A Taste For Pastrami

Thinking about this blogger I read.

He has a lot of food allergies; it interferes with him when he eats out, or goes to dinner with people. He was blogging about his fondness for corned beef, but apparently he can't have horseradish with it; it does awful things to his digestive system. The following day, he apparently got a zillion emails from people who apparently don't understand this; they thought that he didn't LIKE horseradish, or that he was exaggerating, and apparently half the world sent him recipes that they swore wouldn't hurt him, but he HAD to try corned beef with horseradish!

SOME FOODS MAKE SOME PEOPLE SICK, WITHOUT AFFECTING OTHERS. Apparently, a whole lot of people just can't get that through their heads. The blogger in question found this surprising and disheartening; he apparently expected People On The Internet to be different than People He Meets In Person. No. Actually, People On The Internet are so much worse.

This is no secret nor surprise to me. For YEARS, I couldn't eat pastrami. Not that I don't LIKE pastrami -- I do! But to eat a pastrami sandwich, deli style, the proper way, meant that I either had to suffer a bout of gurgling heartburn agony that verged on the volcanic, or make sure to take a slug of Maalox or something within a half hour of eating the sandwich.

I like pastrami. I don't like Maalox.

Moreover, I discovered this in my late teens, a time when MOST boys my age can eat damn near anything without ill effect... jalapeno, sausage, onion, pepperoni, and peanut butter pizza with Frank's Red Hot dipping sauce? No problem.

But a pastrami sandwich would put up a fight all the way down.

And I could make a list of people who wanted to tell me, "You just haven't had GOOD pastrami," or "I know a place that makes a pastrami sandwich that will magically not give you indigestion! It's just that good!"

And I knew they were wrong. And I didn't order the damn pastrami. And I insulted at LEAST one person by persistently REFUSING to order a pastrami sandwich while at this one place that served magical pastrami that never caused indigestion or heartburn, because I didn't have any Tums handy, and didn't feel like suffering the tortures of the damned just to show him he was wrong.

Some people just can't handle the idea that you are not simply "Them, But With A Different Face." That you are a whole different person, sitting there across the table, and that perhaps your thinking, your physiology, your philosophy, your spiritualism, WHATEVER, is not simply a reflection of their own.

And a percentage of these folks? They don't LIKE that. Apparently, being allergic to peanuts or horseradish, or simply being sensitive to pastrami... is ... WRONG. It's an INSULT. Or worse, an ABOMINATION. Or perhaps you're just delusional, and if you ever want to try REALLY GOOD pastrami...

Some folks regard otherness as the mark of the stranger. Or the enemy. Or the Devil. And sometimes, all it takes to mark you as The Other is a refusal to eat the damn sandwich.

Think about that, next time you hear someone complaining about homophobia, or transphobia, or xenophobia, or whatever. The fact that Doc Bedlam made someone angry once... for refusing to eat a damn SANDWICH, fa' potato's sake.

Some folks don't need a lot to get all het up. Your refusal to exist PROPERLY, in their eyes, is all it takes.