Tales From The Third Lobe

About the author: Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird. About his bi-weekly column: Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week. View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...

If you leave your food out overnight, the fairies will get into it and steal the goodness out of the food. If you eat what they leave, you can eat and eat and eat—but you'll always be hungry, and you'll eventually waste away and starve to death.

I read these tales as a child, thinking, "Fairy stories. Pretend stuff. Entertainment, not education."

And the occasional moral lesson, preachy and ignorable....

According to the World Health Organization's September 2003 report, eight hundred million people are suffering from malnutrition. That's 13% of the total population of the world. And since things are a bit skewed wealth-wise, that means one in five people in developing countries are underfed.

And for some reason, the people with all the money—and that's us, for right now—are looking to poison the food supply just a little bit by producing a crop that contains less capacity for keeping people alive instead of more....

... so we can shovel another handful of fucking French-fries into our gobs and maybe not get stuck as often between the armrests in the seats at the movie theaters.

Fairy food.

This isn't a new trend. People of wealth and comfort have been dying of their opulence forever. It's Darwinian. If you don't produce anything—if you just sit there and consume—then the world is basically done with you. You're an unnecessary load on the system. That shit clogging your arteries and that lard nailing your ass to your bed are the inevitable forces of nature levering your worthless bulk out into that cold dark night.

Leaving more for the rest of us.

Westerners have felt Mother Nature's foot on our collective butt for more than a hundred years, most notably starting during the snake oil era, where our desperation to climb back up the slope to health and longevity made us buy any damned old thing—to pour down our gullets, to smoke or breathe, to smear on skin, to poke into orifices, to shake, jiggle, or electrocute ourselves with—in order to miraculously restore us to the glowing health of a slightly underfed tanned and muscular working-class peasant.

The earliest era of this was the most amusing. Patent medicines and cures and nutritive products were completely untested, and many early consumers died in quite spectacular and novel ways.

For an interesting view on the phenomena and the era, read T. C. Boyles's The Road to Wellville, spotlighting the early days of Kellogg's Corn Flakes as the New and Perfect Food. Or, if you prefer more glamour and less substance, you can rent the video instead.

Or you can visit your favorite grocery store.

The entire concept of prepackaged foods and concentrated medicines in the form of pills, syrups, and creams came out of this delightful era. It's amazing that we, as a culture, survived it. Are surviving it. After a fashion.

It's symptomatic.

Our science is designed to deconstruct the world, to take it apart and sort the little bits with complete disregard to structure and interactions. We separate flavor from the nourishment to the extent that we can, and we consume them separately.

That's the aim, anyway. The end goal. We require all the flavor we can stand laced with the bare minimum of substance—just enough to keep us alive. Because otherwise we die fat and poisoned and, most wrongly, early. Even though we live twice as long as most.

No wonder the developing countries are afraid of us. In awe of us. No wonder the rest of the world is in a blind panic when they see us coming.

We are the God Damned Fairies, foretold in the tales of poor Irish peasants.

We don't visit. We invade. We conquer. We seduce.

Our daily lives are incomprehensible to the average resident of our planet. Our daily goals, our social interactions, our woes and joys, our sciences and magics, our wisdom and humor, and our labors and entertainments are completely foreign. We are from a whole nother world, somehow attached to their own, yet completely inaccessible except to us and our designated agents and go-betweens.

We steal healthy babies and turn them into glamour-enthralled and soulless consumers, more concerned with sensation than substance. We pull the dirty, yet solid, unspoiled and innocent young men and women away from their normal lives and fascinate them with images and flavors and scents and textures and laughter and music and dancing and toys and magic and sex. Our substanceless substances become their new food, and they eat themselves into starvation. Just like we do.

We are the Gentry. The Fair Folk. The Shining Ones.

Some of us use our magic to help the poor and starving and downtrodden, and those people become demigods and legends and heroes in the outer world. And those fight against the massive unseelieness of our own society in order to get anything positive done.

(Sadly, those people are rarely heroes on our side of the fence... at least with respect to the general public.)

Is that our salvation though? Is it theirs?

[*]

Vidicon has been the buddha, but the pay was lousy.