Today, not only do I bring you a shitty photo from a bathroom stall, I also bring you a motto I've lived by for more than 15 years, "Hot Dogs Suck."
Hot Dogs are an abomination to meat, and I use the term "meat" as loose as the laws of what is allowed to be stuffed into these vile, spare parted, tubed casings.
I've never wanted to be an Oscar Mayer Wiener and here are two reasons why...
Picture it. High School. 1995. Bourbon County, Kentucky. Nirvana blaring from a radio station that would soon be turned into something known as Lite FM. Angst seeping through teens sweaty flannel shirts. And me on a marching band field holding a trombone. YES, I WAS THAT GUY.
As 75 of us shuffled around a football field preparing for a marching band competition on a late Friday night, YES I KNOW THIS IS THE LAMEST THING EVER, the band moms decided to serve us a health dinner of hot dogs, Fritos and Twinkies. I instead decided to skip this K-mart food court knock off and drove 5 people to a gas station for something more palatable.
The next morning, as we loaded our band instruments and prepared to leave for what would be a waste of a perfectly good Saturday, 18 kids failed to show up. By noon, another 23 kids were throwing up or demanding clean linen undergarments. By the time we went on the field only 43 of the 75 people in the band marched. The experience was as close to 'Nam as I'll ever get. People were passing out, sweating profusely and throwing up on the field. Not sure if you've ever seen anybody throw up in a tuba, but I have—through the mouthpiece.
We can't blame the Twinkies or the Fritos for this, for this, for this HOT DOG FEVER. Nay! We all know, Twinkies and Fritos are atomic bomb and rapture proof! Satan and his army will be dining on corn chips long after the mortals are burned alive or hung up by their toenails from the nearest Wal-Mart.
For this horrid outbreak, I blame HOT DOG FEVER!
My second reason for getting "Hot Dogs Suck" tattooed between my shoulder blades comes from an old college friend, we'll call him Steve. One summer, Steve's uncle got him a job at meat facility. Not a slaughter house or a packing plant but a meat facility. According to Steve, there were differences, significant differences between the three.
On Steve's first day, his manger handed him a long dowel rod and told him he'd be "manning the trough". Steve of course had no clue what this meant. As he reached his post, he slowly realized his $10.50 per hour responsibility.
Steve was to use his dowel rod to flick bones out of what he described as, "a gutter of raw meat sewage." As the testicles, eyeballs and leftover portions of animals slid by, Steve would kick bones out before they got to a rotating circular saw blade in the trough. Miss a bone and the river of meat would back up and the saw would stop spinning.
At first, he thought all this random meat just had to be chopped up before the meat facility dumped it into a landfill or ground it into chum for animal consumption. Wrong. Steve later learned this was the "hot dog trough."
So for 15 years, I haven't touched a hot dog. Can't come near them without getting queasy. Brats, are barely passable. Lil Smokies and I don't see eye-to-eye either. I know there are hot dogs out there today that aren't made of salvage yard animal parts, but I can't bring myself to get near them. Maybe when I slip into dementia and the nurse is grounding them up for me, I'll make piece with wieners, but until then, "Hot Dogs Suck."
No comments:
Post a Comment