Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

Last weekend there was a chili-fest. I tried some chili. It was hot. Check back...I might add more descriptive text later.

OK...here's a message I wrote to a friend describing the effect.

Went to a chili-fest on Saturday. Tried some chili that was advertised as "insanely hot." I interpreted it as "gringo-hot" as in "less than 50% of the population will like this." Plus, since I had a cold, I figured some of my taste sensitivity would be dulled.

I was wrong, the advertising was correct and I'd guess somewhere between 1-5% of the population would like it. I was not in that population. It was rather spicy and somewhat unpleasant. And then it started to get hot.

I had a few tastes of it, though the entire amount was only like a salad dressing take-out container, maybe 3oz. Eventually, once the hiccups started, I realized I could eat no more. They weren't true hiccups, more like miniature seizures in my stomach. I realized this was a sign that it wasn't meant for me, as my stomach was not trying to make me throw up as much as simply wrench itself out of my body to try to avoid getting any more of the material to which I had just exposed it. I threw the remaining chili sample out.

And then it got worse.

I heard one of the people I was with point something out about me to the other. I could only guess that it was that my eyes were watering. I was legally blind at that point. I believe I stopped walking too, as another friend mentioned the camera I was carrying was about to fall off my shoulder. It was borrowed from a friend and was probably almost $2000 worth of camera equipment. At the time, it didn't seem worth it to do anything drastic, like move my arm slightly, to prevent it from falling off my frame and smashing onto the cement sidewalk below. Fortunately, one of my friends walked up to me and pulled it up and put it back around my shoulder before disaster struck (I could still hear what she was doing and had some vague sense of the strap being moved). I did not really care.

After that the pain started.

My mouth and lips had a burning, raw, chapped, nerves-that-register-pain-being-directly-stimulated kind of feeling. We went into a wine and cheese tasting place. I had some cheese on the off chance that the chili toxins were fat-soluable. I think they laughed at it. Or maybe it was chili cheddar and they forgot to tell me.

After 10-15 minutes, things eventually got back to normal.

One of the other people reported that the other variety of chili offered by that place was smokey and quite nice.

I guess I chose...poorly.