I Shall Sup Upon the Blood of My Enemies and Taste Vengeance
I stopped eating sugar a week and a half ago and it has completely changed my life, in the sense that I am filled with a bottomless rage that can only be quelled by spilling the blood of my enemies and also my skin looks amazing.
Candidly, I have lost it. I stopped eating sugar because health or whatever, and while I am heartened to see improvement in some of the things that led me to do this, I am now on day three of a psychic breakdown in which everything is infuriating and the slightest inconvenience feels like a personal affront that must be avenged with the full force and might of the United States military. Actually it might be day four. It could also be day 13,003 and I’ve always been like this, I no longer remember because my heart knows only fury and an all-consuming hunger for vengeance. (But not for sweets, oddly enough, so there’s that. Wellness!)
For example, today en route to my car I dropped my keys on the ground, and the fact of having to bend down, pick them up, and stand up straight again had me so incensed I spat, “FFFUCK you you fucking F@GGOTS” toward the sidewalk where they lay, really hitting those F’s too, spittle flying off my lips like Sylvester the Cat. It was a lot! I’m all for the marginalized reclaiming epithets because it infuriates straight men, and that’s praxis. But there’s a time and a place. When you just hurl that word at some errant car keys you dilute its power to bully “masc 4 masc” tops and theater queens who insist on singing showtunes in karaoke bars. Keep it sacred, you know?
But that was nothing compared to what happened when I got into my car and dropped them again, into the recesses of my car’s console, at which I shrieked, verbatim: “SON OF A BITCHASS BASTARD SHITFUCKING JESUS ASSEATING CHRIST FUCKING COME ONNNN! FUCK!” while pounding my fists into the steering so intently at one moment I thought I’d broken it off its axis. The only thing that stopped this tirade was the fact I was screaming so hard my throat dried out. When I finally arrived at the Starbucks I was going to and found its bathroom door locked, something in me broke like a dam and I just openly bellowed, out loud, in a public facility of foodservice, “Are you FUCKING kidding me?” as if the entire staff of Starbucks location #16109, its customers and suppliers, the construction team who built it, the factory workers who manufactured the building materials and the engineers who designed them had all somehow conspired together to ensure I and my bladder were left to twist in the wind for the purposes of laughing at my agony. Thankfully it was very loud in there and nobody heard me, which added insult to injury at the time but I now see as providential.
In my defense, I am already at a 7 out of 10 upon entering a Starbucks on my best day anyway simply because I would kill my entire fucking family with a knife if it meant Starbucks would put the goddamn half-and-half back in the lobby so that I could make my coffee the way I want it instead of having to say, “just a splash of half-and-half, literally a splash, just seriously like a spoonful, like bloop! just a gesture of half-and-half, the suggestion, an innuendo if you will, merely the unsubstantiated rumor of half-and-half circulating around the cup which nobody will confirm nor deny, just very very light on the half-and-half please” and then STILL receiving a glass of fucking milk into which someone dripped two drops of coffee with a beral pipet.
You look at me like I’m crazy, but I have lived in five different locales since the pandemic rescinded our agency over coffee preparation and have also done two months-long stints driving all over this country in the past year and this is a consistent experience across all Starbucks. It happens in Chicago, it happens in Los Angeles, it happens in St Louis, it happens at the Starbucks inside the King Sooper’s in Boulder, Colorado just before you climb up into the Rockies and the one inside the City Market in Moab, Utah on the way to Arches National Park and the one inside the Target in Eureka, California and come to think of it the one in downtown Eureka, California too as well as the one that adjoins the Qdoba in the rest area in Colby, Kansas and the one by my brother’s house in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and the one down the road from the Holiday Inn Express Scottsdale Desert Ridge and the one off I-75 in Cincinnati, Ohio in the same parking lot as the Chick-Fil-A.
