Overdose

My wife made a stop on the way back from an out-of-town trip this weekend, and picked up a treat for the two of us: sushi! As requested, she also picked up extra Wasabi, which is a spicy spice that I prefer over those found in Mexican cuisine, because it typically only burns once.

Skilled sushi-snarfers will attest that mixing soy sauce and Wasabi (is "Wasabi" capitalized?) make for a most excellent paste that tastes fantastic and is easier to apply to your food. Therefore, I mixed up a lean batch of Wasoybi (trademark, Liberated Pachyderm Productions) and enjoyed it.

The trouble came when I, rather than dipping a fat morsel into my soylent green concoction, I lost control of it and splopped the entire gob into a small, homemade vat of Japan's revenge for Nagasaki. Dumb as I am, I thought: "No matter - if I enjoy a dollop of this culinary battery acid, think how much I'll enjoy an entire fistful of octopus and rice that's been dumped, turned over and fished out of such a potent potash!" Into my stupid maw it went.

At first, I tried to tough it out. "No need to panic; we've been here before... I've taken borderline-regrettable hits of Wasabi before, and survived; I'll be fine." It only took a moment to realize that I was in over my head. First, the pain. The great thing about the Wasabi experience is its purity on multiple levels. If used correctly, you don't just taste the sting; it wafts through your sinuses and slaps your stupid brain for allowing the body to consume such a wonderful abomination, and then continues to scald its way out your nose. In small doses, a pleasurable extreme. In larger doses...?

In the blink of a watery eye, I couldn't breathe, couldn't chew, and was concerned that swallowing would lead to hideous some combination of barfing, snorting and shitting my pants, none of which had any future (although there are those upon whom I could call, had I needed the voice of experience).

As I wondered idly about the number for the Poison Control Center, I made the decision to cut bait (unfortunate fish reference noted). Eyes watering freely now and with my wife by my side (surely feigning concern while she stifle inward torrents of laughter), I nodded at her questions about whether I was about to die and leave her with two mortgages and a five year-old psychopath who's just learning to spell, and I expelled the entire unholy mess back into the styrofoam tray where the painful nightmare had begun.

Having rejected the malignant mass, I coughed and choked entirely without dignity until my eyes pointed in the same direction again, at which point I assumed the stance of a cat who'd just clambered drunkenly off a bookshelf and careened into an aquarium, strutting away as if to say: "Yes I meant to do that, and what's more, I stuck the landing. I can teach you that, you know."

Can't wait to see what's for dinner.