So I’m having a fairly annoying day today, and the last thing I need is for Facebook to tell me that I am a huge loser. I am already in a bad mood, plus I am totally trying to lose weight right now like everyone else in America. Well, this afternoon I quit caring and made some not so healthy choices.  I shit you not, I sit down in front of the Facebook after my “binge” and these are what greet me on the right hand side, like I’m not already crippled with guilt and self-shame as it is.  Quit with your Minority Reporting!  It was a funny at first but now you are just being mean!!

First of all, I don’t even really like doughnuts, so fuck off.

Guess what? I’m lactose intolerant, dicks. I guess I did forget to add that to my “likes” though, so my bad on that.

Oh goody!!!!  Assholes.

Jesus Christ I don’t even have my relationship status listed.  It is CERTAIN no boys will ever like be because I ate a hamburger today.

WTF Facebook!?

On my lunch break this afternoon, I decided to drive through Taco Bell (for a grilled chicken quesadilla, calm down, I’m not endorsing fast food, I was in a hurry) and as I approached the giant picture menu, I was unable to fully wrap my mind around what I thought I saw. For, you see, pictured above the Beef Gordita Supremes and the Taco Fresco Box Meals and the Beefy Cheesy Potato Double Flash Fried Nacho Tacos was a new menu item. A menu item so brilliant… so NECESSARY, that only in my wildest dreams would I ever be able to imagine something of this opulence to be made available for public drive-thru consumption. Upon first noticing this blessed gift obviously sent straight down from the heavens above by God himself, I was still several cars back in line, so I really had to just tell myself to take deep, deep breaths and wait until I got a little closer to be sure. As the Subaru full of office staff pulled forward to receive their Mexican fare, and the Ford Windstar, rocking back and forth with the delighted squeals of half a dozen kindergarten aged children about to lay hands on Dora the Explorer Fiesta Meals pulled up to the window, it became my turn to place an order.

I had become the chosen one.

Drive Thru Attendant: “Hi, thanks for choosing Taco Bell, how may I help you?”

Me: “Yeah, hi. I’ll take your grilled chicken case-a-dill-a, with a side of sour cream.”

Drive Thru Attendant: “The sour cream will be $0.35 extra.”

Me: “Seriously?”

Drive Thru Attendant: “Yeah.”

Me: “Wow. Ok…”

Drive Thru Attendant: “And to drink?”

The moment had come.

Me: “Um, please correct me if I’m wrong, but your menu out here says you have margaritas?”

Drive Thru Attendant: “Yes ma’am. They are new. We have traditional or strawberry.”

Me: “Ok, I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t seeing things…”

Drive Thru Attendant: “Which one do you want?”

Me: “How big can you get them?”

Drive Thru Attendant: “We carry small or large.”

Me: “And how big is a large?”

Drive Thru Attendant: “Ma’am… it’s a large cup. It is our Frutista Freeze large cup. Do you want one of those?”

Me: “Can I have two? Is it only one per customer?”

Drive Thru Attendant: “No ma’am, you can have as many as you want.”

Me: “I don’t understand how this is legal. Ok, I will take two large. I mean I have to get back to work.”

Drive Thru Attendant: “Please pull around for your total.”

I pulled forward, elated. FINALLY. WHY hadn’t society allowed this before. And HOW did Taco Bell get the green light for this project!? I was certain that this new concept in convenience mixed drinks would be fairly watered down, and they couldn’t possibly taste THAT good, but I didn’t particularly give a fuck, I was about to drink two margaritas for lunch from a drive thru fast food restaurant.

Drive Thru Attendant: “That will be $7.82?

Me: “Here you go. Can you make mine a little stronger, or do you guys like have a specific measuring thing you use?”

Drive Thru Attendant: “What?”

Me: “Like, can you put just a little more tequila in mine, or do you have to really stick to the formula or whatever?”

Drive Thru Attendant: “Are you being serious?”

Me: “What?”

Drive Thru Attendant: “Ma’am… these don’t have alcohol in them. Are you kidding me?”

Me: “WHAT!? Are you kidding ME!? Why would you call them margaritas!?”

Drive Thru Attendant: “Ma’am… they are just a new fruit drink that we are offering.”

Me: “How are these any different than your other assorted fruit drink options!?”

Drive Thru Attendant: “Ma’am, they taste like margaritas. Our smoothies and Fruitista Freezes are completely different flavors.”

Me: “You have LITERALLY ruined my life, I hope you know that. Tell your Marketing department to go to hell.”

Drive Thru Attendant: “I will do that. Thank you.”

FUCK YOU TACO BELL. FUCK YOU IN THE FACE.

Originally published on MPLS.TV

“I’m not going to order that by myself,” [she] shouted into the phone.  I don’t know why the hell not.  Everything I’ve heard suggests – no, unequivocally states – that the new KFC Double Down is absolutely delicious.  So it can’t be that she’s embarrassed; that there would be some question about her taste in cuisine.  So maybe it’s that some condescending KFC aficionado would be watching her every move from some dark corner of the restaurant, writing on his blog about the crazy white lady that just walked in – fooled by the marketing hype and hipster appeal of the obviously satirical sandwich that was created solely to reinvigorate the waning youth market of the once dominant KFC franchise.  Or maybe it’s because the KFC I’m making her go to is in a bad part of town (read: black neighborhood).  I don’t know.  Look, I can’t speculate as to the reasons, but I will – she’s totally racist.

