Jesus Christ, do I even have a column anymore? It's been, like, three fucking weeks since my shit has been in the paper on account of my column being every other week, combinated with another one of these fucking "special issue" issues where my fucking column doesn't even fucking run. Oh, yeah, right, every paper my column doesn't run is a special issue, har de-har-har, ha.

I don't even remember what I woulda wanted to write in the column if I woulda wrote it when it was supposed to be writ, but here's what's going on now, man, and it's big, seriously, because I am talking about corn. Corn! I made that last sentence a one-word, "all-object" sentence, if you will, to underscore the importance of Corn, OK? Corn!

Now look, I have discussed Corn before, mostly because I enjoy and depend upon the Miracle of Corn in almost all of its forms and presentations, like Wise Cheez Doodles® that are made outta Corn, Corn flakes for breakfast (or lunch and dinner and a midnight snack), Corn chowder, Corn bread, Corn on the cob, Corn that is popped, Corn chips the tortilla kind, Corn chips the Fritos kind, Frito pie, canned Corn, frozen Corn, Corn dog, etc., and I have freely admitted in the past to my obeisance/semiregular thankful worship of/at/to Centeotl, the Aztec spirit of corn, with equal love thrown up there for goddess of Corn Xilonen, aka Chicomecoatl, just to keep it fair, right? Basically, pre-Columbian and Mesoamerican-wise, if you represent Corn, I salute you.

Meanwhile, there's this whole other Dark Side of the Corn, like with all this Experimental Corn where it is bioengineered into something that is not really Corn for humans, and you (if you are human) could be allergic to it, and more importantly, it ended up in Taco Bell grocery packages of taco shells for when you wanna play the home version of Taco Bells, and when you lay your genetically modifying, bioengineering hands on my Taco Bell supply, I get concerned, OK? And don't get me started on how there's no fucking honeybees, man. It's the goddamn Experimental Corn, seriously. Corn is Big Business, man. There's this Archer Daniels Midland Co. that's always advertising on the Sunday morning teevee news shows about alla wonderful things you can make outta Corn, like ethanol to help us (as in U.S.) continue to burn gasoline before it all runs out and these guys, in the Name of Corn, they got their hooks into us, as in U.S., as in John and Jane Taxpayer, because of all these government subsidies for Corn and Corn sweeteners, which are not things for sweetening Corn, but sweeteners made outta Corn, and that totally fucks up my Coca-Cola and my Mountain Dew, because it's cheaper for these soda popperies to use el cheapo High Fructose Corn Syrup instead cane sugar, and it doesn't taste as good in my effing soda pop, see?

Look, man, I'm not hating on doing stuff that's good for the environment, OK? I went to a music festival the other day and they had $8 beers served in cups that had made from corn printed on 'em, and they are totally "green," apparently, because they look like a regular plastic cup (yeah, the beers were eight fucking dollars), but you can put the cup in a compost heap and it will degrade, all biolike, in a matter of months, and then you can put that stuff on your garden as mulch or whatever. And I would totally drive a car that ran on french fries or french-fry grease, but look, the demand for this ethanol shit to water down the gas or maybe to eventually replace gas is gonna cause a goddamn tequila shortage, because of My Friend Corn.

All the guys who are growing tequila in Mexico (which is where tequila comes from) are gonna burn off or cut down their agave, which is actually and more specifically what you grow when you want to enjoy some complex and flavorful and challenging tequila. These farmers are gonna get more money to grow Corn, for the ethanol and the high fructose corn syrup and the made from corn cups because it takes like six years to get a tequila plant to grow and, I dunno, probably a coupla months to get some corns going, eh?

You know what? Never mind. Enjoy your ethanol and high fuckshit corn syrups. I'm gonna start a tequila farm, grow me some magueys or whatever I can squeeze some tequila juice out of, and in six years, you can drink some of it outta one of those Corn cups. For $20. ¡Salud!

Pulque fiction