It was the Red Kind

It happened one night near the end of my restaurant shift. I was pretty tired and wanted to get out of there, so I wasn’t really paying attention. I was refilling Tabasco bottles, which require removing that little plastic disk with the hole through it (that dispenses the sauce in drops).

So I filled it completely. More actually, since the sauce crowned over the top and was held there only by surface tension. Forgetting Bernoulli’s principle entirely, I snapped the lid back on. It was like putting your thumb over a garden hose. The teaspoon of Tabasco only had one place to go, and it did–straight through the goddamn pinhole, jet-streaming the liquid right into my eyes.

The first quarter-second registered only annoyance at having to clean myself off, and the slight embarrassment of giving myself a money shot. This quickly dissipated when my eyes reacted to the mixture of red peppers, vinegar, and salt.

I didn’t know a person could be so instantly filled with rage. It was like a flipped switch, a spraybottle before a cockfight. I wanted to rip out someone’s eyes in a vain attempt to replace my own. Instead, I just flailed around like a retard.

I may as well have been kicking and screaming. I don’t explode very often, so that moment of complete loss of control was unusual enough to stick with me. I must have looked ridiculous and small. Ryan talks about this here, and I think the Bill O’Reilly thing is a good barometer:

If someone were watching a video of your outburst, would they laugh at you?