I grew up with this kid, Chris. We weren’t friends. He was just around. Small towns are like that. Everybody is just always around. Chris was one of those boys who grew up in the hills and hollers without much supervision and affection. He was mean and funny and unpredictable and didn’t give a piss about shit. He’d get off the bus in middle school with a Dale Earnhardt t-shirt, a pinch of dip in his lip, and a Mountain Dew bottle scrunched in his back pocket, looking for a fight. I don’t know that I ever really liked Chris, but as a small person scared of most things, I admittedly envied his wholehearted disregard for everything and everyone.
One time, in a tenth-grade ‘health’ class, where the principal assigned an ill-equipped gym teacher to teach kids about abstinence, Chris stood up proudly and said, “Coach Day, I’ve got a foolproof solution for this whole teen pregnancy thing. I do it a couple of times a week. You take one of ’em Oscar Mayer bologna slices out of that cold yellow pack, and instead of making a nice little sandwich with it, you put it in the microwave for exactly five seconds. Once it’s nice and warm, you wrap ’at thing around your pecker, and it’s the best piece of ass you’ve ever had. I’ve been doin’ it for years, and I ain’t never once got a girl pregnant.” Coach Day turned bright pink and the room went black not long after. I’ve yet to laugh as hard as I did that day.
But the last I heard about Chris, he’d given up bologna and had a kid of his own. There was also a rumor a while back that he got caught up with the law after he pumped a couple of slugs into somebody’s gas tank during an altercation at a party down by the river. Who knows.
All this is to say that I just went to the store for beer and caught myself staring into a bright yellow pack of Oscar Mayer bologna. I was standing there thinking about all the lips, tongue, anus, knuckle cartilage, tails, ears, and snout that go into a tube of bologna. I thought about Chris and the hilarity and malice of humanity. Then, I thought maybe that’s all humanity is, one big ol’ tube of bologna, one big ol’ tube of tasty, cancerous farce. And if we humans are just a big ol’ tube of bologna, then Chris is all swine sphincter, shitty and tightly wound, but still, undeniably, a part of it all.
Hello, world.
Wow, never thought about giving out bologna for Valentine’s Day before
great anecdoting !