How a Sandwich Makes You Its Bitch in 11 Easy Steps

1.  At first, you are unaware of your desire for a sandwich

At this stage, you are generally unaware of any desire to eat a sandwich.  Maybe you are watching TV.  Maybe you are talking on the phone.  Whatever you are doing, you are content to be alive without a sandwich in your mouth. 

2.  Desire for sandwich registers

You become vaguely aware that something isn't right when a feeling of uneasiness engulfs you like a dark, suffocating fog.   You realize that you are going to need a sandwich.  

3.  Panic

HOLY SHIT!!!!!!  YOU NEED A SANDWICH RIGHT FUCKING NOW OR YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!! 

This stage comes on abruptly and usually before you have time to even make it to the kitchen, let alone go through all the steps of preparing a sandwich.   You feel like your body is imploding into a black hole of hunger and without a sandwich to plug that hole, you will almost certainly perish. 

4.  Melodramatic journey to kitchen

Hunger has a way of bringing drama to the surface.  The combination of hopelessness and self-pity often leads to unnecessary theatrics. 

5.  Planning

Your sandwich is going to be the best sandwich ever.  A sandwich to rule all sandwiches.  No matter how many things you put on it, it always seems like there needs to be more things.  

6. Creation of a monstrosity that even you will look back on with shame and bewilderment

Hunger has clearly clouded your judgment because your sandwich turns out to be a towering atrocity of questionable meat and condiments that are wonderful on their own, but taken together, create an oozing sludge of nearly inedible failure.  

Despite this, you feel like you are some sort of mad genius.  You should be on Iron Chef!  You are creating new flavor frontiers!

7.  Anticipation

This is probably the best stage of eating a sandwich.   In this moment, you imagine a kind of nirvana that is not attainable by mortals.  Your mind conjures up a flavor experience so powerful that it defies logic.  As you sit there staring at your glorious sandwich, nothing else matters.  

8a.  First assault

 

You seem to have neglected a few details during preparation, namely the discrepancy between the size of your mouth and the size of what you can reasonably expect to fit inside something the size of your mouth.  Your sandwich is cumbersome and unwieldy.  If you want to eat it, you are going to have to get creative. 

8b.  Second assault 

8c.  Third assault 

9. Violence

You finally resort to trying to crush the sandwich with your hands.  You stand over it like a caveman, beating it with your fists in a fit of rabid frustration.  Condiment sludge squishes out the sides in rivers.  

10.  Success (?)

The sandwich finally submits to your reshaping efforts.  You have reduced your once majestic creation to a festering shadow of its former self, but it is now possible to put it in your mouth!  YAY!!!!  You think you've won.  

11.  Resolution

Sandwiches almost always end in one of two ways.  

If you made the unfortunate mistake of underestimating your hunger, you will be unable to enjoy the final third of your sandwich because you will be too busy being afraid that there will not be enough of it.  Every wonderful bite is filled with the painful realization that it is bringing you closer to having nothing more to eat.  You begin to panic.  You try taking smaller bites and chewing longer.  You alternate taking a real bite and just sniffing the sandwich and moving your jaw to simulate eating.  But nothing can reverse the inescapable fact that you didn't make yourself enough sandwich.

Conversely, if you overestimated the amount of free space inside of you, you will be faced with a harrowing battle of man against sandwich.  And the sandwich always wins.  If you force yourself to finish the sandwich, it will defeat you from the inside.  If you give up and leave part of the sandwich uneaten, it will haunt you with guilt and feelings of inadequacy.  

The Year the Easter Bunny Died

Fear can help to cement every detail of a particular memory into a child's brain.

The memories I have of my fifth Easter are extremely vivid.

The day before Easter, I was bursting with anticipation.  I could recall that the year before had yielded a hefty amount of chocolate and jelly beans and that there were bright colored things and baskets and  a magic rabbit that somehow made all of the other stuff happen.   I was understandably completely out of my mind with excitement.

It wasn't long before my little brain began concocting a scheme to squeeze every last bit of sugary goodness out of the opportunity before me.  

