A Plan to Unguilt the Species and Key Lime Pie

Key Lime Sacrifice to Mount Molar 2021. Acrylic on paper, 12 x 16"

Just got back from a drive to NYC. We passed 4,567,343 plastic flossers on the way. I recently wrote about the “Flosser of the World” and this will update for you my current state of mind. I think we must free humanity of environmental worry:)

And there’s dessert too!

Some thoughts on Key Lime pie and a recipe for all and sundry:

Deconstructing Key Lime Pie

Marie and I can talk for an hour about deconstructing Key lime pie. The finished dessert is global and global is hastening doom. We can discuss karma, which I declare is “fate” with a few freewill choices. I believe fate and karma are inventions of the freakishly comfortable species “man,” so I say “impossible” until the raccoon is allowed to fall onto the spinning wheel of life and death. The skunk too needs to make his karmic choice. “To spray or not to spray this asshole shitting on my habitat?” Without all living things respected thus, fate and karma are superstitions of species-ism, collaborating with guilt, justifying the gruesome murder of anything, as long as it doesn’t affect our dessert.

From Key Lime Pie to karma, to power, corruption, evil… And from those one or two fleeting dreams of contentment now— which tend to put me (sometimes my loved ones) in an imaginative state of anonymous poverty, secure in a non-motorized hut, with a wood stove, gun, and a four-season garden with saved seed—from these clear and happy daydreams await the visions of what my species has given up for the constant decoration of key lime pie for dessert, biweekly trips to the super-duper market, a deep bitterness brought by a devotion to standard time, individuality, and the purchase of a thousand materials to cram inside a wooden box, dressed up pretty in vinyl strips pretending to be wooden strips.

We have forsaken clan devotion for the hate crimes of individuality.

The mechanized hyper-individual is a lone cancer cell. He is the beginning of the end of nature. Self congratulation, self pride, self-satisfaction are not only meaningless without clan approval, but infinitely depressing as harbingers of doom. If we are living and working on a global treadmill, and my specialty is Key Lime Pie, the wife dabbles in printing runs, Mom does garage sales, Dad knows black fly fungiciding, sister claims insurance claims, friends teach kids fifty miles away, or guard prisoners with a night stick in a sweat-stink, cement room, etc., and over time we cannot come to value each other’s specialization beyond how much it stratifies our class position, and nurtures our personal “comfort,” then nothing besides boredom and incompetence ballooning in the brain awaits the hopeless worm of modernity.

The mass of physically comfortable folks obliviously act out their dreams slowly torturing all the living things on earth.

Themselves included.

There are no more clans here.

There is no sharing or need of one another. Who has ever needed an insurance worker or a prison guard in the family?

The hyper-individual Carl Sandburg published a little poetic blurb not so long ago about Hungarians at a beer picnic. Group happiness. We need that now. Bonfires, wine sharing, poetry spoken from every mouth. Never again the written word!

We must have a group expectation of the dawn—not only for the sake of the new economy, but for our happiness too. Our extended families are in ruins. Thoreau was right about simplicity, but dead wrong on the individual. He was an excellent spokesperson for the dangerous hobbyist of the future, that is all.

It is inevitable that we will come to clans again. We shall need to build successful ones. Survival of the fittest is unnecessary at first. In western, that is, rich society, we can chant the mantra “survival of the happy” for now, and nurture our fledgling clans without immediate economic or natural disaster implications. It does necessitate group projects, however. Like corn planting, water gathering, and grand meals at siesta, finished on those easier days with some exotic, mouth-watering Key Lime Pie.

Cities will have to die out. All clans will soon discover that cabbage cannot grow on asphalt. Sadly, the hyper-individuals will annihilate 9/10 of the living planet long before the first clan boy or girl’s rite-of-passage ceremony. A one or two meter rise in ocean level will launch nuclear winter for sure, no matter what happy, hopeful, denial predictions the specialists spout. Clans in the wild are the future. Coastal urbanites, find yours on higher ground. Suburbanites, may I suggest bowling night, and many mead and shredded wheat parties?

Making a Key Lime Pie amidst the knowledge of dinosaur implications for millions of species, including our own, is doom. Definitions are changing. Joy will be defined as “the feeling of clan nurturing”. Individual will be synonymous with “clan crime,” a future capital offense.

Key Lime Pie

Lime filling:

4 teaspoons grated zest, plus a ½ cup juice from about 4 limes
4 large egg yolks
1 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk

Graham cracker crust:

11 full size graham crackers, bludgeoned to fine crumbs (1¼ cups)
3 tablespoons sugar
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

Whipped cream topping:

¾ cup heavy cream, chilled
¼ cup confectioners’ sugar
½ lime, sliced paper thin and dipped in sugar (for decoration)

For the filling:

Whisk zest and yolks in a medium bowl until light green color, about two minutes.
Beat in the milk and then the juice. Set aside at room temperature to thicken.

For the crust:

Preheat oven to 325°

Mix crumbs and sugar in a medium bowl. Add butter and stir with a fork until well blended. Scrape mixture into 9-inch pie pan and with a measuring cup, press crumbs over bottom and up sides of pie pan to form an even crust.

Bake until lightly brown and fragrant, about 15 minutes. Transfer pan to wire rack and let cool for twenty minutes.

Pour lime filling into the crust.

Bake until center is set, yet wiggly when jiggled, 15-20 minutes. Return pie to wire rack. Cool to room temperature and then refrigerate for at least three hours.

For the whipped cream:

Before serving, whip cream in a medium bowl to very soft peaks. Add confectioners’ sugar (1 tablespoon at a time), and continue whipping until just-stiff peaks. Spoon on to pie slices and top with sugared limes.

Yum. Think on future bonfires with your clan.