TGIF: Lions, Tigers, and 500 Pounds of Spaghetti...OH MY

Fair warning this post is gonna get weird. Some might call it a downright unnecessary exploration, burning a gratuitous amount of brain power and perhaps even, simply put, a total waste of time. Yours and mine. I call it fun. Today we focus our attention on an act so mysterious, so baffling, so …. something I would do in an alternate universe where I had to dispose of a heinous amount of obscure evidence with limited to no resources or critical thinking skills. Today we’re exploring a criminal act so confusing and so ruthlessly silly I cannot stop thinking about it. I'm talking about...

To dump such an outrageous amount of cooked (COOKED!) pasta in the womb of mother nature is the most hilariously nefarious Jersey thing I've heard about in a long time. Probably since the birth of Gritty, and that thing is technically a Pennsylvania monster.

Now, this post claims 300 pounds were dumped but I’m now reading it was over FIVE HUNDRED pounds, including ziti, spaghetti and other noodles. Other noodles?! Good lord what could they be!? Don’t tell me it’s orecchiette, my ears can’t take it! This was a crime of passion, an act of desperation and idiotic determination. These noodles weren’t dumped in one fell swoop (read: foul swoop), they were strategically dumped. This was dedicated dumping. The person(s) at large threw a shit ton of pasta in the woods and thought “this is a good idea” and then kept doing it until over 500 pounds laid sprawled along the wild flowers like the exploded guts from a sinister spaghetti overlord.

My first though: this has pasta mafia written all over it.

And if we’re going down the rabbit hole of creating a fictional world of organized noodle houses you can’t tell me this crime wasn’t a direct order from the big boss himself, Al Dente. Al’s notorious for getting his undercooked underlings, Riga Tony and baby faced Angel Hair to do his dirty work. Al's been a real hard ass since the death of his father last spring, Pappa R. Delle, the god father of organized noodle nonsense. *sigh* they don't make em as broad and as flat at Pappa anymore. That guy could really hold his sauce, yaknowwuddimean. What's worst? Pappa's death is still a grating situation. No one knows for sure what happened. Some say he made a flakey deal with Parmy John that landed him in hot water. Others say he squared off with the Ravioli's and they stuffed him. Crimped the edges too. There's even rumors that he and his sidekick, Mini Stronie, tried to make some quick dough at the Hut, but Little Caesar slipped something BIG in his drink at the salad bar and then BOOM...he and mini went down like dominos. Chuck E. Cheese swears his kids saw him get roughed up by Dave and Buster, but all those punks like to play games so I don't believe em. All we know is one night last spring Al got a delivery from Papa John, his dad's alcoholic brother. It was the chewed edge of a farfelle, Pappa's favorite bow tie. The man had a gift for fashion, he was a walking lesson in Italian Dressing. Al's stomach was in garlic knots, he knew his Pappa had been cooked. The next morning Al and a couple hamburger helpers found what was left of him stuffed in a shell down by the shore, salt water dripping off his flaccid remains. In that moment Al swore on his Mamma's Mia that he'd get revenge. And he wouldn't stop until every cheesy, crusty, sonofabitch involved found a new home 6 feet under the olive garden in his backyard.

*Cue Law & Order DUN DUN sound effect*

END SCENE.

I can't keep going with that. Trust me, I'd love to, but like gorging yourself on Olive Garden's endless pasta bowls, all good things must come to an abrupt and bloated end. Also it’s overwhelmingly stupid. Also also, that took way longer than I expected it to and now it's almost 5 o'clock lol. But I'll tell you what, I'm obsessed with this story. It raises SO many questions. Philosophical questions like... if 500 pounds of spaghetti get dumped in the woods in New Jersey but know one's around to see it...does it make it fucking weird? YES, YES IT DOES MAKE IT FUCKING WEIRD. Or, why is 500 pounds of mystery spaghetti dumped in the woods so silly and sinister? One: because, to me, spaghetti is one of the most hilarious foods ever created. The way it practically faints on your plate is delicious comedy every time. Two: the fact that this pasta has been cooked. Effort was put into preparing these starch sticks into food only to dump SO MUCH OF IT in the woods. Three: THERE'S SO MUCH OF IT. We're talking hours of preparing these starch sticks for some reason. Only to abandon ship and dump them in the woods. Four: It was dumped IN THE WOODS. No, not in a dumpster, or any other type of designated container for trash...THE WOODS.

*RECORD PLAYER SCRATCH*

Hold up, I was just going back and reading another article about this fever dream of a story and it says "It's believed the pasta was dry and uncooked at the time it was dumped but then turned al dente when rain fell on central New Jersey last week." WUuuuuUUUuuT??!!?? Hahahaha OMG, wait, the article also has a rumor about how it happened

Word in the neighborhood, Rost said, is that the dry pasta was dumped by a man as he cleaned out the Hillyard Road home of his late parents, who apparently believed in having a fully stocked pantry.

Okay so a man was cleaning out his parent's hoarder home and decided to FULLY UNBOX AND DUMP 500 POUNDS OF SPAGHETTI IN THE WOODS. That truly is the most Jersey way of problem solving I've ever heard. No no no, sir, please, don't you dare donate that perfectly good pasta to a homeless shelter or a food drive or a school. DON'T. You get that pasta out of those boxes and you scatter the woods with it like the fucked up Jersey spaghetti fairy that you are! Then just sit back and let mother nature do it's naaaasty thing!

Oh man. So gross. So confusing. Such an exhilarating and weird story. Thanks for letting me try to wrap my lil brain around it. It's truly so fuSILLY. And thanks to this story I'm just like a good fusilli.... I'm spiraling. Thanks for indulging me in one of the weirder TGIF posts we've had in a while. Let me know what you think of this absolute sopping mess of story. What would you do with all that spaghetti?? I hope you have great weekends! And thanks, as always, for being here! 💚G