raisins skyburst777 fight cavities 050609 ... ovenbird In church on Sunday mornings my mother always gave me a small, red box of Sunkist raisins. I would eat them as slowly as possible so as to stave off boredom and sleep. Maybe this is why I hate raisins now–they are forever associated with the droning voice of a Roman Catholic priest filling my brain with notions of sin that would feed my intrusive thoughts for years. Hell tastes like raisins, its rivers polluted with bloated grape corpses. I was terrified that I could never be good enough to go to heaven. The world held so many tantalizing temptations and my resistance inevitably failed, which is how I would find myself raiding my brother's closet for his uneaten Halloween candy when my own was long gone. Unforgivable. I was eating raisins when women were told to obey their husbands and when transubstantiation made us all into cannibals. The host, like a stale piece of ice cream cone, mixed with the raisins stuck in my teeth. I would go home and write letters to God in a perfumed diary, the floral scent mingling with the residual smell of raisins on my fingers. I don't know when the last raisin touched my sinful lips, but I won't eat them now. They taste like fire and brimstone and their yielding bodies squelch like roadkill in my mouth. Raisins are what happen when unassuming grapes are subjected to a torturous, slow heat. Sinners are what happen when unassuming children are subjected to dogma that tells them they can never be clean. 250914 what's it to you? who go blather from