Things I Do Not Reccommend

I'm better. I have been for most of a week now. I tend to bounce back from illness pretty quickly, and, in fact, I was on solid food the day following the virus, with the result that I almost immediately had material for a blog, and have taken an entire week to get around to setting it out because I kept getting distracted by other things. So, in that spirit, here are a couple of things I do not reccommend, and why.

• A Double Whopper (with cheese)
• Beef broth
• White wine

Now, it would be easy here to take the high road, and simply claim that you shouldn't have all three of these things at the same time, but that's not what I'm about here. Firstly:

The Double Whopper. Two days after my adventures, I felt well enough to venture out in search of sustenance, and I was hungry. Man, was I hungry. During the period of the virus I had had nothing solid, in fact nothing substantive at all, and the following day very little; so, I reasoned, this would be a good time to embark on something I had not had in many years, in order, if nothing else, to re-visit why.

Now, a Burger King Whopper is a hell of a thing. Oversized bun, oversized beef patty, piled and drenched with toppings, there is always something vaguely suspicious about it, as there should be about any example of, to paraphase Bryson, drippy food. Some years back-- Gad knows how many-- I discovered what exactly it was about the whopper that is being hid, by way of ordering and consuming (or, if memory serves, attempting to consume) the Double version.

And here's what it is: the meat. It is, in fact, a flacid, droopy, grainy, dry piece of institutional grade efliuvia. All the dressings are there to distract you from that. But, as always happens in corporate setting, not only does the right hand not know what the left is doing, for all the right hand knows the left hand is a toaster. Despite the marvelous job the camouflage has done in hiding the fatal flaws of the product, the impulse that says "Hey, if they'll buy one, sure as hell they'll buy two!" That this doubles the mass and presence of the offending article does not enter the equation, verily, does not become part of the cogitation, insofar as such operations can be considered cognitive. So, where with the whopper, you have a chance of getting through the thing without incident, the chances are that, if you are any kind of sentient, sensitive human being with a reasonable palate, at some point in this excercise (the Double version, or Whopper 2.Blech), it will occur to you that you hvae a mouth full of gray, greased sawdust (albeit finely cut), and wonder if you either could or should swallow it.

Beef broth. Now, I specifically mean Campbell's, and for some of you that might raise objection enough already, and I mean as consumed alone, as a meal. And I mean a whole can.

I can consume an entire can of beef broth, reconstituted. In the aftermath of the Whopper debacle, I found myself not hungry for a conventional supper that evening, snacked on a bit of this and that here and there, and found myself standing over the stove at something after midnight.

This is not an uncommon occurrence for me. Fairly often, my body will simply instruct my unconscious mind that it is hungry and popping out for a snack. The mind will take this as a perfectly reasonable suggestion, and think nothing of it, until coming out of unconsciousness to find, say, a large pastrami sandwich being assembled on the production floor, at which point it will judiciously counsel "More mustard."

This time, the mind, before returning to it's inert state, had the wherewithal to say something to the effect of "Nothing too big or complex, you were just ill, and I don't want to go though that again." So, it was over a pan of quickly heating beef broth that the mind found itself focusing it's fuzzy, slowly focusing vision this night.

Now, the mind was able to counsel against imbibing the fluid until it had cooled somewhat, but not enough, resulting in a slight scalding of the gums, lips, tongue and palate. But it was still sleep-weakened enough that, when it's request to stay up for the rest of Ghostbusters was met with the bargain "OK, if we can have the rest of the broth in the mean time," it seemed not just reaonable, but in fact a bargain. In return, however, the mind decided it needed a glass of white wine, just one, to aid in returning to sleep at the film's conclusion. The final result was that, when lying down, fluid sloshed around the stomach, which, trying to process said fluid, protested in it's favorite, sadistic way, which is to contract painfully. So it was that sleep was staved off by part of another hour.

Now, I know the easy conclusions ("What the hell do I care?" and "What a dumbass!" spring to mind) would be easy to reach, but I would counsel you, dear reader against them. You should conclude that your humble author, this simple poet, has simply performed the role of the Good Scientist, undergoing these experiences, collecting the data, and presenting the results, cheifly so that you, dear reader, won't have to.

And when I say I don't reccommend these things, I mean specifically that I don't reccommend them to you. I figure to be doing this kind of bizzaro crap all the way to my grave.