The Pain Of Cooking

I’ve been sitting here for most of the day trying to figure out how to write my Christmas story. Now, I’ve been working on it all day, but I’ve run into a little problem. I just don’t know how to start writing it.

Yeah, yeah. I’m an idiot.

So instead of beating my head against the wall trying to come up with the “right way” to write my story, I decided to simply write it when I can. Since I’ve already written three pages of the story, I think I deserve a little break.

Especially since I was losing my voice.

I also wanted to tell everybody about a little thing that happened to me last night. It’s a little thing I like to call ‘dinner’. You see, last night for some strange reason I decided that I would cook. That might not seem so important or awe inspiring to you, but to me it’s a very big deal. I don’t like to cook. In fact, you could say I actively avoid doing anything that even resembles cooking if it doesn’t also involve an open flame.

Every man knows that a barbecue is the only way to really cook.

There’s just something so right about an open flame slowly roasting the outside of dead animal flesh. Everything tastes better when it’s cooked over an open flame. Steak, potatoes, chicken, small children, or anything else that you could ever want to eat. They’re even better when drowned in barbecue sauce, pink on the inside and slightly charred on the outside.

Especially the small children.

Anywaste, last night I was going through my pantry what I discovered that I had pasta. I don’t know how old the pasta was, 1988, 1989, or maybe 1991, but it didn’t make a difference to me in the least. All that mattered was that I had something to cook that I might actually be able to eat.

And lord knows I was hungry.

I scrounged up some pasta sauce from the bottom of a ketchup bottle and noticed that in the back of my freezer there was some mold that looked like it could have been some sort of meat at one time in the past. I scraped this mold off the back of the freezer, put it into a pan and started cooking. The pasta was boiling, the sauce was simmering, and the meat was browning nicely. It was at this point that I had another one of my revelations, an epiphany if you will. I realized that I was only cooking for myself and therefore didn’t have to tone down the spices.

My god, I could finally make the perfect sauce.

I literally flew to my spice cabinet and took out all the spices I would need to create the perfect sauce. I had them all, garlic powder, onion powder, black pepper, ground red pepper, and crushed red pepper. I also had my secret ingredient, the one thing that’s guaranteed to rip apart the stomach lining from any human being on the planet. I won’t tell you what it is, but you need to be licensed by the government in order to have it in your home.

Yeah, I got the hook up.

So I added all of the spices, including my secret ingredient, to the sauce and let the whole thing simmer. Then I added the meat-like product (which I am now convinced was sentient) and let the whole thing simmer for about fifteen minutes.

I swear I could hear the meat crying in agony the whole time.

This was going to be the best sauce I ever made. If any of you out there like spicy things the way I do, then you would have loved this sauce. I was crying as I ate this perfect concoction of spicy bliss, this wonderful, acidic nectar of the gods. It didn’t even bother me that I knew I was slowly destroying myself from the inside out.

Oh yeah, I knew I was a dead man come morning.

Throughout the meal I could feel this delicious, spicy, almost-sentient sludge burning a hole in my stomach as it sat there like a piece of white-hot lead in my stomach. I just knew that my anus would be a blistering, festering, open sore for the next four to seven days and that should I venture forth from my apartment people would die on the streets as I walked by. I knew all of this, but it just tasted so good I couldn’t stop eating it. Consequences be damned, I was going to enjoy my spicy meal because it was everything that I ever wanted in a sauce.

This sauce was so good it should go down in the history books as the greatest sauce ever conceived by man.

As I sat on my porcelain throne this morning, bent over double, breathing through my mouth, holding my knees and praying to god that the pain would stop, I knew that I only had myself to blame. I smiled as my sphincter convulsed in agony and the sweat formed on my brow and back. I knew that if it weren’t for my years of training in the back alleys of Chinatown, Korea-row and Indian-alley, eating anything with the little symbol for hot on the menu, I would have died during the night.

And you know what? It would have been worth it.