Fast Food Fate

I scared myself last night. As I sat in bed and futilely attempted to sleep, I noticed a deep rumbling sound emanating from the hollow recesses of my cavernous stomach. I knew what that sound signified - I was hungry - yet I couldn't think of any food to satiate this incessant desire. I didn't feel like eating a Healthy Choice frozen chicken dinner, as I had chicken a few hours prior to bed and there's only so many artificial preservatives I can consume in one evening without running the risk of transforming into a giant wax pear. I couldn't run downstairs and cook up a delicious entree of steak and potatoes because the last time I tried to cook something by using the stove, John Ashcroft threatened to imprison me in a Federal jail for 20 years. Besides, I don't even know what steak is made out of. I think fish. My mind quickly began running through a checklist of possible objects I could shovel into my mouth and somehow force down my throat, possibly by using a complex series of pneumatic tubes or blackmail. When I was done cross checking every possible edible choice, I was shocked and appalled by the results. Surely there couldn't only be one single thing that would satisfy me at such an awkward time in the middle of the night! There had to be other items I could try gnawing on in an empty pursuit to quell the grinding turmoil in my gut. A depressing realization slowly dawned on me, informing me that my stomach would only be happy if it ate one thing and one thing only, and this scared me even more than the time my father called to reveal WB was canceling "Nick Freno: Licensed Teacher": I wanted White Castle hamburgers.

Some of you may live in sections of the world which do not contain White Castle restaurants, probably due to local ordinances and zoning laws. Scientists have come up with a name for people like you: "lucky bastards." Please allow me this opportunity to describe in horrible detail the experience of dining at one of these esteemed establishments, in the hope that my words of wisdom will scare you and your loved ones away from mistakenly entering these houses of horrors either to purchase food or to take shelter from the rain. Every White Castle restaurant shares the same unique, colorful exterior design which leading architects dub"a gigantic white brick box with some flaking blue stickers applied to the windows by mentally challenged illegal immigrants who live in a leaking tool shed with 28 of their brothers and sisters." These white brick structures not only keep (some of) the (larger) insects out (of the fries), but it also keeps (not much of) the (horrible rotting) smell in (thereby causing the stench molecules to chemically bond with anybody who walks inside). The government has required every White Castle fast food joint to pass a series of rigorous tests each quarter, ensuring that a minimal amount of scent pollution escapes into the atmosphere where it will invariably cause birds and jumbo jets to take their own lives in twisted suicide pacts. You see, some restaurants are know for their great food. Others are known for their low prices. White Castle is known for its ability to emit an odor so strong that you can actually see the little wiggly green smell waves waft out from it like in one of those Bugs Bunny cartoons where Peppy LePew keeps trying to hunt down that female skunk and forcibly ejaculate into her mouth. If you make a tremendous mistake and actually buy some food from their drive through, you better have plans to immediately drive your car directly into the nearest body of water, because the interior of your vehicle will never, ever, ever, ever stop smelling like rancid onions stored inside a used Polish gym sock until the day you take your own life. Make sure the police don't catch you disposing of your automobile in a nearby lake or else they'll call the HAZMAT officials and your family will receive a very hefty fine for extensive environmental damage.

The inside of White Castle isn't much better, unfortunately. The people in charge of the interior decorating opted for the "sterile veterinarian's clinic" motif, with the fanciest and most upscale object inside being a used ketchup packet or one of those festive signs hanging from the walls which promote the benefits of purchasing a "400 for $40" combo meal. Now this would normally be perfectly fine with me, as I enjoy eating in a clear, sterile location which contains a minimal amount of hobos sleeping off a hangover underneath my table. Unfortunately, while the design and decoration may embody the "you're eating in a hospital" theme, there is something lacking in the cleanliness department behind every White Castle branch. All of the floors exhibit the "vaguely sticky" sensation which isn't sticky enough to make you think you stepped on a piece of used chewing gum, yet adheres to your shoes and constantly reminds you of the fact that some unnatural chemical adhesive is clinging to your clothing. The floor deposits a thin, translucent coat of mystery slime across the bottom of your shoe, and this spooky substance has a long enough half-life to outlive all of us. When you return home from your exciting evening at White Castle, millions and millions of tiny microscopic stench atoms will jump off your shoes and chemically bond with the fibers in your carpet, eating away at their foundation like how communism eats away at the souls of good men or how liberalism eats away at the souls of Woody Harrelsons. Once your carpet is infected, the plague of White Castle slowly spreads out and begins infiltrating the studs supporting your walls and the foundation of your home itself. Then, before you know it, your house has collapsed and your whole family is dead. I hope you enjoyed your White Castle, you murderer.

