Saturday, January 04, 2003

The Allegory Of The Pasta Maker Day!

There was once a couple aflame. In the throes of divorce, a man and his wife directed the whole sum of their bitterness and rage into a single dispute over the custody of their jointly purchased pasta maker.

It began when the husband first moved out of their home. He was packing into his Nissan several boxes containing all the belongings he felt he could not live without during his stay in the apartment he was subletting from an attorney working out of the London office of his firm for the year. Settled precariously atop the last of the boxes was the pasta maker with its cord wrapped tightly around the base. As the husband made for the door, his wife reached out and snatched the pasta maker into her embrace.

"You're not taking the PastaMatic," she said.

The husband defended his rightful possession. "The fuck I ain't," he said. After much shouting, it was in a huff he left, and the pasta maker was returned to it's home on their kitchen counter. But it was not plugged into the wall socket, and neither would it ever be again.

In the ensuing months, the husband fetishized that dusty countertop appliance as if it were the key to a secret door of escape from his feelings of loss and resentment. The Secretarial Services Adminstrator with whom he'd struck up the instigating affair soon grew tired of his preoccupation and ended their trysts, yielding him all that much more time to strategize how to win back his prized piece of cookery. There were many threatening phone calls during office hours and he even staked out his wife's dinners with her new beau, waiting for her to step out of an Italian restaurant just to jump from his car and shout "Ah ha!" into her recently carbohydrated face. She would shout back that she'd only ordered a plate of veal, and he would say, "You'll slip up one day. And know this: I'll be there when you do."

The pot came to a boil when in the middle of his fifth sleepless night in a row he broke into his former home, grabbed the pasta maker from the kitchen counter (noting that he didn't have to unplug it from the wall) and climbed upstairs to stand at the foot of his old bed and woke his wife and her lover from their sleep with a whisper of her name.

"I'm taking the PastaMaestro now," he said.

She saw the flames in his eyes and decided to stoke the fire. "I'll ruin you," she said. "Walk out that door with the PastaMucho! and my lawyers will have you working for me by the time this divorce is final."

Her new boyfriend concocted a plan to bring the matter to a close. The husband appeared not to have even noticed him until he finally spoke. And even then, it wasn't sure how much he heard.

"Why not let an outside party decide who gets the PastaMarksman?" he said. The wife thought that was a good idea. And for some reason, perhaps just to get to the end of this story, the husband agreed as well.

So some old and wise person, probably a town elder or a cop, he showed up in the bedroom and said, "I'll cut the Pastameliorator in half so's both ya'll get a piece."

The wife was into it but the husband said, "No, let her have it. I'd rather give up the Pasta (and I mean) Lotsa! than see it destroyed." The wife went, "Score!" and grabbed for the appliance but the old guy yanked it out of her reach. He said, "No way, little baby ho. Your husband clearly loves the Pastamerica (USA!) (USA!) most for whatever reason. He probably fucks it. But anyway, I'm giving him dibs."

That's when the wife freaked out and killed everyone in the room using magical powers.

Happy The Allegory Of The Pasta Maker Day!