Rambling Rhodes

Dinner Rage

Last night, the stars and planets aligned just right to prevent me from having a pleasant eating experience. First, my wife and I went to a local Chinese restaurant, where I ordered "hot and spicy beef." There was no indication in the dish description that sweet and sour sauce would be employed, but when I saw the cook add a half cup of sugar, my suspicions were raised.

Not that I have anything against sweet and sour sauce. I actually like it for dipping crab rangoon, but the key difference lies in the amount. When you dip items into sweet and sour sauce, you're calling the shots; you get just the amount you want. When the decision is left up to the discretion of the cook, on the other hand, you're almost guaranteed to get sweet and soured to death.

There is such a thing as too much sweet and sour, and last night there was just too much sweet and sour. So, I stepped away from the sweet and sour mass and went to Subway.

First, they were out of spinach. That was thing one.

Thing two was, the sandwich artist was new to his craft and ended up slicing the bread in such a way that it was A) sliced too thin and B) sliced all the way through. Those that know Subway know that the bread should be sliced but not bifurcated completely. The bread should be able to open and close, like Pac-Man's mouth. Unfortunately, I didn't realize the sandwich artist's error until I got home.

When I tried to eat the sandwich, it simply would not cooperate. The cloven, too-thinly-sliced bread insisted on falling open like the jaw of Marley's ghost in "A Christmas Carol," spewing the sandwich innards in a sad little pile on the table.

It was at this point that I experienced my first ever bout of "Dinner Rage." I'm not sure what happened, exactly, but all the unfairness that had transpired, from the overly sweet and soured Chinese failure, to the multiple Subway gaffes, boiled inside me and emerged in a forceful yell of "God fuckin' damn it!"

And then I did something purely animalistic. In my blinded state of Dinner Rage, I started eating the sandwich pile directly off the table like a dog eating from its bowl. I took mad, angry, forceful large bite after bite, foregoing any use of my hands, just diving in face first, attacking the pile like a T-Rex tearing flesh from a carcass. Thankfully, my wife was eating in another room, so she was spared the whole ghastly, frankly sad spectacle.

I came back to my senses once the sandwich was ingested, but for a while there I wondered if I'd be so inclined to use silverware ever again.

Dinner Rage, man. Where did THAT come from?

Posted by Ryan at April 20, 2009 01:09 PM | TrackBack