The trademark White Castle dish is the all-American hamburger, also known as "the cheeseburger" by fancy rich folk who are too high fallootin' for the rest of us who can't comprehend the insane desire to place melted cheese above a hamburger patty. This dish, however, is not your standard hamburger. Oh no, while most fast food places subject their meat to things like fire and hot slabs of metal which transfer their energy to this wad of food, thereby increasing its temperature and scaring out all the ghosts haunting it, White Castle "steams" their hamburgers. This basically equates to them placing a square piece of compressed raccoon bladders on top of a running motor engine and praying that it all works out in some magical way. When the "meat" has reached a temperature of one billion degrees Fahrenheit, King Fake Onion bursts in and begins his happy dance of fake onion festivities. King Fake Onion loves dumping pounds and pounds of fake onions on every White Castle entree including hamburgers and cheeseburgers and chocolate shakes! King Fake Onion wants you to love fake onions as much as he does! King Fake Onion will laugh heartily and shit in your mother's mouth while she sleeps at night! This combination of greasy patty and fake onion overload results in a taste sensation which will either kill you on the spot or make you wish you were killed on the spot hours earlier. If you have been blessed by the Pope and somehow survive this culinary sabotage, you will soon discover you have ingested a battle scar which will never, ever, ever leave your digestive system for the next decade. That's correct, it is impossible for any creature, including Jesus, to digest a White Castle hamburger. NASA scientists cannot even manufacture a chemical strong enough to dissolve these non-organic entities. This might be due to the fact that NASA scientists spend most of their free time working on space-related crap and not hamburger technology, but that's beside the point.

Yet despite all the aforementioned slightly negative descriptions of White Castle food, I continually get "the crave" to willingly consume these tiny wads of hell once every few months. I have not eaten from White Castle in over six years now, but the urge still creeps down my spine and attempts to overpower me during my weaker moments, usually when I'm using the bathroom. If there was some kind of detoxification process I could go through to cause these White Castle genes to recess, I would do it in less than a second because it's very disconcerting to have these battle scars from six years ago continually resurface in my life and prevent me from thinking of things that I would prefer to think about, such as naked women and naked women who turn into beers and let me drink them. No matter how revolting my White Castle experience may sound, let me assure you that there are other terrible places to eat circling around the sun. Allow me to present to you, the reader, an abridged list of these fast food restaurants:

BARFING FROM BURGER KING: I never really liked fast food burgers, and the last one I had was back in 1996. After I stopped, I found I needed something I could order at fast food joints when I went there with other people. Chicken sandwiches always seemed difficult to me to ruin; it's usually just breaded chicken in a bun. One chicken sandwich I particularly enjoyed was the one from Burger King. I had seen all sorts of burger mishaps from my fellow high school students between 1996 and 1998, but I always felt protected by eating my cherished chicken sandwich. One day during the fall of '98, my friends and I ordered some Burger King food and went over to another local high school to hang out. While I was biting into my chicken sandwich there was suddenly a hard crunch, followed by a snapping sound and then a piece of loose plastic in my mouth. I took a hard look at what I bit into: it was a bone. I don't know how they get white meat packed into the neat circles or oval shapes that they make chicken sandwich out of. I'd like to think the chickens remove their breast meat themselves and neatly package them into the breaded homes for safe keeping until they can be consumed. Based on this model, it seems odd that a chicken could actually take off a piece of bone and insert it into a sandwich. Besides this would be an evil thing to do and I've not known chickens to be particularly conniving and evil. Somehow this bone entered the chicken sandwich and somehow it beat all levels of inspection at Burger King. A ruined burger I can understand, but this is a chicken sandwich. Its white meat represents a purity of food that cannot be tainted. But there I was spitting out my filling and looking up into a mirror with 3/4 of a front tooth left. I tried talking and it sounded akin to the speech of Mike Tyson. "NO THISTH CANNOT BE!" I cried in anguish, but I had to return to my school, a broken but wiser man. No longer was I naive to the dangers of chicken sandwiches and I have not ordered anything at Burger King again. Luckily no one noticed, and the one girl whom I told, "Haha now I sthound like Mike Tysthon" responded with a simple, "what are you talking about?" (submitted by EG-Fox)

