Fractionals

More thoughts on the whole "insects in rice" thing, since I just finished doing the dishes and so disposing of the contents of those containers and scrubbing them very avidly and thoroughly.

I can put my mind at rest about a few things: There is no chance that when I ate some of this rice half a month or so ago there were living, squirming bugs in it then. As soon as I opened the container the movement caught my eye. There is no way I could have missed it. Maggots - well, I don't know if they technically were, but I saw them and my mind immediately thought "maggots" - looking like little grains of white rice only moving, twisting back and forth. Not that many, maybe one every square inch of surface. But that raises the horror of more beneath. The discarded eggs clung to the lid - they looked, horror of horrors, like a discarded bit of wild rice. For a brief second the thought (irrational as it is) that I've been eating nothing less than boiled maggot eggs arises, the thought of a cupful of them, hatched now, thrashing obscenely in my belly.

Well, that's just stupid. But disturbing. This was when I was still cooking, and in a hurry, so I quickly sealed it back up. Reassuring thought number two: It's almost definitely not anything to do with me that they're in there. The white rice I wound up using was right next to the other rice, in a plastic bag with a goddamn twist tie holding it shut. No maggots. No eggs. So I don't think they're invading my kitchen.

But still... now that I'm done with them, bits of me keep feeling itchy. Like one of them escaped and got on me. Psychosomatic, I know, but that doesn't stop the itch. When I went to go clean them out I noticed a thin (I can't think of a more appropriate word, sorry) skin clinging to the inside of the plastic container. The eggs attach to it. As I try to get it to come off it feels biological in a disturbing way, clingy and possibly with the faintest smell of rot. My mind reels. What the hell is this? What the fuck were they doing in my plastic containers? Vague echoes of terraforming suggest themselves, little disease armies slowly converting grains into fat little worm babies, slowly turning the inside of something I used to carry sandwiches in into a hive/womb. I can't get the shit off my possessions, or my fingers, fast enough.

I know the wriggling when I opened the container was just blind twitch response (brief memory of taking out the garbage when much younger - I'd left it too long, and maggots had formed (remember, the ancient Greeks thought they generated spontaneously - more horror) underneath. In desperate revulsion I stomped them into paste, then spent an hour cleaning the gook off the garage floor and especially off my shoe. When I lifted that bag, they went wild, new data all of a sudden flooding whatever passed for senses), but doesn't that make the idea worse? Blind little armies, brainless, slowly putrefying more of my apartment, my living space. These things have been nesting about a foot below where I prepare most of the food I eat. Sealed off by a thin wall of plastic. My first reaction to the skin was that they'd weakened the plastic somehow, that this was bits of it peeling off. More paranoia.

Of course, pace Nussbaum, often what we are disgusted by are merely by-products of our irrational, hateful desire to forget our mortality, our essential biology; but here I am disgusted by something in the traditional sense, my mind reels as I see the maggots so that in addition to intellectually knowing the food has spoiled, I am not even slightly tempted to eat it. My disgust is purely a matter of health. But given how little the emotion normally enters my life, it's cause for thought nonetheless. Hopefully it stops disturbing me so much soon.