I went a-wandering for lunch today and paid the price. Not the ultimate price, thankfully, but a price.
I don't remember now where I had intended to go but I found myself on Chambers street and very, very hungry. By chance, I was standing in front of the Soda Shop. The front was all glass so I took a peak: it looked like a cross between Beefsteak Charlie's and the candy shop from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in other words, an old school ice cream parlor. I went in.
I ordered a burger because, among the hodge-podge of mundane fare, I figured this at least would be safe. I was wrong, so very wrong.
When I got the burger, it came on the bun with some sort of sauce and nothing else. Nothing on it, nothing on the side. There was no onion, no tomato, no lettuce, no nothing. The burger did come with a salad. I could have converted the side salad into fixings but that would only have multiplied this burger's crime. Besides the salad, there were fries, a few fingers of somewhat warm steak fries. They weren't good.
When I flipped off the top bun to take a look at the burger I found, staring back at me, a homogeneous gray-brown mass. I don't know if it was boiled or processed by some other infernal means but there were no char-marks to indicate any sort of grilling or pan-frying. It was a mass of moon meat, a protein hockey puck. And salty. Dead Sea salty. It was pure ground evil.
This bad a burger, in this town, I did not think was possible. I thought the forces of culinary darwinism would have pushed this monstrosity to extinction long ago. No. Some La Brea like tar pit abyss has hid and nursed this burger away from the world... until now. It was the broodwich made flesh: the Harmburger. And I ate it. I ate it because I was filled with Sinistar-like hungers. At that moment, I would have eaten the One Ring with Frodo's finger still attached. There are prices to be paid for this trespass. I am prepared to pay them.
There was one bright spot. Being that I was in a soda parlor, I ordered an "Old Broadway" which had iced coffee, vanilla creme, and whipped cream. It was quite tasty. But not nearly enough to overcome the harmburger. Only years and years of therapy, prayers, and electric-shock therapy can do that. Excuse me while I go burn off my tongue.
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