It happens at all of them. Every one. 100% of the time. It matters not where nor when you visit one of the Starbucks family of coffee shops nor how emphatically you beseech, “please, PLEASE, I am begging you from the molecules of the marrow in my bones, PLEASE go easy on the half-and-half,” you will receive a glass of milk into which a coffee bean once farted 14 years ago. It is as predictable as the tides, as reliable as the rising and setting of the sun, and respectfully (respectfully! I support the unionization efforts! I bullied Howard Schulz on Twitter when he tried to run for president! I once told a dude berating a Starbucks employee to, and I quote, “chill”! I am on the employees’ side!) I would like answers. I would like answers! What is going on over there? Where is Joe Biden on this? Honestly fuck student loans and infrastructure and codifying basic human rights in the midst of tyrannical judicial overreach, I am a single-issue voter and that issue is getting the coffee condiments back into the hands of the people. Build this back better! Fuck!!
Do you see how out of sorts I am? Honestly I’d just go jump face-first into an industrial vat of black strap molasses and swim through it like Scrooge McDuck to stop this madness but I have the kind of family health history that makes my body immediately start roasting me any time I so much as muse about what it might be like to live to 90. “90?! Bitch you’ll be lucky if you live long enough to join the AARP, have you seen the genetic betrayal that is your legacy?! It’s giving TYPE 2 DIABETES it’s giving HEART DISEASE it’s giving MODERATE TO SEVERE PLAQUE PSORIASIS (probably). Not 90! LOLOLOLOL it’s the delusion for me!!!” So here I am, tending to my blood sugar like a fucking asshole.
But as deranged as all this is, here is the moment I knew this sugar detox was actually working, by which I mean here is how I knew I had completely lost my fucking mind precisely as the internet warned I would while withdrawing from my decades-long sugar addiction: After taking my seat in the corner of the Starbucks yesterday, gently sipping my cold brew while dissociating into the middle distance, I found myself thinking, “I will find that motherfucker who took my campfire ashes and I kill him with my bare hands.”
Allow me to explain.
As I briefly wrote about a few months ago, I spent part of this spring traveling the west, and before that trip went cattywampus (story for another time, when you’re older), I had begun cataloging it in a series of missives for your eyes, one of which was entitled:
“Someone Took The Ashes Out of My Firepit On May 29th And I Have Been Seething About It Ever Since”
That grudge was unhinged enough when I began writing about it on June 3rd, but May 29th is now three months, three weeks and two days ago. I’ve had entire romantic attachments that resolved more quickly than this grudge, about which I will now tell you instead of doing what I want to do right now, which is, like, IDK drop-kick a rotisserie chicken full of M-80s through a plate-glass window or something.
While camping in Moab, Utah this spring I came back from a hike one day to find the ashes and old coals had been scooped from my firepit with such thoroughness I could read the manufacturer’s logo in the bottom, and even now as I type about it nearly an entire fiscal quarter later I am seething with an indignance that has raised my blood pressure to a point where blood thinners are indicated. Who fucking takes someone’s firepit ashes?!
And before you ask the logical question: No, the Bureau of Land Management had not been by to clean out all the firepits because I am the precise amount of insane that I did a walk-through of my end of the campground to survey my neighbors’ firepits and they were resplendent with cinders. It was almost lurid, the ashy riches I found! So don’t gaslight me. I know what I saw and what I saw was THEFT!
Now who cares about some ashes, you say. Sure. But as you know if you’ve ever made a campfire, the ashes and old chunks of charred wood are a great help in quickly getting a campfire to hot-coal status, and this is good if, like me, you enjoy eating incinerated Johnsonville brats out of a charred pouch of aluminum foil you rammed into the coals of your campfire because you’re too lazy to cook like a normal person and too broke to drive into town.
So imagine my boundless fury when I return to camp from hiking the Fisher Towers to find that some douche driving a Lincoln Navigator from fucking Nebraska (of course) took my ashes and coals, forcing me to start from scratch. How do I know it was the douche driving a Lincoln Navigator from Nebraska? Well first of all, name me one good thing that has come from Nebraska besides legendary character actress June Squibb’s Oscar-nominated performance in the critically acclaimed 2013 Alexander Payne dramedy Nebraska.
Name me one, and it can’t be corn on the cob. See? You can’t!
