It's Considered a Paste

I'm back from the east coast beach vacay with tell-tale peeling skin and legions of mosquito bites. Awesome. I seem to have picked up some icky virus which I freely blame on my nephews. With their lack of handwashing and tendency to cough right in your face, who else can you look to?

I will talk about the trip later but first I wanted to follow up on the toiletry concern I expressed in my last post. I was pleased that my personal items passed muster but on the way back my bag of plane snacks was whisked off the conveyor belt and hustled off for the extra-special security treatment. What was causing all the concern? A 2.7 ounce tube of hummus. I bought this from a hippy trippy food store in Plymouth, just blocks away from Pilgrim Rock, because I was intrigued by the packaging. It's like how soy milk comes in those little foil lined boxes that don't need to be refrigerated, but it was like a tube of Crest except you would put it on crackers. Anyway, that hummus got their dander up, boy! That tube of hummus, I was told, is considered a paste, which I guess somehow thrusts it from the innocent realm of food into a potential terrorist tool. The TSA lady, who obviously knew it was ridiculous but had to do her job, wiped down the tube of hummus with one of those Clearasil pad things that I guess detects explosive residue. I don't even know. TSA Lady declared the hummus good to go, and so we went. I just tasted it by the way. It's not bad, but also not that good, either.

One last thing I wanted to mention about the market, Common Sense. There is also a farm called Common Sense where all these groovy body and bath products are made. I bought some of the Balm of Gilead, which sounded so soothing. Despite the multitude of herby sounding ingredients it really smells like nothing more than olive oil, but I wanted to buy something and I knew it couldn't be a freaking liquid or a gel. Well, it could, if it was 3 oz or smaller but their bottles were 3.4 oz and how irritated would I have been to have to ditch a never-opened product?

While I was paying, I saw a display of cards next to the cash register inviting the reader to drop by for dinner. I opened the card and saw that the intended hosts were obviously members of a Jesus freak cult looking for new recruits. Though I did not see it actually written anywhere on the invitation, at that moment I strongly suspected that Common Sense was a huge cult to which I had just given $18.02 of my hard-earned heathen cash.

Sure enough, a Google search of "Common Sense"+"Plymouth"+"cult" reveals indeedy, the cult is called Twelve Tribes and some guy named Rick Ross has written a lot about them. They also have their own web site so you can decide for yourself if you want to buy their products.