Thousand-Dollar Love Potato

"In your mind it's reconstituted, in my mind it's a full life-size potato," clarifies John. "You can't just have the old potatoes sitting around while you make it into a bigger one."

John, with jaundice, lies in bed sighing frequently and staring at the ceiling with dull ivory-yellow eyes. His latest fantasy involves embracing an impressively-oversized (not life-size, dummy!), boiled tuber, slathered with vegan butter. In his daydream his arms sink gently into the vast vegetable's soft flesh and distend the top portion pleasantly toward his mouth. If I can fulfill his all-consuming desire to couple with a potato John is willing to pay me US $1000. He knows how to motivate. Creating the super-sized potato shouldn't be too problematic I reason. Just peel and boil hundreds of the little white guys and then mold them into a giant configuration. The potatoes forming the core should stay reasonably warm as others are appended. Once sufficiently large, the mass could be sculpted smooth with a knife. Dark spots, denoting where the eyes had been, could also be fashioned with minimal fuss. It's the vegan butter that's the killer.

The night before he had offered a US $20,000 bounty if I could deliver three slices of wheat toast covered with vegan butter (a recurring theme), then topped with three slices of veggie lunch meats and one-half avocado each. The stickler is that it has to be delivered by midnight. I am able to convince him to extend the deadline to noon the following day, but quickly resign myself to the fact that, even with the additional half day, making good on the meal is an impossibility. There simply isn't enough flight time. Even the supersonic Concorde, now retired, would have had difficulty traversing the distance necessary to deliver the required ingredients from the States. The bent-nosed bird would undoubtedly have had to refuel at intermediate points burning up additional precious minutes.

Nothing, but advanced yogic power is going to suffice. I decide to meditate for one hour (I was going to anyway) and see if I can acquire the ability to teleport the materials or simply materialize them from the ether. Alas, none of the requisite siddhis are forthcoming and I find my attention drifting to my stomach as images of vegan mock-meats parade mockingly about. A soy dog leads the procession pumping a mini-baton in time to my heart beat.

Incredibly, a few days after our food for thought, we learn that there is a Whole Foods store in Delhi. The self-same grocery chain from the US that carries every vegan goodie under the Sun. Unfortunately, neither of us has the courage to visit the far-off market. The fear is finding it devoid of our lusted-after foodstuffs will be too much for our frail frames to bear. So we continue to lie about and dream ourselves to satiation.