I have something to admit. It's embarrassing and disgusting but it's part of who I am, so here goes: I eat Slim Jim's. I eat those most insidious of impulse items called "meat sticks" that gas stations put right by the register to tempt us of low taste into a violent game of Russian roulette with our stomachs that we lose every time. I'm still unsure as to why I buy these things with the regularity that I do. In all honesty, I probably eat at least three a week, and I'm not talking about the little 25 cent Slim Jim's of my junior high days, I'm talking about the foot long Slim Jim's that are as fat around as an obese twelve year olds' finger.
As embarrassing as it is to put out there, I actually get excited when I buy one. I always rush to my car, put the keys into the ignition, chew through the plastic wrapper, and for one brief fleeting moment I enjoy the Slim Jim not on a physical level, but with the anticipatory fervor children feel the moment they wake up and remember it's Christmas morning. Then I bite down and everything's ruined. If you have had the good sense to avoid Slim Jim's, let me describe that first awful bite for you: there's the "snap" of the Slim Jim then the instant overwhelming horror you feel as you get the industrial grade lubricant they grease it in all over your face, and you realize that you're eating something that is encased in "edible plastic", and you begin chewing what can only be described as shredded newspaper soaked in rehydrated, nondescript animal fat as you feel it slop down your chin region and onto your shirt. It's now that you have to admit to yourself deep down that yes, you are literally eating garbage. This has to be one of the reoccurring low points of my life. Like Sisyphus, I too push a boulder uphill eternally, but my boulder is poop brown, smells like a dead rat and I put it in my mouth.
But why do I keep eating them? I seriously have to ask myself this. There is nothing of nutritional value in them. I'm pretty sure that they cause most kinds of cancer. In fact, I'd wager that they will cause a new kind of cancer that is so resistant to treatment that it ushers in a new age of The Plague. My wife, god bless her soul, doesn't understand why I eat them either. Every time she gets into the car and sits in a pile of hastily discarded Slim Jim wrappers she sighs and gives me that "mom is very disappointed in you" face we've all gotten at some point or another while doing stupid things as children. But that's just it: I'm not a child. I know better. I know that if I eat three of those things in one sitting that I won't get regular diarrhea, but instead become constipated for at least 48 hours, get the most gut wrenching stomach pains imaginable and then delve into an unparalleled toilet experience that initially feels like impending shotgun-butt, but in actuality is a slow, rural-community-destroying mudslide (if that mudslide was made of habanero peppers and rubbing alcohol) that is utterly life ruining. Seriously, Slim Jim's should come with the warning: "Caution: if ingested you will spend no less than one hour in a scalding hot shower and still feel unclean after your bowels have been inevitably torn asunder by this product".
Still though, I eat them. I hate myself every time but I still eat them. Maybe it's the fatalist in me who yearns secretly to die but is too cowardly to do anything other than slowly fill myself up with rancid meat soaked in toxic sludge and flavored with Tabasco brand pepper sauce. Maybe that's it. Maybe that's how I can make it sound poetic.
Or maybe I'm just fucking disgusting. You be the judge.
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