So I’m talking to this police officer the other day, and he says to me “Shut your cake hole!” So of course I shut up and continue to fish around my pocket for money to pay him off with. As I was driving home, in the back of the squad car, I thought more about the officer’s touching words. They had touched me hard in the side of the head and were poking me repeatedly. I realized that I liked his expression. No…loved it. Because it implied that the entire function of one’s mouth is to eat cake.
How great would that really be? Fourth grade science students would learn about how the lungs are for breathing, the eyes for seeing, and the mouth for eating cake. As I was trying to explain my brief incarceration to my mother she told me to “shut my pie hole.” Naturally I started to explain to her how great it would be if we only ate cake, and how she had broadened the horizons to cake and pie. She stared at me with a “dear Lord, my son is using lots and lots of heavy drugs” sort of look. I put down the bent spoon and assured her it was for ice cream.
Cake and pie, oh what a life it would be! Breathing would become completely ancillary, solely the job of the nose. All other foods would fall by the wayside as scientists developed nutritionally fortified cake. I would ask for chocolate with extra foliate. Thanksgiving and birthday parties would become the most revered holidays, for all the pie and cake they provide. Pie-eating contests would become as antiquated as the old “heavy breathing contests” that they had back in the early 1730’s. Bakeries would become holy temples, where we would go to ritualistically slaughter dyslexic baby seals….well…maybe they wouldn’t be dyslexic. When you saw fat people on the street, you would say, “Man, that guy’s got a good mouth. I wish I could have a mouth like him.” Actually, by that point, though, we would only call the mouth the “cake hole” or the “pie hole.” I guess different families would either be cake or pie hole families. Wars might start family feuds, over whether or not mouths should be for cake or pie. Sara Lee and Little Debbie will naturally mediate the international debate on the topic. No one will listen to Debbie, though, because she is very little and eats honey buns.
Maybe I’m off-base here; perhaps I am only looking for a reason to justify an intense early morning cake-longing; maybe it’s foolish to think that a common colloquial expression could completely redefine science, nature and our society as we know it; or maybe we should be preparing for full-scale nuclear war against the bed bugs…word is that they’re trying to bite.