The last thing death row inmate Danielle Nathaniel Simpson ever ate was four pieces of fried chicken, biscuits and gravy, and milk.  The last thing Robert Lee Thompson ate was fried chicken, french fries, onion rings, fired okra, jalapeño pepper, and milk.  Larry Bill Elliott requested that his final meal not be revealed to the public (which I guess is some huge controversy).  I’ve been reading Dead Man Eating Weblog for a while, and I’ve noticed that many of the final meals for death row inmates include fried chicken.  Not that I plan on being put to death any time soon, but I should probably have a plan for my final meal, right?  And if I’m to do that then there’s a hell of a lot of fried chicken I have yet to eat, because if my rudimentary polling of a moderately popular internet blog is any indication – fried chicken is the greatest thing ever.  Ever.  And who makes the best fried chicken? Besides Mama.  No, not Popeye’s.  Think bigger.  Long John Silver’s?  That’s fish you idiot.  Buffalo Wild Wings?  No, no, no.  That’s just a KFC for white people.  Oh wait, of course! KFC!

“Our car stinks now.  Oh, and the drive-up had bulletproof glass,” she said as she tossed the brown KFC bag on the kitchen counter.  Probably because the Double Down is $5 and change and so delicious that eventually people are going to start robbing the place to get their fix.  If nothing else, KFC will always be remembered for being prepared.  That, and forcing you to go in the restaurant to hold them up.  I applaud their commitment to curbing laziness.  You know, I wonder if any of the death-row inmates committed KFC-related offenses during their criminal careers.  Is it possible that one might kill for the very fried chicken that he or she eats just before being put to death for the crime of murdering for chicken?  You bet your ass it is.  The KFC murders of 1983 remained unsolved until November of 2005 when Darnell Hartsfield and Romeo Pinkerton were arrested and charged with the murders of five KFC employees.  Wikipedia says: “On the evening of September 23, 1983, just before the restaurant closed, armed robbers held up the KFC in Kilgore. The five people in the restaurant at the time (who were either employees of the restaurant or were waiting for someone there) were abducted, taken to a nearby field, and each executed in the back of the head with the exception of the manager who ran and was also shot in the head.”

Okay so they didn’t get the death penalty, but it was at least an option so I’m satisfied with my story.  Anyway, the point is this: the new KFC Double Down sandwich is real, which means two things.  First, the sammich really only exists insomuch that the mere suggestion of it provides us a source of meaning to apply to an otherwise normal pile of fried food; and second, you can jam one in your stupid mouth RIGHT NOW.  That said, I have one sitting in front of me stinking up the place so I better get to it (although as I’ll discover later, your immediate surroundings will smell like KFC for some time after the sandwich has been consumed).

If you haven’t noticed by now, the smell is not good.  I haven’t had KFC since I was a child so of course my expectations of it were like those that an acid freak might have for an orange – it can do anything.  Only this time instead of being a sparkling sunshine sphere of indescribable beauty, the orange turns into an old pair of fanged gym shorts that steals my penis.  Surely not something I would like to experience just moments before I die.  But then again, does it really matter?  Let’s think about this as if it were a game – that is, consuming this sandwich is part of a deCerteauian practice designed to prepare me for a time when eating the sandwich has actual pragmatic effects.  I’m learning that the situational context of being executed might afford me some unusual possibilities – not the least of which is consumption without consequence.  That is, I eat this awful sandwich and then experience horrible consequences for that consumption extending well into the next day.  What if those moments following consumption were known to not exist?  Or maybe they exist, but only as fantasy.  So if instead of eating for myself – eating for my body, for nutrition – I’d be eating for nothing more than the memory of eating.

I can’t, or perhaps won’t, pick this thing up like a sandwich as it’s intended.  I mean, this thing is solid meat.  I’m no savage.  I eat with a knife and fork.  First bite is not good.  I try to pour whisky on my tongue to scare away the peppery tang and hot grease, but it just bends away from me as if the Double Down has generated some magnetic field around my mouth that repels anything but more KFC.  Second bite and I’m done.  Shit, no I’m not.  Some primitive urge takes hold and compels me to continue.  I get through half of the sandwich and realize that it doesn’t exist as something that CAN taste bad.  It’s simply not possible.  It’s an indulgence.  Nobody actually believes this is a meal, it’s too absurd.  Our discourse has already established that (after all, there’s no bun!).  And if one were to put the Double Down sandwich on top of a salad we’d all point and laugh at the irony of it.  Why?  Because food is no longer tied to any logic of desire.  Food is a nutritional tactic to be mastered.  And if someone can momentarily retrieve that logic of desire (when eating out at a restaurant, or having dessert), one is said to “indulge.”  And indulgence is a loss of control – it is a loss of one’s mastery.

