Monsters

Some horrors are closer than one would like to think. They lay in wait, unnoticed, in the darkened corners of your home while you sleep. When you're fixing the morning coffee... they're waiting. When you're grabbing a beer out of the fridge after a long day at work... they're watching. When it's one in the morning and you're after a snack in the fridge... that's when those horrifying nightmare beings are most dangerous, because in your tired state of mind and desperation you might just draw out one of the terrors that hides in the shadows.

I remembered that, of course, while I cleaned out my fridge this afternoon.

The amount of questions that arise while cleaning out the fridge outnumber the amount of freezer bags and plastic containers that become Petri dishes and Lovecraftian horrors. Certain colors shouldn't occur in nature, let alone sprout on top of a mysterious pasta dish that sat in wait for the last month or more, but I stare through the hazily transparent plastic box at the rainbow from the fridge because opening the container might release the kind of spore that starts a zombie apocalypse. Why I find it necessary to save one slice of provolone cheese for three months, a few slices of salami until they become close to fossilized, or milk that is no longer liquid, is something I can't figure out.

It's kind of fun to see what sorts of foods don't actually go bad, though. A package of hot dogs I had open for a few weeks still looked like new, but the can of sauerkraut-- already fermented cabbage-- that I opened at the same time as the hot dogs was DEFINITELY spoiled. It makes me wonder what sort of toxic crap I willingly put in my body; if bacteria won't even survive on it, how do I? Why do I knowingly ingest food-like substances that don't follow laws of nature? I know I won't be able to eat the technicolor fuzzfest in that Tupperware, but should I attempt to eat the processed lunch meat from a bygone era?

Of course, I tend to forget about the horrors of food that refuses to spoil and the food that grows furry mold, get hungry, go grocery shopping, eat most of a meal, and save the scant few leftovers for another few months until terror strikes again.

It's finding Frankenstein's monster frankfurter that makes cleaning the fridge exciting and mortifying.