people who go online and talk about how kill shelters all need to be shut down and how horrible they are...have you ever wondered where those puppies come from

Vellee Deli, 7 May 2018

  Story time!   First, a heads up:   I was born in 1981, meaning that I’m a bigot of a particular vintage. It’s not that I’m adverse to progressive ideologies, I just have a hard time remembering to incorporate them into my speech. Take the time I said “transsexual” and my partner had to tell me that’s wrong, the preferred term is “transgender” and so I started saying “transgender” but every once in a while “transsexual” comes out. I’m insensitive like that.   So it is that I don’t know what the current word for deaf/mute is. Back in the nineties and early aughts, when that word was relevant in my life on a somewhat consistent basis, we just said deaf/mute. So bear with me, and if you know the contemporary term for deaf/mute, leave a comment. Not like anybody ever does though and I’m OK with that.   OK, so, story time!   My Uncle Steve married a Korean deaf/mute woman named Kyong. They lived in Hawaii and Missouri a lot so I didn’t really get to know either of them.   Then, my Uncle Steve and Aunt Kyong got divorced. Not a big deal. A lot of couples get divorced.   Then, my Uncle Steve married another Korean deaf/mute woman named Mi Sook. To this day, I still wonder if Uncle Steve’s game was based on his ability to work the Korean sign language.   Anyway anyway anyway, Uncle Steve and Aunt Mi Sook moved back to Ohio and lived with my grandfather while Uncle Steve was… I don’t know what he was doing. But he died.   Yeah, sorry about dropping that bomb but he died. You have to read about it, we had to live it. Uncle Steve died the same summer that Grandma Betty and Grandma Maggie died. It was a fucker of a summer.   Anyway, Aunt Mi Sook, now a widow with nowhere to go, lived with my grandfather, a Korean War veteran who spoke no sign language at all. While she lived with him, she made kimchi the old fashioned way: Put all the cabbage and chilis and seasonings in a jar and bury the fucker in the backyard. At a later date, Aunt Mi Sook would go out to the backyard, dig up this fucking jar of fermented cabbage and chilis, take it into the house, open her up, and chow down. Well, I think she ate it like a normal person. Not like a jar at a time. Grandpa Charlie would complain to my mom all the time about how the stuff stank up the whole house.   Strangely, well, probably the right word is “expectedly”, I was not exposed to kimchi at the time. I think Aunt Mi Sook moved down south or something. I don’t think she went back to Korea, she said it sucks there if you’re a disabled woman. Easy now, this was two thousand two. The United States still looked good then.   Fast forward about a decade and you find me moved in with Kafe Nasty, who is half Korean. Kafe Nasty would eat kimchi I wouldn’t say all the time but he ate it often enough. He would just buy a jar and eat it like it was a pudding cup. It didn’t stink up the apartment, I didn’t even notice a change in the quality of his flatulence. He was just chowing down on some kimchi.   I would take a look at it and it didn’t look bad but I’m not trying to eat fermented fucking cabbage and chilis at ten thirty at night and you can tell me how probiotic it is for my colon or whatever, no. Any time after ten o’clock at night is reserved for alcohol. Adults, it is noted, have very limited hours in which they can ingest nothing but alcohol, and that’s ten at night to three in the morning. We can drink before ten but it must be accompanied by a meal or we look pathetic and we can’t drink after three in the morning because we’ll look like Tara Reid. We can start eating again at five in the morning. The rules are weird.   ANYway, a year I live with Kafe Nasty and I never try kimchi.   I see it on the menu at a restaurant and I want to try it but I don’t know if it’ll be any good. I panic a little because I just don’t know. “Does this place do a ‘good’ kimchi?” “What am I ranking this against?” “How come I didn’t eat Kafe Nasty’s kimchi at eleven o-goddamned-clock that night??”   Cut to today:   I don’t know what I want for lunch so I go out cruising, pretty sure I’m going to wind up at Chipotle and I pass Vellee Deli, the Mexi-Asian deli I have noted make an inconsistent as fuck banh mi but I say fuck it, let’s go to… Let’s try that kimchi burrito.   YES, MOTHERFUCKERS, I AM ABOUT TO TRY KIMCHI FOR THE FIRST TIME FROM AN INCONSISTENT SANDWICH SHOP.   LOOK AT ME. LOOK IN MY EYES.   I AM DANGER MANIFEST.   So, I go in and look at the menu board. Korean BBQ Pork Burrito has kimchi on it. There’s the Chicken Currito, which I don’t know why they don’t just call it chicken curry burrito but, OK, they’re cheeky. I ask the guy at the counter which he’d recommend. He tells me the currito is spicy but the BBQ burrito is his pick. I get that and a Mandarin Jarritos.   I get back to the office, unwrap my burrito, and chow down. Here’s what we’re working with: I like their BBQ pork. I think I may have detected a hint of pineapple in their salsa roja or maybe I was having another goddamned stroke, that’s entirely possible, too. I watched their rice, that shit was not seasoned, they just stirred the salsa into it. The romaine lettuce is there for ruffage because I can’t remember the last time somebody told me romaine lettuce tasted fucking great.   And then there’s the kimchi, the nine inch-cocked stud of this little twink blowbang Pornhub exclusive. You know something? At first I thought I didn’t like it. Then I wasn’t even sure I’d had a bite of it, then I kept eating so I know I must have eaten it but it just didn’t leave an impression on me. I fail to be wowed or soured by the introduction of kimchi into life.   So I have to try it again sometime, preferably not accompanied by a salsa roja that may or may not have had pineapple in it which itself may have just been a stroke-based hallucination.   The burrito over all tasted like just a real good sweet ‘n’ sour pork dish, but in a burrito. When Vellee gets it right, they’re on point.   But kimchi?    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