It Came From Chinatown...

After last weeks nauseating encouter with the Satay Jellyfish of Doom, folks, honestly, I was hoping for some sort of a break. Not from the ICFC adventure as a whole, of course... don't be silly... but maybe, you know, maybe this week I could have a product that didn't make me want to individually rip out my tastebuds with tweezers and set them on fire. I don't think that's too much to ask. And, apparently, neither did Girlfriend. She felt a bit bad about subjecting me to the bouquet of sticky, stinky dried invertebrate pieces and, thus, went out of her way to look for something that was perhaps a bit more bland and non-threatening.

That... um... didn't quite happen, in much the same way that Bonnie and Clyde didn't quite get out of the way of all those bullets. Ladies and gents, I give you... Dried Lilly Flowers



Could I be more cocky? I'm thinking, "Pshaw... they're just a bunch of dried flowers. They probably taste like herbs or maybe some sort of plant, and that's if they taste of anything at all. I laugh at them! They are weak and I am mighty!" Yes, I really do think in complete, haughty sentences like that. What of it? Here's a closer look at the package:



Commenter J (our language guy), does that really say "dried lily flowers," or does it actually say "slices of what your own death tastes like?" Here's another picture of them, unleashed:



The cockiness started to subside as soon as the package was opened, or, more accurately, as soon as I caught a whiff of the dried lily flower's stink. Bad, kids... bad. Like something old and musty that you would find in the attic of a haunted house. Something that more than likely carries with it a horrible curse, damning all who possess it to a lifetime of misery, woe, and a really funky taste in their mouth. Here's me attempting to use the dried lily flowers as a moustache disguise in an effort to avoid actually eating them:



Actually, I'm just smelling the little bastards, trying to figure out if that odor was coming from them, or if a Cthulhu had just entered the room. I put them in my mouth:



Sweet baby Jesus, I am not a talented enough writer to accurately express to you how bad it was:

They're chewy, almost raisin-y, and they taste like an unholy combination of sweaty feet and rotten fruit. I never thought I'd say this, but they were worse... worse... than the Satay Jellyfish. By a country fucking mile. So bad that my throat closed up and I had to spit them out; it was like my stomach took over for my brain and refused to allow these hateful nuggets of sorrow down my gullet. It was the gustatory equivilent of watching your family get slaughtered by a rampaging horde of zombie clowns. Every color in the spectrum of awful was represented and it hurt me... it hurt me real bad:

Now, to be fair, and to satisfy my own curiosity that I hadn't just eaten, you know, poison... I Googled up "dried lily flowers" to see just for what in the name of all that is good and decent these were actually used for. It turns out... and not that this excuses them... but it turns out that I kinda sorta ate them wrong. As it happens, you're supposed to let these soak in warm water for a half hour before you do anything with them, and even then you don't just eat them like soggy chips out of the bag. You're supposed to chop the dried lily flowers up and put them in a soup, or add them to a stir-fry dish with a million other things. They're a flavoring, not a snack. Again, that doesn't make it right; we don't forgive a serial killer for murdering a bunch of hookers just because he once got fucked by his stepdad. Trust me, it's the same thing.

Anyway, Girlfriend apologized for inadvertently subjecting me to these ass blosoms, but I told her that she was entirely blameless. This is just the sort of thing that happens in the unpredictable world of ICFC... it's Chinatown, in other, more famous words. Still, though, that doesn't mean I'm going to take this shit lying down:

Yep. That showed 'em. Motherfucking stench weeds. Dude, I hope next week has a happier ending. Truthfully, though, it has to. It cannot possibly get any worse than this.

(I just jinxed myself; the next item I eat will now actually make my head explode)