June 16, 27 J.E.
As I get older, I find my life is filled with tougher and tougher decisions. I find myself yearning for the heady days of youth when times were simple, and whatever decisions I had to make were simple. Take, for example, my recent visit to the supermarket. I like orange juice with pulp, and also orange juice with calcium. The store only had pulpy orange juice without calcium, and calcium orange juice without pulp! What a cruel state of affairs!
I find myself faced with a similar dilemma with spicy food. When I was a child, it was never an issue. As most kids my age, I despised spicy food. The slightest hint of pepper was enough to incur the wrath of my delicate tongue. Yes, those were the days when my tongue still had most of its taste buds, and even McDonald's cheeseburgers tasted exquisite to my immature mouth.
As with most other humans, that faded over time. My taste buds were slowly crushed under the jackboots of time, and the tastes I knew so well when I was young became shadows of their former selves. At last, I understood why my evil mother said that McDonald's cheeseburgers tasted like cardboard. I also learned why my evil father put jalapenos on everything.
Yes, when you get old, you have to resort to ever more extreme measures to try to recapture those flavors lost to the dustbin of time. Hot sauce, peppers, onions, spices...they're all weapons in our arsenal to drag a last few sensations out of our dying tongues. It's a sad thing to slowly lose one of your senses, but it will happen to all of us, and if you don't believe me, you're clearly insane.
So I, too, have adopted a love a jalapenos. I don't eat them whole like my evil father, but I appreciate them on things such as pizza and grilled cheese. I put hot sauce and onions on my hot dogs. I look for the spiciest-sounding foods on menus. I can even tolerate my evil mother's experiments into new recipes. On the bright side, I puke a lot less these days...
There is one major draw back, though, and I may have to cut down my consumption of spicy food. It's not that it gives me any gastrointestinal problems, like some people. Nope, no gas or stomach pains at all. Nevertheless, there is a certain problem that is making life difficult. Let's just say that goodbyes can be very painful.
It's true! Although my mouth may have lost sensitivity, my sensitive little sphincter has not! It strikes me as strange that all of that spicy food induces no reaction until it hits the last half inch of gut on its path to freedom. Why can't it just pass quietly from the bowel to the bowl (HA HA!)? Why oh why do I have to climb the walls every time I drop a load of used jalapenos?
Well, whatever. It's either pleasing my mouth or my ass, and frankly, I use my mouth a lot more. So I guess it's more spicy food for me (sorry anus)! As my taste buds continue to decline, though, I'll no doubt have to resort to more spicy foods. Perhaps someday the poop pains will become unbearable so that even the urge to taste things will become secondary to quelling the fire in my butt. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
I got the pulpy OJ, by the way.