It Sounded Like A Good Idea at the Time

I like spicy food. The richness of flavor, the aroma that reaches out to tantalize and tingle the taste buds, the way that it settles down with a little fire into your tummy. OOOOOH! What a great meal!

The beans were just right. The crackers sublime. The spice just a bit on the wild side.

But the backlash was all junkyard dog. On those rare occasions where spice isn't nice, there comes the agony of repeat. I have the unfortunate and unladylike habit of burping that comes back to bite me with a vengeance at these moments when the burp is a bit more than just hot air. I am compelled in these circumstances to commiserate with Gollum "It burns us! It burns us!"

Hot, molten lava shot up through my throat and into my left nostril and Eustachian tube. If I had never felt pain before this moment, it would be enough to convince a sane person never to indulge in any spicy additives again. But who said I was sane? It's an evil rumor started by someone who was just jealous that the voices are talking to me instead of them!

I swear, the feeling of the lava was speeding through my Eustachian tube and trickling directly and deliberately onto my left skull plate in the occipital region was a repeat of what Herculaneum must have enjoyed. I could feel the heat through my skin. My left eye, and only my left eye, began to water like Niagara had stopped in for a visit and the fire in my left nostril roasted out the mucous membranes so that I am quite sure that neither will ever be totally whole again.

The back of my throat is now chapped raw. Sandpaper wouldn't have been any more abrasive. I swear that I didn't put that much hot sauce on the beans! Well, maybe just a few teensy shakes of the bottle. It was really much less than usual. I'm sure of it.

But, in this quasi-Shakespearean tragedy that my indulgence has produce, the agony most definitely didn't match the ecstasy. What started out as a pleasant, tingly repast has turned into a pit of fire and brimstone that would make Mephistopheles shrink from the flames. Coward!

WHY do I do this to myself? And why in the hell do I forget from one inferno to the next that I created this monster? Instead of a benevolent and homespun Julia Child-like meal of tenderness and love, I'm more like Frankenstein's child with the spice rack as my accomplice in a masterwork of death and destruction. And I am quite sure I melted a couple of keys on my keyboard with the initial blast. The letters are missing from the "S" and the "A" keys entirely.

One wonders if that is a Freudian slip to keep my subconscious from recognising that the combination of the two handily spells out "ASS" when applied appropriately. I question 'What the great Doctor make of that conundrum?'

In any event, the right hand drawer of my desk is stocked with some mint flavor Rolaids. It's not that they taste like mint. They don't. In reality, they taste like chalk that a 90-year-old school teacher with stockings rolled down to just below the knee would have carried around in her purse snuggled up right next to a bottle of camphor. Maybe slightly better. But not much. The reason I keep them in the drawer isn't so much for their flavor. It's for their fire extinguishing ability.

The icky, chalky taste coats my tongue like so much whitewash and I've begun to feel like all of those suckers that Tom Sawyer roped into painting Aunt Polly's fence.
While the fence might have needed to be painted, there must have been better ways.

I think Vesuvius has begun to subside. The firetrail in my left occipital region is down to a brush fire being peed on by a squirrel to put it out. Eventually my nostril will regain its feeling and, in time, this painful episode of insanity will become a dim memory. I will resume eating food without dipping my tongue into a cup of ice water. I will experience the joy of tasting the flavor of my food again. And one day, I will rejoice in the normal process of digestion that flows in only ONE direction.

Until the next time...

Happy trails, happy campers. And remember, only YOU can prevent forest fires!