Endless Shrimp

“We eat so many shrimp,

I got iodine poisoning.”

~Three 6 Mafia

Endless shrimp comes around like an annual comet, reliable in both its appearance and destruction. Every year I miss the all you can eat shrimp festival by a week or two, and a skull-crushing pressure of  misery smashes me down into a dark place. It’s a sensation I can only relate to Homer Simpson missing Mr. T’s mall appearance.

I wake up and go to the bathroom, telling the mirror I’m good enough, I’m good enough. I’m done showing up to the bus station of life two minutes too late. I’m getting to the endless shrimp. I’m good enough.

I lace my boots.

I arrive.

I stare down the pale and unwelcoming shrimp pasta dish, yet to my surprise, I see myself staring back. I see the monster I am becoming, I feel the simmering churn within me building up to a boil.

I could sit in this franchise restaurant and eat shrimp forever, I could endless shrimp to no end, devouring waves of (one out of six) shrimp dishes and leaving plates in my wake –  but why, at what cost? The cost of my humanity, my human condition. I refused to let myself transcend into some post-ego-death shrimp eating being of light! Yeay, it may be a higher tier of existence, but I have such love and happiness in my human form that I will never leave behind – not for this, no.

I need an escape. I need a box.

I leave in a desperate hurry and open the throttle as four Japanese cylinders thrash and burn, differentials spreading their 165 horses to my four tires that grip the road and turn and bring me away from the dark nexus of all possible futures.

I come home to my dog. She looks at me through a haze of flash photography. “How could you? How?”

“How have you?

How have you?”

~Modest Mouse

So many shrimp, born only to die, dying only for me. My stomach hurts and I feel disillusioned.

Keep on Chooglin’