So I’ve lost control.  I’ve consumed this weird creature, and its demon eggs will lay inside me until one day they’re called up to release their evil hunger upon my soul and I am once again forced to get me some KFC.  It will drive me to do inhuman things, and I am powerless to stop it.  Because it’s a metaphor.  For sex.

You know, I’ve hung out with some pretty wild ones in my day. I could tell you about all the crazy nights at Studio 54 with Mother T., back before she got deep into the Indian mysticism stuff, or about the back entrance to Jimmy Carter’s “peanut farm,” and suffice it to say that if I were you, I’d stay far away from the Dalai Lama’s high-stakes poker game – it took me six months to learn how to walk right without that toe. But Jesus? Don’t even get me started on that guy. Sometimes I have to ask myself: what wouldn’t Jesus do?

Like last month, Jesus comes in to the office one day and he’s like “let’s go to Hawaii!” Before I even know it, he’s taken out his magical Jesus teleporter – it’s how he makes it to all his appointments, I guess – and boom. We’re on Oahu, on the highest cliff you’ve ever seen. And Jesus just jumps off, right over the cliff! I yell after him “man, you might die,” and he just yells back “been there, done that!”

Talk about a sanctified pair! I think he resurrected maybe five times that night alone! When he got me back to work, he sneezed a little “milk-of-human-kindness” on my boss and I ended up with a raise out of the whole deal.

And he is the absolute best wingman. Whenever we go out to bars, he takes the ugly friend without even thinking twice. I asked him about it once, and he said he sort of has a thing for the downtrodden, so I don’t even feel guilty about it anymore. And anyway, even if I did, I know he’d forgive me like that – not a grudge-holder, that Jesus.

Plus, he keeps my tabs way down; all I have to do is order the lady a water, and when she turns her back, Jesus turns it into a cosmo, or a mai-tai, or whatever she wanted. When I tell him it’s a miracle, and he doesn’t have to do that for me all the time, he’s just like “hey, dude, the only miracle here would be if you were able to get tail without liquoring her up; I’m just helping out a bro.”

But it’s not like he’s just there for me, oh no. Like I said, Jesus doesn’t even know the meaning of the word “limits.” He said it had something to do with a desert quest he took once – sounded sort of like a horrible “Outward Bound” experience.

Point is, the morning after, no one ever has a better story than Jesus. One time he teleports in to brunch and he’s still got a ball-gag in his mouth that he can’t get out because his hands are nailed into a plank – I mean, the guy likes it kin-ky. I asked him if he didn’t think his dad might get a little pissed off at him for some of the crazy shit he pulls in the bedroom (or in the bar bathroom!), because, I mean, the guy is pretty protective of the family name from what I understand, and Jesus just looked at me, absolutely straight-faced, and says “he’s the one who made me flesh, am I right?”

Even though he has enough endorsement deals to buy up half the eastern seaboard, I’m pretty sure the guy hasn’t paid for a meal in his entire life, and he eats out all the time. He’ll be going crazy, ordering ten, twelve appetizers for the table, getting the two most expensive entrees on the menu “so he can see which he likes better,” you know, big-shot stuff. Then when the waitress comes with the check, he’ll just touch her hand, and say to her, in this solemn voice he has, “my daughter, ’tis better to give than to receive,” – the guy is just a riot, I’m telling you – and at least half the time, we just get up and walk out, no problem! If that doesn’t work, he might give the manager a chance to talk to a dead relative, which usually gets us comped, or, if the boss is being a real dick, he’ll just replenish the restaurant’s walk-ins with frozen bread rolls and about a thousand dollars-worth of fresh fish; I have never seen that one fail. He’s also managed to rack up quite a tidy little sum in bets with non-believers on whether or not he can do it. I mean, if I tried to pull that stuff, I’d end up washing dishes for a week, but Jesus can just work it. It’s really pretty awe-inspiring.

I was talking with him just last night while we were watching “Dog the Bounty Hunter” – he just can’t get enough of that guy – and I told him that I wished I could have the sort of charmed life he had. He turns to me and he’s like “Larry, I had to be crucified, die, and be buried to get this life, and you can’t even imagine the burden the weight of Christendom can be.”

I felt horrible – after all, I was just making conversation, hardly paying attention to what I was saying – so I got down on my knees and started to say an Our Son to let him know I didn’t mean anything by it. He stands up, all wrath-of-god, with fire shooting out of the sides of his head and a flaming sword in his hand that he definitely didn’t find at my place, staring at me like he’s going to take revenge on the whole Warren family, and just when I’m literally pissing my pants, Jesus starts cracking up. “Larry,” he says, choking a little on some of the sulfur he’d just released “Larry, I’m fucking with you. Of course it’s amazing – totally worth it.” Then, just to show there were no hard feelings, he whipped up a round of Harvey Wallbangers and called up a few of his latest converts to “make things interesting.”

If Jesus is the one saying it, I have a deep and abiding faith that statement will come true. In fact, I would swear three times before the cock crowed for morning: I don’t know anything that guy wouldn’t do.