Buttering The Bagel

First thing in the morning, half-awake, half-dreaming in a pre-caffeinated fog, buttering a bagel is an existential challenge.

Some days the butter resists the hole, other days it falls right through. How does one navigate that perilous hole?

The Freedom Bagel

You're hungry right? Bagels are the holes that fill a hole. So why waste time pussy-footing around the perimeter?

Just spread that butter straight across the hole.

This is the Land Of The Free® where a man can butter his hole any damn time and any damn way he wants.

Don't fail to appreciate that instant of suspension, the golden circle clinging on the cusp, before it surrenders to heat and gravity and an exhilarating fall to the plate beneath.

Fifty Shades of Bagel

In a dimly-lit kitchen, the butter spreads itself in front of you.

You confess your kitchen kinks, your fetish for full-fat dairy, your secret desire for boiled dough products, your persistent invasive thoughts to lick and rim and penetrate that delicious bready orifice...

As your guilt and shame pour forth, the bagel begins to glisten, to moisten, engorged with oozing layers of buttery grool.

It offers itself on a plate. You cannot resist. You eat.

The Nietzschean

Stare too long into the bagel hole and the bagel hole stares back at you.

Thus spake Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), famed philosopher and fellow bagel eater.

Take care, dear butterer, do not dally with the bagel hole, lest the bagel hole become a part of you.

To live as a bagel eater, one must accept the struggle. Some days you are the butter, some days you are the hole. Some days you can resist the void, other days it draws you in...

The Tower of Bagel

Genesis 11:3 (revised version):

And they said unto each other, “Come, let us boil dough then bake it thoroughly.” And God was most displeased.

In ancient times, the Bagelonians desired to build a mighty tower with its top in the heavens. Having no conventional building materials, they decided to use bread. But not regular bread - boiled bread which was then baked!

God witnessed this blasphemy. "Dough must not be cooked twice! Except being toasted, that's OK. But this boiling business is fucking weird."

So he smote the Bagelonians with confusion (probably because coffee had still not been invented) and human race split across the earth, carrying with them the recipe for their freaky boiled dough rings.

The Bagel of Memory

The butter's swirls are a velvet vortex, sparkling under the warm counter lights. You feel the light become creamy as a presence blooms in the air. A voice, as smooth as churned silk, whispers to you from the ethereal pail:

"I will butter your bagel, my child. Like a mother's love, I will take away your fear and give you sustenance... Do you remember this?"

Before you can answer, she says:

"Yes! That sweet infant memory, aah. That is what I seek..."

A perfect bagel forms in front of you, baked from forgotten nostalgia, buttered by memories oozing from your recollection...

"Aah, yes! Give me what your mind most cherishes..."

The bagel attains a flawless quintessence. You reach for it and––

In that moment you realise you can't remember your mother's eyes... Or the touch of her hands... Or the carelessness of innocence...

Only the taste of bagel.

The Cronenbagel

You open the fridge and find the butter... throbbing.

Breathing.

A slab of golden flesh. When you touch it, it reaches out, tendrils gently wrapping around your wrist, stretching, searching. But it does not want you. It wants bagel.

Its dairy fingers demulsify around the band of bread, weaving into a golden halo, which pits and bubbles until the plasmic substance permeates the body of the bread.

You take the bagel to your lips and bite into it. You shudder as it descends your food pipe, bite by bite, until it is gone.

Then you realise your error. It is inside you now. It is still alive.

And the butter is spreading.

The Whole of the Hole

You swallow more, faster, but you are not filled, are not satisfied. As you gorge and stuff yourself, your blood thickens, your arteries congest.

But the only thing you feel is emptier. Every bite makes you feel hollow. The act of consumption is consuming you.

You look at your hand – and with horror you see the truth: you have not been eating the bagel. You have been eating the hole.

You pray it is just fear, or hunger, growing in the pit of your stomach. You feel a visceral chasm. A gaping hollow. But you cannot stop it.

The hole you swallowed swallows you whole.

The Bagel of Nonsense

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Bagel:

"bagel"

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Beigel?

The Last Bagel

All future humanities are dead. Our last derelict spacecraft plummets into the black hole at the galaxy's core.

Only a bagel remains. The last ark of bio-organic matter.

As it crosses the information boundary, formless intelligences are drawn to its round embrace.

"... the sublime form ... circular perfection ... moist but not claggy ... evidence of intelligence ... god-beings! ... with mastery of the hole!"

A nexus of energy forms at the bagel's core, collapsing to infinite density. The wormhole transports it to a distant world.

A nascent and starving species picks it up from the dirt. Sniffs it, licks it...

This crumb of hope. This seed in the bread-basket of life. This dough from which civilisation will rise again.