Well see if Libsyn lets me upload a header photo for this blog entry, it was being all wiggy yestarday. Anyway, I thought I’d take a second and talk about what Spam mean to me.
First off, I have never eaten even a single bite of Spam. I am a Spamical virgin, never hast the gel encased spiced meat product crossed mine lips. Why? Because it looks gross to me. This coming from the guy who eats squid, tentacles and all, like french fries, who pops smoked oysters (yet another scary caned ‘meat’ like substance) like potato chips, and who relishes in Dim Sum, which let’s be honest is some of the most ‘what the heck is the meat in this dumpling’ kind of chinese food around. So whereas I find it inexplicable (outside of living in Guam, the Philipines, the trenches of WWII era France, or Hawaii) that anyone would eat this stuff, I don’t actually hold it against anyone who does. Each to their own right?
Yet, I have probably purchased more of this canned meat wonder over the years than a family of four. It all started for me in high school. I was a weird kid and I liked weird stuff. I liked wearing my backpack on the front so it looked like I was pregnant with my math book. I carried around a giant super bouncy ball that I named Fidel, and when I pitched him up on top of the school roof in a fit of anger one day I switched to carrying around a little plastic grasshopper that a suction cup on his underside. I stuck him to the face of my watch and left him there throughout the day. And what’s even more weird is that I dated in high school. Anyway I was weird. It was my way of rebelling. Making people scratch their head and wonder was just about the greatest thing ever, at least at the time.
So one day I was in the store with my mom when I saw a new kind of Spam next to the deviled ham and tuna fish, Deviled Spam. It was much smaller (in theory because deviled spam is super concentrated evil and must be taken in smaller doses) and in my mind I vividly saw it as the best necklace pendant ever. So I bought it and threaded some string through the pop top and started wearing it to school. The assistant principal even stopped me one day in the hall and said that I must be forgetful if my mom had to tie my lunch around my neck. All was well until one day when I got off the bus one day. I used to grab the hand rails and jump from the top step to the road, and on this day I was the last of our group to get off. When my feet hit the ground we all heard this snap-pop and we all froze. The pop top had opened and it was hanging by a sliver of metal while the can of meat precariously swung from side to side. I carefully lifted the necklase off and them proceeded to throw it as far into the wood as humanly possible (I’m sure a family of chimpmunks ate well for a week.)
From that day on I started carring around a regular can of Spam on a leash. It was much safer and a little weirder IMHO. I did this until one day some wannabe-punk chick stabbed it with a clay knife in art class. It was a pretty weird psycho moment where she just stodd there waiting for a reaction like I was going to cry or something, but I just casually tossed it in the garbage and shrugged. Anyway, my obsession with the culinary grenade continued past high school as well. For the first year that I worked after I graduated I bought one can of deviled Spam a week, naming and dating each can until I realized that I didn’t have anywhere to store the damn stuff. Besides, my father snuck into my room one day and ate the can named Comissioner Gordon, so I sort of got out of that habit. I’ve already written about my comic con experiences with it, so I won’t get into that.
All in all Spam has been a pretty significant part of my life, well arguably significant. So that’s that.
