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Gross Jar 2012 – Human Teeth and Stink Fruit

Further evolving the jar that humiliates God.

It's a jar with gross stuff in it. It exists because of science.

It's been nearly a month now since we brought back the Gross Jar. In that time, we have besmirched and savaged the concept of decency and humiliated God by adding horrible, horrible things to an empty pickle jar and watching and smelling as they fester. Your three delicious courses in this set-meal for one have so far run thus:

To start, an entrée of human shit, piss, phlegm, vomit, drain hair and rotten vegetables, followed by a palate cleanser of santorum (the frothy mix of faecal matter and lube produced by anal sex).

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A main of fish heads, lamb intestines, mouldy doner kebab and chicken feet was served up as we upgraded the jar to a bigger model. The splish-splosh of two-week-old shit, piss, and vomit over dead animals and the author's own hands was a bile-raising personal highlight. Then, last week, we topped off the unholy cocktail with a mutilated, bloodied rat.

This week, we have a dessert, though this isn't the end of the meal. Think of it as an ongoing Roman feast, the ancient myth of puke-filled banqueting vomitoriums made dreadfully real.

To source our putrid pudding we looked east. Far east, to East London, where we went to a local Chinese supermarket to source the flesh of a southeast Asian fruit that smells so bad, it has been banned from public transport and some hotels.

It's called durian, or "Stink Fruit", and in nature it looks like this:

The smell of durian is so powerful that it's able to penetrate the fruit's thick, pointy skin. Testimonials to its oozing and pernicious stench include that of novelist Anthony Burgess, who described his experience of it in his book The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy as like "eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory."

The durian we bought came without its skin in an ice-cream tub. The labelling seemed unusually upbeat considering it was advertising something with an odor described as being like "pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock," that was sure to leave your breath smelling "as if you'd been French-kissing your dead grandmother."

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You'll notice that the German translation of durian is “stinkfrucht.” Say what you like about the Gerrys, they've never been afraid of tackling a problem head-on.

We opened the tub. Measures had been taken to ensure that the smell from this accursed stepchild of nature didn't escape and scare away all the shoppers (ie someone had wrapped it in clingfilm).

It looked like a post-mortem photo of Homer Simpson's frozen, radioactive heart.

With the wind howling and the rain lashing down, we cracked open the lid of the Gross Jar and immediately felt like we were wrestling with some inhuman beast on a gale-lashed moor; the odour of the abominable effluence tearing at my sinuses like the claws of a lycanthrope. Wincing in the elements, we peeled back the plastic and abandoned the stink fruit Sunday to the mercy of the jar before it had time to defrost and fully unleash its stench.

On an aesthetic level, hopefully the durian will go on to bring new color to the Gross Jar's sauce, which seems to have settled into a complacent hue of pumpkin orange.

Next, it was time to toss in the human teeth. We sourced our teeth from a kindly Greek dentist, who didn't think it was at all weird to hang on to the teeth he'd removed from people's mouths, and even take some of them home with him. These things looked pretty gnarly and lived-in. I like to imagine they once belonged to the type of person who would eat raw steak on the bus and not care about people staring.

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We dropped in the teeth and let them settle into their new home.

Scientific observation: Before we put the lid back on, we held our breath and had a look into the jar to see what was going on. The apple seemed to have been stained a brownish shit color. It wasn't shrivelled or rotting yet, but it was definitely starting to bow to the obscenities surrounding it.

After a quick shake, a long stream of bubbles was observed exiting the lamb intestines, for quite some time. A staff member commented that she thought she saw something swimming in the jar. Check back next week to see if we have to make a phone call to Whitechapel A&E after we force an intern to fuck it and it turns out the jar's evolved into a portable vagina dentata.

Previously - Gross Jar 2012 - Dead Rat