Addicted to Love

Red Wine, now there’s something I agree with, Roasted Garlic, yes, yet another item that I’m totally in favour of, I don’t know where these two items existed five years ago, not in my life anyway, perhaps there are thousands of other exciting things I’m not aware of that, in time, will be pushed into my skull.
 
There have been less Nacho’s in my life lately, except for the Whitby pub Melanie Pringles masterpiece which is always available with a side of very hot wing sauce and a pitcher of the amber brew. I was first introduced to the Nacho chip about nineteen years ago in a bar in California, a delicacy that up until then, had eluded me. At the same time I was experiencing hot Pace salsa for the first time, a new heat experience for a British boy who was only conditioned to the occasional Vesta curried beef and rice.
 
Then the addiction began, the slow slope down to capsicum addiction, the sensory anomoly of pleasure mixed with pain and strong urges to try the hard stuff. A journey of discovery, the joy of hot wing dizziness, the hot sweats, the delusions, the halucinations, the panic attacks, the waterfalls of spit, the gastric rumblings and of course, the famed ring of fire.

It was in the local trendy bar the Banshee one evening when the server unwittingly passed me a dixie cup of uncut weaponised Dave’s Total Insanity Sauce ™, there I was thinking that it was the normal stuff, smearing it amply on my nacho chips, only to find that within seconds I was a foaming fountain of spit, devoid of all facial feeling muttering that "I’m not an animal, I’m a huuumaaan beeinnggg!!"

In the beer fridge downstairs I have six litres of my favorite hot sauce, two more in the cupboard upstairs, festering away at room temperature for the extra kick along with about twenty bottles of assorted hot sauces.

Strangely enough I don’t find that in the least bit odd.

In a fantastic show of support my wife Karen has joined me over the last few years in the downward spiral towards nerve damage, a woman who used to think that Vesta’s were about the spiciest thing on the planet and now, after a lot of training, she too has an insatiable urge for the fix.

And we’re both in agreement, neither one of us is going to get out of this alive.