I occasionally make poor decisions.
Sometimes, if the anticipated payoff is great enough, it’s
still worth it.
I exercised this maxim a week ago or so on the way home from
work. Thanks to my home state’s policy of “always working on all roads all the
time for every reason even though nothing ever seems fixed because we work on
the same roads every single year,” I’ve been taking a different route for the
way home, and each day I have passed a store that specializes in
smoked meats.
Smoked meats, as should surprise no one, are my kryptonite.
I don’t know what it is. There’s something strange about
smoked meat. Like, it’s meat, only full of spices to hide the gross parts and
then cooked so it’s tough and weird. Like, sure, you gain the benefit if having
it be able to sit around for a while without cooking or refrigeration, but you
lose not being able to use the same meat to make a steak or a hamburger or
literally almost anything else. (Granted, I’m certain the meat they use in smoked meat is
not the same meat you’d use for a steak or even ground beef—it’s probably the
Z-grade scrapins they can form into a tube and fill with garlic powder and
brown sugar. But that’s neither here nor there.)
And none of this matters, because it tastes so good. I’m never thinking “Man, forget that teriyaki meat
stick, I’m savin’ myself for a good ole sirloin steak later.” I’m thinking “Can
I get away with eating three of these meat sticks and also eating steak later?” (The answer is always yes.) And can I use
the benefit of being able to keep a meat stick around for buying a few of them
and eating them over the following week? Yes! Do I do that? No! Do I instead
eat them all in one sitting and then lay on the carpet wondering what I am
doing with my life and what happened to my sense of self-control? Of course!
So anyway, after resisting the siren call of the meat shack
for over a month, I finally gave in to temptation.
I stop one temperate evening and walk into the shop. If
you’ve never been inside a store that almost exclusively deals with cut meats,
let me describe how eat and every one of them looks: it’s a small, very
claustrophobic room that has a distinct smell, probably of cloves or
formaldehyde. They make a valiant if futile effort to sell things that aren’t
meat, like chips and drinks, but they all have long-abandoned logos from
campaigns past, covered with a sickeningly nostalgic coat of dust. There’s a
rack of do-it-yourself seasoning packs, a noble gesture for those outraged by
the reasonable prices who believe they would rather hunt and dress a cow
themselves in order to form weird tubes of meat in the comfort of their own
garage.
I vastly prefer spicy meat snacks, so I asked for that. I
was just sampling, so I turned down the clerk’s offer of a full pound; just two
sticks, thank you. The clerk seemed mildly annoyed at having to stop her
butchering of a cow just to ring up two dollars and change’s worth of product,
but she did her job gamely (ha!).
So I get in my car and immediately dig in. I’m driving, a
meat snack hanging out of my mouth like Tony’s cigar in the title sequence of
The Sopranos. It is…OK. Only mildly spicy, like someone reached for the red
pepper flakes but grabbed parsley flakes instead. Also a little fatty.
Disappointingly, I finished the snack and mentally crossed the store off the
list. Oh well, I thought, maybe next time.
But! I still had one stick left over, and the previous one
literally left a bad taste in my mouth. So I took a bite.
It was spicy.
Like, really spicy.
Like, pull off the side of the road because I can’t see the
road because tears are streaming down my face spicy.
Of course, I’m driving when this happens, and while it’s
quick it’s still gradual. I am, at least fleetingly, a menace to the others on
the road. Caught off guard, I start coughing. Two bites in and I can hardly
breathe.
It was delicious.
I get back on the road but my mouth is on fire. I limp along
to the nearest gas station, where I grab a fountain soda. The workers there
probably thought I was some weirdo, face wet with sweat and throat constantly
clearing, trembling as I take furtive sips from my unpaid-for drink. Back in
the car, I hit the road again, taking tiny bites while gulping down Coke Zero
until it was gone.
I don’t know what was up with that first stick. Maybe they
put twice as much spice in the second and none in the first. Maybe they put it
in the wrong box instead of “mild, fatty flavor”.
Who knows? All I know is that I’ll be back and I have no
self control. Because I have no self control.
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