practices.
- Dead hamsters for pillow stuffing.
- Spiced pickles of deliciousness.

And then you fry the living shit out of it. Fry it until it’s unrecognizable. Until no one consuming it has any real way of discerning the quality of your starting kernel from any other possible starting kernel to ever exist. Fish? Chicken? Drywall? What the fuck is this I’m dipping into a plastic cup of mayonnaise mixed with mustard? Oh wait, that’s right. Why would I fucking care what it is? It’s acceptable enough to the tongue buds of my mouth that my brain is self-voodoo-convinced of its nutritious potential!

Yes!

Fuck it.

The meat of the thing can be entirely suspect. Potentially rancid. Perhaps even illegal. But once battered and fried, it becomes a national goddamn pastime. Ding Dongs. Coca Cola. Bay of Pigs. If someone won’t take it straight, then coat it up and burn it to a crisp. The line will form quicker than you can say “bread and circuses!”

There’s good reason why truly valuable things aren’t in need of being fried. Weed. Winning an arm wrestling match against Frank Sinatra’s ghost. Knobb Creek. Gusto felatio. These things need no help; they require no middle-meddling in order for them to be appreciated and sought after. Because they’re brimming with intrinsic value. They totally sell their goddamn selves.

However, bleached slices of overly-dry chicken, okra, those bits of hair/skin/bugs and shit skimmed off the top of any Long John Silver’s fryer, catfish… well, those things do rather poorly on their own, under any natural conditions. But once they’re fried, they become an industry unto themselves.

And in an even stranger turn of intent, some truly decent shit has recently found itself being dumb-fried. Snickers bars. Caramelized apples. Ice cream.

Ice cream? For serious?

It’s as if there’s this great conspiracy out there, the Cornoilluminati or some shit, and they were afraid everyone would somehow pick up on the fact that only really nasty shit was ever fried into our collective fancy. That eventually we would, understandably, equate fried with inedibly foul. So they started frying already-good stuff too, intentionally, just to really confuse anyone trying to find the sense of the heart-bursting caloric disaster we appear to be living in.

The same goes for other wonders of our curiously de-modernizing age.

Why exactly would one find Youtube presidential debates so popular? Or the janky digital shithole of The Myspace (or any other distance-promoting social networking scheme)? Dora Tha Lead-Painted Explora debacle? My guess is because these things have been made accessible. Fried. They’re properly prepared for us to try and ingest. Their kernel is something less comfortable to us (political crap, successfully socially interacting with other pilled-up human beings in real life, caustic toys of monk-wigged children with scewy pet monkeys which are made by similar-looking children who talk in a funny language but who will probably be ruling the world in our lifetime), things that might never be considered by the majority of us if left un-doctored in some way because they’re so… unpalatable.

But if you FRY that shit, it’s awesome! Fry it in cheap theatre! Fry it in blinking html and disastrous diy graphic design! Fry that garbage up in a whirlwind of embittered speculative jingoism and rumors of oppositional suicide! Dear lord, it's sooooo DELICIOUS that way!

Just make sure that the eagerly anticipated arresting array of dipping sauces are readily available.