Truesday: Atta, Oh Wait, Oh Shit Boy

Okay then. I’m not going to launch into some worthless tirade about Texas weather, but I will say that it is seriously fucking with my sleep. Well, it’s joining forces with other less-pleasant elements to turn my private slumberland into a deranged dreamscape that would likely force Snake Pliskin to gouge out his last functioning eye.

And it’s the evil cohort of the heated, humid air that is bothering me more than anything else. The ONE thing I did which rendered my night of restful sleep a complete and ruinous failure:

One. Jalapeno. Popper.

Motherfuck that popper for being little more than fried ruthlessness, and my mouth for welcoming that little bastard in.

It was a simple enough situation: I was hungry. I was seated in front of some variety of appetizer. I was going to eat one of the three things in my reach: a red plastic basket, some wax paper, or one of the fried blobs of something-or-other on the wax paper, in the basket.

For the sake of speed I simply took what was on top: the fried ball of whatever. Once my teeth went all the way through that little nugget of disastrous indigestion, I immediately knew that all would soon be lost. The sleep that I was so desperately looking forward to would soon be rendered a failed plan. My many battles with jalapenos, jalapeno juice, and those menacing little seeds have become legend in my own mind.

My body rejects them the same way others stomachs might reject latex paint, boiling motor oil, or hornet spray: with swift violence.

So my night was spent rolling about in bed like a tuna in a net on deck, moaning and crying about the hallucinations I was having whilst writhing in pain between sleep and wake. And that got me to thinking. Well, panicking, really.

I started panicking because it always seems that no matter how much effort is put into something, no matter how much care is implemented, or subtle detail managed, all it takes is one goddamn popper slip-up and everything takes a fast-track trip to the shitter. That, of course, led me to even deeper delusional thoughts. I amplified the popper to galactic proportions by combining it with what my father used to always tell me about people’s perceptions:

“Son, don’t go and make any egregious mistakes in life. Between people, you don’t get many chances to keep a clean reputation. You get one of two marks for everything you do. There is the ‘atta boy!”, which you get when you’re doing well. And then there’s the ‘oh shit’, which comes after the obvious. You need to know that it only takes ONE oh shit to erase a whole life of atta boys.”

And goddamnit if that isn’t the cold-death truth.

So I intermingled my horrendous popper experience with the “atta boy” vs “oh shit” life lesson, as I sweated and toiled whilst staring at the clock above my bed, gassy and unable to find respite. The resultant conclusion: everything I will ever do, knowing myself and how I operate, will end in some variety of “oh shit”. And that I need to get (remain) comfortable with the notion that whatever the hell it is I do (eat a goddamn jalapeno/kryptonite popper before I go to bed), shit’s likely to get a bit carried away and beyond me. Most importantly, the result, the “oh shit”, will very likely obliterate the train of “atta boy” back-pats that I collected up to that point.

And again, I need to be okay with that.

When I woke up fully, and lamented such a dreadful night of shit-sleep, I came to a more usable and reasonable decision: FUCK JALAPENOS.

They aren’t even that good.