Nubbly Jules

Some person’s words are all poetry, wisdom and afflatus. And some of us only speak of breakfast.

Stop me if you’ve heard this; everybody dies, but does everybody live? My friend Jules was born with a rare congenital condition that left his whole body covered in small brown warts. They were actually moles but with a bit of added kerotin that made them a little softer than a wart but harder than a mole. They were all of a more or less similar size, a bb when he was younger, a petite pea as he got older, perfectly circular and as evenly distributed as an attractive freckle would be, well maybe more like a pattern on a collander. His arm felt like the pebbly texture of a new football or basketball. Some children taunted him as Spot, or Polka dot boy, he just laughed off the name calling, his friends just called him Julian, or Jules, or Spot. He was easygoing and well liked and something about his cavalier approach to life shone through. People looked, but that was all, and most smiled back or raised their eyes in acknowledgement.
Julian was brave and took up interests that were just dangerous enough, or in fact so dangerous that they ultimately cost him his life. ‘Twould be romantic to say that his spots afforded him excellent camouflage so he took up wildlife photography and was pummeled to his demise by a heretofore previously undiscovered race of green pygmies wielding cypress knee clubs as he sought the last ivory billed woodpecker in the Pearl river drainage of Louisiana. Nope, nor was he to become a social outcast in his teens and as a result pursue the medical sciences leading eventually the team that not only found the cure to his own disfigurement but made the breakthrough that restored beauty to all who wished it and hence his team was assasinated and all his research burned by the L’Oreal beauty product cartel.
He took up cooking. That’s dangerous.
Sure, sure, chefs put on weight and perish from all those things that that involves, scurvy, afflatus, contumely, (chefs are notorious for contumely, grab a hot pan handle and see why for yourself), heart failure, diabetes and such. But Julian only gained one notch, not a new belt and moomoo, so what did him in was something else.
What did him in was a mushroom. And it took years. Nothing special, just a little brown myotis to be succinct, or lbm briefly.
He had always wanted to create the perfect dish, the recipe that someone could eat as much of as they wished and not suffer for it. It was like a science-fiction culinary dream to him. Eating was pleasurable, why couldn’t it be interminably satisfying.
He knew he was onto something when he began to introduce aerogel into his recipes. It was firm and light and had a crunch that gave way to instant dissolution. It could be flavored, and in different shapes, served hot or cold, wet or dry and that crunch that went from crisp to nothingness, that itself was heavenly. Meals he made from it could be as nutritious as a wallaby is cute or as airy as an overly attractive blond. Yet something was missing, and from his study on the matter he decided it was the munchie factor.
He ascertained this from his observations of the nerds in the server room with their Cheetos. The Cheetos had a nice crispy crunch that dissolved to almost nothing but the nerds ended up with fat, yellow fingers. The nerds were also rotating through the server room with an alarming freguency. He could only assume that when they left for the day they went home and succumbed to cardiac arrest or diabetic coma or the other fatal diseases of the Cheeto eaters. Only that could explain the turnover.
So he figured that it was the cheese that done it, cheese being nothing more than sweet wholesome milk gone bad, and resolved to find a substitute.

Cheese was milk with a fungus. He’d cut out the fattening component, the milk, and go straight fungus. This led him to mycology, the place where the old were never bold and the bold never old. He tried buttons, meh. He tried portobellos, meh, chanterelles, meh, oyster, blah, even shitakes, no dice before he stumbled upon a raving long-haired savior looking dude, some old longhair, that swore what he needed was LBM’s and they were everywhere in bovine pastures in Georgia. Off to the great southeast he trundled, to his doom.
By now aged, and feeble, for the quest had cost him much, he was reduced to a few stray wisps of white hair on his pebbly textured head, he walked through pasture after pasture searching for LBM’s, consulting his mycological identification book by headlamp. He searched at night, the raving hippie had suggested this as they would be both easier to find and the farmers less able to shoot accurately in the dark. It was on one of these forays that he was bit by a little brown myotis and contracted rabies and died.
It was never about his speckled, rough textured skin, he was lovely as a person and was loved by many he loved in return. He had raised himself from a cook to a chef to a preimminent pioneer of the food sciences endeavoring to benefit mankind by rendering one of its favorite activities less harmful. He was a proud pet parent of a loving Corgi, an active campaigner against the epedemic of bad hairdos in men or women be it behive, combover or pink spikes and he will be sorely missed. It was fun to rub that nubly bald head and see his eyes light up.