Morton Salty Bland
The kitchen where they make the images has two settings ... fast and faster ...
No one is tasting anything before it goes out ... No one is asking if this will nourish or just fill ... The portrayals arrive the way drive-through arrives ... warm for now ... identical to the last one ... engineered to satisfy a craving that was also engineered ...
Unvibrant. That word knows what it is missing ... Not dead ... not dark ... Unvibrant ... The color was there and something extracted it the way milling strips the germ from wheat ... What remains is shelf-stable ... What was removed was the part that was alive ...
Other places on this planet ... places with less money and places with more ... have figured out something about their own images that we have not ... They put safety measures around their portrayals ... Not censorship ... Context ... Duration ... Ceremony ... An elder who says wait ... tell it slower ... you are leaving out who was in the room ...
We skipped that. We are in a hurry. The images go out bone dry or sloppy ... no middle ... No one is adjusting the heat ...
Bone dry ... all the moisture of complexity cooked out ... A person stripped of their contradiction ... A place stripped of its weather ... Sloppy ... everything dumped in at once ... No care for what goes in first and what goes in after ... A pot where nothing had time to become itself before the next thing landed on top of it ...
Morton Salty.
When it rains it pours ... That is the slogan ... That is also the method ... One seasoning ... Applied in volume ... The same salt on every story ... The same salt on every face ... Crime is salted the same way comedy is salted the same way tragedy is salted the same way a Tuesday afternoon in a town where nothing happened is salted ... Everything tastes like the same emergency ...
A woman in Senegal watches an American film and thinks ... where is the space between the words ... In her language the pause carries meaning ... The silence after a question is not empty ... It is the room where the answer is being built ... The American film has no room ... Every silence is filled with music that tells her how to feel before she has decided ...
A man in Oaxaca makes mole over two days ... Thirty ingredients ... Some of them roasted ... Some of them raw ... Some of them bitter on purpose so the sweet has something to push against ... He watches an American cooking show that makes everything in twenty-two minutes ... He does not know the word unvibrant but he knows the taste ... It tastes like something that was in a hurry to be liked ...
A kid in Detroit has never eaten a meal that took two days to make ... Not because no one in Detroit makes food that way ... Because the images he has been fed since birth say food comes in minutes and feelings come in clips and a person is the worst thing they ever did or the best thing and never the Tuesday in between ... The images were full ... He is full ... Full and starving are not opposites when the salt is the same on everything ...
A person contains weather ... A culture contains centuries ... A flavor contains its opposite ... The bitter and the sweet in the same dish is not confusion ... It is accuracy ...
Richer means ... more rooms in the house ... More chairs at the table ... A longer meal ... A meal where the person across from you is not reducible to the first thing you notice about them ... Where the portrayal has enough nutrition to survive the drive home ...
DISCUSTING
February 12, 2026
Unfolding
Methodology: Wonderful Garbage
Style: Noir Song
Oyparaploo
