Monday 16 April 2001

Pic of the day: This picture shows the neighbor's black cat on top of the bird feed. How this relates to the text below is anybody's guess.

Burgers for Africa

Dream alert! Those who hate dreams, skip to the next main section (***). There is no obvious connection between the two.

This morning I had one of those dreams. No, not one of those dreams! Ecch! One of those weird dreams where I was someone else. This happens to me sometimes. Usually I don't even know the person. The reason why I particularly noticed this time was that near the end of the dream, there was an inquiry into my family and the family members of the dream were utterly different from my waking ones.

I was a teenage boy. Together with a young girl I was held hostage by a primitive northern tribe. Their shaman was trying to teach me his craft. In personality the girl reminds me slightly of Amber, a girl I met online, but this girl was white. As was I. We stayed there for days. One day we escaped together, the girl and I, and spent days on the road, running away. We also found a baby which the girl took care of. (I don't know how she got food for it, she had not had any babies herself.) We eventually met a former emissary (preacher) who was now a drunkard. He acted very rude and aggressive and I wanted to kill him and throw his body down the cliffs into the sea, as I was afraid he would force himself on the girl. He acted like the type. But the girl somehow had faith in him, and eventually proved to be right, sort of. We eventually reached civilization, in the form of an outpost owned by a christian organization. There was a telephone and we got contact with our families.

It is utterly strange, is it not, how I seem to be a completely different person in these dreams? This time at least the gender and species were right, but I still woke up feeling that I had dreamt someone else's dream. I think this is a symptom of my highly unusual mental construction. My brain is like other human brains, but it does not think like most other brains. (Well, there's always Drew, but to be like Drew is hardly a sign of normalcy either.)

***

I went to town for dinner, namely at McDonalds. Today was a day off, in Norway it is considered as holy as a Sunday. I have noticed that there are less customers at McDonalds early on Sundays, so it is easier to get served reasonably fast and find a place to sit. I guessed, rightly, that it would be the same today. After days without any meat, I fancied a hamburger. I am not much of a carnivore, but I like to have a small trickle of meat in my diet. Especially now that I've cut down on the milk.

Today's special was McAfrica. I had not tasted that one since the Olympics, so I bought one. It was quite good. And of course the name made me think, as it always does...

The way I heard this legend, it was about Marie Antoinette, the last (?) queen of France. One day the tranquil beauty was disturbed by the sound of angry voices from the mob outside. The queen asked an aide what this was about. "It is the people, your Majesty. They don't have bread." The queen did not see how this could be such a problem: "Let them eat cake!"

This would indeed have been a great idea, if the royal family had sponsored the cakes at least. Cake is nearly ideal in that it packs an incredible amount of energy into each bite. It is hard to find any other way to make so much fat and sugar edible at the same time. For the starving workers, cake would indeed have been an ideal solution. Sadly, Marie Antoinette's sage advice was never followed, and she lost her head, literally, a while later.

The reader may already have guessed where I am going with this. McAfrica. Let them have burgers! I know all of Africa is not the black hole that our press likes to portray. People are not always hopelessly starving and begging for crumbs from the rich white man's table, while the dogs are licking their sores. Still, I have this feeling that there may be sold less McAfrica burgers in Africa than in the West. Which is a shame, really. They probably need them more than we do.

***

Some people think perversities are for the bedroom, but is it not perverse that people in our parts of the world die from eating too much? And is it not perverse when people have to spend lots of money on strange foods in order to become "slim"?

Yes, I know some people are born with obesity genes or something, and some probably are infected by an obesity virus (there certainly exists such a virus among chickens, at least). And I know the feeling when you find that you are all out of chocolate, and search the cupboards to find a small, dry piece of old chocolate ... As I said to myself the other day, "I feel a deep emptiness in the center of my soul that only chocolate can fill". (Actually, chocolate eaters are no fatter than other people, slightly the opposite. But it serves to illustrate that cravings of the flesh are not lightly bounced off.)

Still, something in me cringes at the idea of spending much money to eat less. It just sounds wrong. How will I be able to explain it when I meet those starving people in the waiting room outside the Judge's office on Judgement Day? Sometimes I can feel their eyes on me already. I'm not looking forward to it.

In short, support free trade! Just say NO to protectionism! And you may also visit The Hunger site for a quick fix of good conscience (band-aid for the conscience). Feed the poor for free, courtesy of capitalism on the Net. Not exactly burgers for Africa, but pretty close.