Strawberry Genocide

I love strawberries. Everything about strawberries is delightful. When I enter the grocery store, I sprint directly to the strawberry section. I would go so far as to say that strawberries are my life. This is why I don't understand my need to destroy them.

Because that is what I always do. I am a serial strawberry killer. (They never even make it to my cereal.) I have this deep-seated (seeded?)compulsion to murder every strawberry I see. I never get around to eating them, and their juicy red corpses sit decomposing in my fridge until they morph into something else entirely and their remains cast a pall over the rest of the food and I carry them, like a pall-bearer, to the garbage. I am a strawbicidal maniac on the loose.

It's not like I have anything against strawberries. Strawberries have never done anything to me. (Unlike rhubarb, which singlehandedly ruined my life.) In fact, as I say, I love them very deeply with an abiding, all-consuming passion. ( I have, in fact, gone so far as to use them amorously to add flavour to my after-dark activities, sometimes even with a woman present.) So why I have embarked on a one-man crusade to wipe them out is a horrifying mystery to me.

Because I'm slaughtering them in ever-increasing numbers. As I type these words, in my fridge, in their fungal death throes, are four, count-'em four containers of strawberries which I purchased in a joyful frenzy at Longo's two weeks ago and whisked home lovingly as though they were succulent little valentine hearts. I had the best of intentions. It was going to be great. I would get up each morning and start my day with a delicious repast of sliced strawberries in milk with brown sugar. But yet again, that never happened. My apartment is strawberry Auschwitz. There's a sign above the entrance that says 'Mould Shall Set You Free'.

I feel terribly guilty about this. I'm wracked with remorse when there's fiendish, fruity foul play afoot. It's getting embarrassing when I buy strawberries. They plead for mercy in the store. "Nooooo!" they scream as I put them in the cart. "Spare us! We don't want to go white! Quick! Raspberries! HELLLLP! He's taking us to strawberry HELLLL!" But I run them outside and put them in the trunk of my car like doomed mob victims, hoping other motorists won't hear their desperate, muffled, thumping pleas.

I used to be a banana killer, too. Within a week, the cheery yellow bananas I brought home would ripen to festering brown tubes of slop until my countertop was a fruit-fly nightclub. Eventually, moved by their plight, I simply stopped buying them. But I can't stop purchasing strawberries. I'm bent grimly on their merciless destruction.

Eventually the authorities will catch me. And, fittingly, I'll rot in jail with a fruity cellmate. In the meantime, don't try to stop me. I'm on a rampage.