I drove across the entirety of Nebraska back in 2003 and not only was it stultifying in a way that seemed actively sinister but it was also a cicada year, and they were so loud I could hear them inside my car while driving 85 miles an hour with the air conditioning running and whatever reprehensible bullshit I was listening to in 2003 (probably Gwen Stefani, fucking hell) blaring out of the stereo. The place is just outright menacing. I did stop at a Dairy Queen in the middle of nowhere at which I had an excellent Mint Oreo Blizzard, however, so you can add that to the list with June Squibb and corn on the cob if you absolutely must, but it won’t change the fact that Nebraska is ass, and that is why when I saw the guy with the Lincoln Navigator with Nebraska plates sitting at an adjacent campsite enjoying a roaring campfire I instantly knew that’s who took my fucking ashes and coals.
I think I’ve handily made my point, but I am a democrat at heart and understand state origins alone are pretty thin grounds on which to convict so allow me to habeas corpus this shit by painting you a picture of the man himself, who I decided is named Brendan, because… well, obviously. You ever met a Brendan? Garbage, the lot of them. Not worth the paper they’re printed on!
So for starters, Brendan had Oakley sunglasses which means, of course, he’s an Oakley Sunglasses Guy, and this alone would be enough to send him to super-max if the system weren’t so broken. But it wasn’t just the Oakleys. He was also wearing not only a fitted t-shirt with one of those rococo crucifixes embroidered on the back but also those jeans from 2005 that have embellished pockets and a boot cut.
You know the jeans I’m talking about, the ones with visible stitching and all kinds of extranous buttons and rivets and distressing and “whiskering” and 3-D pockets on the back that often also have flaps for some reason and all kinds of other weird decorative shit that makes you look at them and think, I don’t know how and I don’t know why but in some way by some means these jeans are racist. These jeans marched on Charlottesville. These jeans have an account on Truth Social. These jeans, and those embellished pockets specifically, yelled “f@ggot” out a car window at me once. These jeans insist the Civil War was about states’ rights and Obama was born in Djibouti and vaccines are made from abortions and I don’t know how I know any of this but I just do, like in what Glennon Doyle calls my Knowing™.
Anyway, you know the jeans I’m talking about, the racist 3-D pocket jeans! Well Nebraska dude was wearing those jeans, and a rococo crucifix Affliction t-shirt and Oakleys. It was like if an Ed Hardy trucker hat was a person, just full Bush-era, Great Value Dave Navarro regalia but in 2022 and to borrow a phrase coined during the epoch from which this dude seemed to have teleported, “That’s a lot of look.” The styling was so expertly executed I instinctively ducked thinking he was going to throw a flip-flop at me for voting for John Kerry. (Please click that link, you won’t believe it.) He stepped out of that Lincoln Navigator and I was like “Oh no, it’s a Swift Boat Veteran for Truth™ KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!”
(And THAT ladies and gentlemen makes two posts in a row that reference the 2004 presidential campaign of John Forbes Kerry! Might I interest you in a Patreon subscription?)
Have you guys tired of 2000s references yet or should I keep going, because I feel like I learned everything about this dude just from that first glimpse, like that he followed Puddle of Mudd around like Phish back in ‘02, and that he makes his son take showers because baths are gay, and that he still has the Halle Berry issue of Maxim in his toiletside magazine caddy for jerk-jerk time because “I’m not into Black chicks but I make an exception for Halle Berry.” You know you know who I’m talking about. You know you know! And he obviously took my fucking ashes.
But as Johnny Cochrane famously said, “If nothing but the stereotypes fit, you must acquit” so let me go get a bad Marcia Clark perm real quick and continue mounting my case.
After I’d been back at camp for a few minutes, he appeared at the junction of the walkways that led to our adjacent campsites and eyed me as if on watch, like my rusting Honda CR-V was full of a marauding band of rogue Antifas waiting to pounce. Just standing there with his ropy hairy arms (mmmmmph) folded in front of his ample pecs (unnnggph) staring at me like “And what, bitch” (daddy?) in the way that this specific brand of white straight man always does. So after I had properly concealed my erection in my Columbia Outlet hiking underpants I mean-mugged him and was like, “Sir, I came to Moab to do two things: kick ass, and eat incinerated Johnsonville brats out of a charred pouch of aluminum foil like a sad gay hobo, and guess what I JUST RAN OUT OF JOHNSONVILLE BRATS.”
