(We’re not talking jello now, people.)
You’d think there was, like, this religious decree or something, given all the places the jam’s showing up. This is no APPLE jam, now. That’s never not apple sauce. We’re talking strawberry rhubarb; some kinda weird peach/orange marmalade hybrid (still we’re counting it); lemon and blueberry; spicy habañero + some other fruit, I can’t tell, too hot; lemon marmalade, too, but limes are right out for some reason, no one wants green jam, I guess; and finally just some straight-up strawberry, boring as sin, but always tasty somehow, both with chunks-so-you-know-it’s-real and chunks-without-so-you-knows-it’s-not.
There’s a depth of feeling, a passion, a real love of jam that kinda permeates the place. But permeates, that’s just really not a strong enough word, you know, for what we’ve got going on here. Smeared maybe. Or shoved. Splattered, even, sometimes signifies given the kind of, whaddayacallem, morse code or braille scattered about underfoot some days. That would be some trick, I’m thinking, if you could pick up some kinda coded messages (or flavor) from tromping on the sticky floor. It almost might be kinda worth it… Nah.
Let’s get real here. Jam’s not for eating in this place. OK, let’s say you’re an ant: THEN it’s true. Jam is, in this place here, more like an observation, a libation, like those old dead Romans used to do, just spilling some of that old wine on the dusty floor to get some gods’ heads to turn away. (Never toward, man, that’s NEVER good.) There are times when I’m standing barefoot–or even worse, socks–on the sticky floor, not really thinking, more like just trying to drink a cup of coffee and not think, when it seems like toast is not so much a thing you eat as a staging ground for jam.
Let’s just say, I’m glad they’re not drinking coffee yet.