On That Sweet Sweet Burn

My eyes are watering. My nose is running. I’m doing everything in my power to maintain deep, even breathing. My mouth feels as if I’ve just taken a big bite of the molten core deep at the center of the earth. My fingers are blood red and so dangerous that if I got them within a yard of my face, I wouldn’t be able to see for a month. To some people, this sounds like hell. To me, it sounds like an absolutely delightful afternoon snack.

I love spicy foods. I think it comes mostly from my grandparents. On my mom’s side, we have roots deep in Texas and Louisiana where the spices flow like water. On my dad’s side, my namesake, Bill Peterman, would put Tabasco sauce on a rock and call it delicious. I never got to meet any of these grandparents which always bums me out, but even more than that, I’m sad I never got to introduce any of them to the wonders of Hot Cheetos, Takis, or Turbos Flamas.

I was born in 1991 which was also the year that Hot Cheetos first hit the market. This was obviously not a coincidence but a preordained miracle that leads me to believe in a higher power of some sort because I would NOT want to live in a world without those spicy, crunchy, cheesy little devils.

Spicy foods are a mystery, though, and not just to me! In thinking about spicy food for this Dumb Brain, I did a little googling and found this fascinating article from The Guardian in 2010 discussing how we still don’t reallyknow why humans like spicy foods. We’re the only animals on the planet that can actually taste spicy and yet still seek it out.

It must be that magical feeling when a snack is so spicy that after a few minutes you feel like you can see through time and space to the inner workings of the universe itself. From skydiving to surfing to rollercoasters to action movies, humans are always trying to find an adrenalin rush that makes you feel just a wee bit closer to the edge of mortality while still being relatively safe and spicy foods are just the edible version of that.

I’ve truly never felt more alive than a few years back when a friend and I tried a legendarily spicy variant of instant ramen. At first it was just tasty. A little hot but nothing too special…then things started to happen. Reality began to warp and stretch like Play-Doh. I began to lose all feeling in my mouth as my nose and eyes started running like Usain Bolt. And then suddenly my friend and I were in the bathroom, him lying on the floor, me laying in the tub, with the lights off just trying to figure out if we were still alive or in some new circle of hell even Dante couldn’t imagine. Needless to say, the next day was equally not fun but in a very different way.

So, what about you, do you crave the heat? Do you demand that the spice must flow? Or are you more of a mild/medium kinda person?