I was going to trap the Easter bunny and make him my slave.   I was going to have an unlimited supply of chocolate forever!

I went to bed that night with the plan firmly in place in my mind:  wake up early.  Go outside and hide in the bushes.  When the Easter bunny appears, trap him in a bag or under a blanket then put him in a hole or in my closet where he can't get away.  It was flawless.  

I fell asleep, content with my strategy.

When I awoke, I was filled with rabid excitement about my almost certain future of unlimited chocolate. 

I grabbed my blanket and raced down the hall:

I threw open the back patio door. 

 

I was shocked to see my poor, tired mother kneeling in the grass, a brightly colored egg in her hand; her head adorned with rabbit ears. 

Imagine that you are five years old.  You have just exploded enthusiastically out of your house, expecting to find the Easter bunny, which you are hoping to trap and keep as your chocolate-making slave.  Instead, you find your mom.  There is no Easter bunny in sight even though he is supposed to be there.  Your mom is wearing rabbit ears.  

What does your brain do with this information?  Mine did this: 

=

My mom killed the Easter bunny and harvested his ears to wear as a hat.   What.  The.  Fuck.   Grief-stricken and terrified, I fled to my room. 

My mom, unaware of the correlation between her rabbit ears and my sudden terror, followed me to offer comfort. 

I can only imagine her confusion.  I'm pretty sure she assumed that I was simply upset over the realization that the Easter bunny wasn't real.  But no.  It took me at least five more years to figure that out.  My mother sat on the bed with me, trying her hardest to convince me that she was just "helping" the Easter bunny because he was "sick."  The whole time I was inching away from her; wondering what other kinds of sickening crimes such a monster was capable of. 

I don't remember how (or even if) the situation was resolved.  I don't remember whether I looked for eggs that year or just sat stunned in a corner of my room all day.  I DO remember worrying about the safety of Santa Clause the next Christmas.  I sat in the hallway closet and watched my stocking, prepared to jump out and surprise any would-be attackers.  No one was going to lay a finger on Santa if I had anything to say about it.  

Apparently I am a Failure at Success

Hi.  I am not coping well with this bit of success I seem to have come across.  It appears that my nervous system is having trouble distinguishing celebratory excitement from extreme danger.

As you can imagine, this has not helped to foster an atmosphere of tranquil creativity.  Every time I sit down to try to write or draw something, I feel like chaos and darkness are going to erupt out of me like some sort of natural disaster laced with PCP and everything I love is going to die.  

Much of this terror may stem from previous experiences with feelings of success. 

The same thing happened when I decided that I wanted to be a psychologist and then a journalist and then a doctor again.    

I want this time to be different.  I want things to work out.  I'm utterly terrified of waking up one morning to find some guy standing over my bed with a flashing neon sign that reads "HAHA.  No one actually likes you!!!  It was all a joke and you fell for it!!!  You idiot!"  

So I've been keeping all my excitement bottled up inside even though I desperately want to tell anyone who will listen about how great my life is right now.  It's partly because I'm superstitious and partly because I believe in at least maintaining the appearance of modesty.  

The combination of feeling like I'm going to die and repressing my happy feelings for fear of looking like an idiot, has made it nearly impossible for me to get my ideas out in a coherent way.  I have a whole binder full of post ideas, but when I try to sit down and actually put them together, it just ends up looking like something created by a schizophrenic baboon with a bear fetish and an endless supply of finger paint; like there's some stupid little guy living in my head and all he wants to write about is bears. 

Anyway, I wanted to let you know what's going on and why I haven't been posting as much.   It will get better.  This has happened before.  Does anybody remember that week where all I posted was a string of Rick Moranis pictures?  And then that somehow turned into a failed side-project called LOLRickMoranis?  That was a shameful time.  However, it seemed to work itself out and everything went back to normal the next week.  Let's all hope that's the case here.   If it isn't, I sincerely hope you enjoy reading about bears as much as I seem to enjoy writing about them.

UPDATE:  Just to clarify, I still want to be famous and win the internet.  It's just that it might take a few days of being a total recluse to get me back to the point where I can write/draw funny things.

UPDATE:  You know what?  Fuck it.