I'm a fan of hot sauce. Hell, I'm a fan of hot things, in general. I like spicy food. I recently met my match with an especially hot serving of twelve wings from a local establishment, wings I had consumed dozens of times before but that, on that particular day, well exceeded my level of comfort. To my credit, they were the hottest wings on the menu, and I had consumed them before, but that day those wings put me under the table.
They are covered in a thick habanero sauce, but sometimes the sauce is thicker than other times. Sometimes it is an entirely bearable amount; others, it is not. This time, it definitely was not.
As per usual, I dug into the first two or three wings, thinking that, as always, I would grow accustomed to the stinging in my mouth and be able to enjoy the flavor (I do like the taste of habanero), but the sensation only grew worse.
My stomach burned. My eyes watered. My lips became numb, and when I talked, my mouth, too, watered profusely. It's the kind of place that gives you one big cloth rag rather than a napkin, and the wings were so full of sauce that I quickly ran out of space on the "napkin" and had to resort to licking the red poison off my fingers. Bad idea. Even heaping dollops of bleu cheese dressing and stick after stick of celery could not alleviate this particularly heinous form of discomfort.
I felt true physical pain, like someone had doused my face with kerosene and lit a match. I drank three 32 oz. glasses of Coke and 2 smaller glasses of water and became as miserably full as I was just plain miserable. Sad thing was, I didn't even finish all of the wings.
Needless to say, I've given up on the idea that I can eat anything spicy, but I just read a story on the Times Online that makes my story pale by comparison. Go check it out, because it has definitely cheered me up on this gloomiest of days.
[Help, quick – I’ve unscrewed the top on a ticking bomb]
[img source=fortune cookie (wiki commons)
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