Bacon: No Sir, I Don't Like It

(This is how every library should be. No bacon in the library. Ever.)

Ok, look- it seems as though everyone will not shut the fuck up about bacon these days. I'm starting to feel left out and out of the loop, because bacon is probably my least favorite food product, period. In fact, even thinking of it makes me vaguely nauseous. I absolutely loathe the stuff.

I understand if you don't want to be friends with me anymore. I, for one, find it off-putting when I see an adult avoid the crust on a sandwich. We all have our things.

For many years, bacon was one of those things I just happened not to eat. It was greasy, it had a bitter taste, and I could actually see the fat in it. It tastes like it's not clean. Not my thing, so I just avoided it. I didn't really hate it until I was around 22 or so. See, I was living with this girl who was on the Atkins diet. I was bothered by the Atkins diet to begin with- I couldn't stop asking her if she really thought it was the best diet ever because what sense does it make to be on a diet where you can eat half a cow, but not an apple?

The way everyone feels about bacon these days? Well, that's me and fruit. It's my favorite thing ever. I love all fruit, except for blueberries and bananas. Blueberries because I ate a rotten one once at my Nana's house, and bananas because I od'd on them when I was trying to prove my mother wrong on her theory that eating bananas before bedtime would give you nightmares. I didn't get any nightmares, but I did get kind of sick from it. Otherwise, I am a champion of all fruit. Actually, hold on, I'm going to get some grapes before I finish this.

Ok, I'm back now. I'm pretty sure I took the whole Atkins diet as an affront to everything I considered good and holy in the world. Well, that and I was tired of hearing about it. Everyone was on that fucking diet, I never heard the end of it. Being an oppositional person, I have a tendency, anyway, to develop an aversion to anything that people seem suspiciously enthusiastic about. I never liked the class dreamboat, I was weirded out by Beanie Babies, and I have never seen Dancing with the Stars. Maybe this is an extension of my misanthropy, I don't know. Anyway, I was totally convinced that any diet in which fruit was verboten was downright sacrilegious. It also totally made people smell weird. Swear to god.

So, there I was, living with a girl who was way into this whole Atkins thing. Our refrigerator was filled with my delightful fruits and vegetables from the farmer's market, and our freezer was filled with her various meats. Every morning I would wake up to the oppressive, blanketing smell of bacon coming up from the kitchen. I'd be trying to sleep, but the smell would seep into my throat. I'd cover my head with my blankets, and still, I couldn't escape it. I'd grudgingly get up, and take a shower, and I'd be washing myself with fancy soap that was supposed to smell like chocolate, orange, and almonds (delicious!), but instead now smelled like chocolate, orange, almonds... and bacon (blecch). Everything for the first two hours of my day smelled like bacon. I'd go out into the world worrying that somehow the stench had stuck to me somehow, despite all my scrubbing.

It didn't last that long, only a few months, because I moved to Chicago that August- and otherwise she was a perfectly fine person to live with, but the smell of bacon still makes me want to die. So, no, I cannot share your enthusiasm for this food product. I'm sorry. I am not cool.