The Forgotten Vegetable 2

            Before I go any further, please keep in mind that this is a fictional work and does not necessarily reflect the fate of one so obsessed with rutabagas. This piece is not meant to piss off the fine people at The National Rutabaga Council, because I know that they have a rutabaga or two handy, and those things are big and hard. Basically, what I’m saying is that you can eat all the rutabagas that you want. Actually, I prefer turnips. This is kind of an ‘outside the comfort zone’ thing for me. But don’t tell this guy.

            Perhaps I was grasping at straws when I finally went ahead and watched the famous Green Acres episode with rutabagas that some people were talking about on the rutabaga social media. The episode was exciting at first, then it degenerated into Eva Gabor in a balloon, dropping rutabagas on people. But it gave me an idea. Knowing that designing a personal balloon is unworkable (although I did research ‘lawn chair dirigibles’), I found a design to modify, and made a tiny Rutabaga Trebuchet. That’s like a regular tiny trebuchet, but it has a pad I designed specially so it can only toss a rutabaga. I solved the ‘wax problem’, you see, and the whole thing might be patentable. On Trial Day, I had a little trouble and took a rutabaga to the forehead. I wouldn’t want to experience that in rutabaga battle. By Monday, there was only a chartreuse mark evident on my brow, but I got comments at work.

            “…was it a rutabaga?”

            Of course, yes, that was just what had happened that weekend, and I work with some smart people, but I knew one thing they all don’t know. The rutabaga is superior to the turnip.

            I think that life is like a funnel sometimes. When life is good, you’re at the bottom coming up, and there’s a large cone of possibilities. I found myself in the reverse, going down, with options narrowing.

            First, things went bad with Clarissa. I swung by her place, and she had some sort of casserole prepared. The rutabagas in it were pulpier and had a piquant flavor. I asked what variety of rutabaga this was.

            “Oh, it’s not rutabaga,” she said. “They only had turnips.”

            !

            I’m glad I hadn’t eaten more. Didn’t she know? Hadn’t she been listening? I put the offending fork down and left. I couldn’t stand the smell of roasting turnips.

            “Everytime!” she said as I left, and she wasn’t referring to the casserole, I think, but to me.

            That’s ok, her last boyfriend woke up one day and thought he was Lawrence Welk or something. I never got the whole story. I went home and had plenty of rutabagas to get the taste of turnip out of my mouth.

            Then, had been feeling tingly, and then I felt more tingly. I felt very tingly. I went to the fast clinic and apparently if you’re feeling tingly you should go right to the emergency room. “Would you like us to call an ambulance?” they asked, and I don’t need no freaking ambulance. I still, at that point, thought it was a skin thing. I took the bus.

            I thought I saw Dave the Turnip in one of the back seats as I got on the bus. I sat in trepidation then I finally looked back and it was a lady with a kid in a white coat on her lap. Don’t know why I mistook that.

            Anyway, here I am. They hooked me up to an IV and I’m pissing up a storm. They took my blood three times, then they started asking me: “Do you work with magnesium? Have you recently bought dishes or pots, like, at a garage sale or thrift store that you’re now using that are really old? And sluffing off magnesium? Have you been swimming in magnesium. You have a lot of magnesium in you.”

            I’m lying here cornered by them hooked up to an IV with all of these electrodes and wires and stuff snaking out feeling like one huge tingle and the questions continue:

            “Have you been downing entire bottles of magnesium supplement as part of some ‘Tic-Toc Magnesium Challenge’ or been using some trendy new sport drink that’s, like, 100 proof magnesium? No? Because we’d definitely have to warn the public about that. Ok. What do you typically eat.

            How many rutabagas?

            Come again?

            ?”

            They just brought in a doctor who works at the work clinic and has dealt with people falling into vats of heavy metals and stuff, and he examined me thoroughly again, stroking his beard at times and looking like he’d just found something that he could write up in ‘The New England Journal Of Medicine’.

            Everyone in the hospital, the doctor and nurses and phlebotomists and the physical therapist thinks that they have it whittled it down to my taste in rutabagas. So Doctor Welby The Work Clinic Doctor, anti-rutabaganist that he is, needed some education. I told him that they lie. Rutabagas are far from poison, and if I am poisoned, it’s from Clarissa’s turnip casserole.

            He said “Alright! Let’s say that it was from turnips.” Then he scolded those turnips I ate.

            “Bad turnips! Either way, your mineral balance is out of whack, and it’s gotten to the point where we’re considering a transfusion.”

            The anti-rutabagas are now all in a clump in the hallway outside my room, and I think I heard one of them use the phrase ‘Rutabaga Abuse’. Some chuckles for that. There has been such chaos. Poking, prodding and beeping noises that become thicker and more insistent, and frankly, I just realized that I’ve had it with rutabagas. But I wouldn’t give these people the satisfaction of knowing that.