GROSSNESS FROM "GEORGE'S BEST": I once had to help a friend shoot a film in a fast food restaurant which is impossibly hard to accomplish since no one wants you to shoot in their place of business. After weeks of searching for a place, we finally found one in beautiful downtown Anaheim called George's Best. We started our seven day shoot at George's "Best" and immediately noticed that the floor hadn't been cleaned in years due to the residue left there. Then, when we were shooting scenes in the rear rooms, is where the horror began.

Giant oil drum of sludge in a back closet next to the bathroom: someone bumped the lid off this with a bit of equipment and immediately vomited due to the stench that came out from the stink barrel.

Six page report from the health department stapled to the wall behind a nudie calendar: this gem was found while wasting time between takes and trying to stay away from Stinktown. Among the infractions were minor things like "Rat feces found in lettuce."

Dishes in the sink from 1978: Not only were there dishes, but there were stagnant pools of water... but the water moved like old butter... maybe it was old butter. All I know is that when I was replacing their fluorescent lights with daylight balanced bulbs, the end cap fell square into one of the pools of filth. I would gladly dive into a fat woman's cheesy vagina before returning my hand to that lukewarm liquid hell.

Cockroaches as large as men having tea parties on the ceiling.

This was George's Best and let me encourage all of you to avoid it at all costs. (submitted by I Am Ditka)

LAMENT FROM "LARRY'S PIZZA": When I was a young lad my father used to make me play Little League Baseball with the rich queers from the mean streets Yorba Linda in "tha OC." My mother and father, afraid of a traditional Hispanic upbringing of shame and failure, figured that forcing me to catch balls with over privelidged white people would do wonders for my future. Every time we won a game the coach (who was apparently living through his many sons) would take the whole team out for pizza. He constantly took us to a place called Larry's Pizza and Sports Parlor.

Now this is one of those places filled with fat, old, and balding white men too into sports to notice the hairy moles on their asses so huge that the moles are growing their own asses. There are roughly a hundred sports games on one hundred TVs at any given time and a gigantic projection screen television so old that the score is burned into the corner of the screen. The place smelled of beer, smoke, and the sweat of men desperately enjoying the relief of getting away from that ever increasing mass of a woman they call a wife. With such a lovely atmosphere this Larry's Pizza sounds like a glorious establishment to bring a budding softball team to now wouldn't it? I don't know about that but I can safely say that Larry's Pizza was the domino that started my cascading view of humanity.

Much of that had to do with the pizza. It was like eating leather drenched in motor oil on a fat man's asshole who was constantly passing gas. Sure, all the ingredients were there. I vividly remember the cheese that slightly resembled a cross between Silly Putty and Play-dough. Olives were like miniature june bugs, probably to compliment the real ones crawling all over the place.

They also sold all sorts of specialty items as well. There was their signature pizza salad which was basically their regular pizza smashed up and grinded into rancid lettuce topped off with blue cheese dressing that you could swear the individual pieces of cheese contained their own mesozoic ecosystem. The soda was always either too syrupy or too watery; it was an exciting surprise with each visit. The bread sticks may or may not have been actual baseball bats. (submitted by Zachary "Spokker Jones" Gutierrez)

Hope you enjoy lunch, and please, whatever you do, resist the crave or die trying.

Nice Spikeu!

Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons here with an extra jiggly new Hentai Game Review fresh from Japan. This time around it's the new "Sexy Beach 2", a game that's great for the kids.

Those of you looking for anything resembling gameplay in this title will be sorely disappointed. It's basically a collage of sex-related mini-games and scenarios where the girls play around on the beach or at the pool and you just watch them. Combined these two types of interaction add up to a gameplay experience that makes the awkward volleyball and gift giving of "DoA: Xtreme Beach Volleyball" look like the epic roleplaying saga of our generation.

Go and read this so my family can eat! Please, little Timmy hasn't had anything but coffee grounds a melon rind in months.

– Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka (@TwitterHasBannedAllMyAccountsEver)