In reality I just nodded hello and went back to my fire pit because I am afraid of men and will die alone, but seriously why was he like patrolling me? “Sus,” as the kids would say! He seemed to be waiting for me to notice my firepit was devoid of ashes and charred wood. Incriminating! And egregious. I mean it looked like someone had come through with a Dirt Devil and fucking vacuumed my shit. I may one day forget on account of a family history of Alzheimer’s, but I will never forgive!
Irate, I began rebuilding my Johnsonville brat-burning fire from scratch as Brendan and his 3-D jeans went back to the roaring inferno he’d built for his wife, who had a curling-ironed ponytail and a sweatshirt that said “The mountains are calling” in that weird Christian Instagram Fascist cursive. You know what I mean? I’m talking about this font:
I believe the official name is “Christian Instagram Fascist Sans Serif,” if memory serves.
A while later, as I was ravenously swallowing incinerated Johnsonville brats whole like a feral midnight werewolf (who’s also a sad gay hobo) I heard Brendan turn to Christian Instagram Fascist and grunt “You done?” She looked up at him all dreamy like he’d just read her a love poem by Rumi and then he dumped a bucket of water on the fire and they just … left? But like LEFT, left. Like they never came back and 30 mins later a whole-ass family of five from Idaho showed up and camped in that site for three days!
Brendan and Christian Instagram Fascist literally just hijacked a campsite for an hour to have a campfire, WHICH THEY BUILT FROM MY ASHES AND COALS, and then bounced. Psychopathy!
And so, there is only one possibly plausible version of events.
While they were driving into Moab, Christian Instagram Fascist looked up at Brendan all doe-eyed from her side of the Navigator, batted her fake eyelashes and cooed, “Beebee? Before we go to the hotel what if you built me a caaaaampfiiire and pretended you actually loooovvvee meeeeee instead of despisiiing meeee because you think I traaaapped youuuu with a baaaayyybbyyyyy I named Briynleighleyeîghnne and also you hate wooooomeeeeeeen. Beebeeeeeeeeeee?”
And after briefly considering hurling the Lincoln Navigator into a bridge abutment Brendan was like “Will it get you to shut the fuck up for the rest of my life you stupid bitch?” And she twirled a DevaCurl ringlet around one Jamberry manicured finger and was like “heeheehee you’re so funnyyyyy that’s why when I met you I said ‘Father God, I know this man you have sent me is the OOOOONNE because I always praaaayed for a man who is FUUUNNYYY and he is so FUUUNNYYYY’ and now you’re miiiiiiiiiiiiiine anyway yes I will never speak again like it says in the Bible amen” and then Brendan leaned to one side and farted his assent in her general direction, pulled the car into the first campsite he saw, hunted around for some ashes and charred wood to steal, FOUND MINE AND TOOK THEM, built his sentient Young Living Essential Oils catalog a fire and then bounced to the Hampton Inn.
It’s the only version of events that makes sense and I will go to my grave angry about it. This is THEFT! This is LARCENY! I have been BURGLED! He may as well have gone into my tent and helped himself to the tropical fruit-flavored Tums and Icy Hot I keep in the little pouch stitched to the window too! THIS WAS A HOME INVASION. And for that, he must die.
Although death would be a bit of a dodge of consequences. As my dear Aunt Kris used to say, “Eat shit and LIVE, it’s what you deserve.” And so to that end, I hope he falls in the next fire he builds and is forever deformed when all those goddamn rivets and buttons on those ugly-ass jeans melt into his skin and then Christian Instagram Fascist divorces him for a youth pastor with hair plugs and a convertible Chrysler Sebring.
And then after that? I hope he has to undergo a fucking sugar detox. Without the glowy skin.
Thank you for your eyeballs! If you enjoyed this, you should consider telling your friends about it by tip-tapping this little button:
And then, tippy-tappy on this little button:
And then THEN, if you’re feeling REALLY carpe diem about this shit, do a little tippity-tappity-tip-tip-tappalappadingdong on this little button:
See you soon! I love you! Mind your sugar intake and stay hydrated!