RHAPSODY ON A BAD PANINI

You are eating a panini as terrible as your first table was wobbly, here in the bowels, not of culinary mercy but of the Montreal Eaton Centre, not the chicest place to hang out, but this, too, is Montreal, this food court down here in the mall-rat paradise of the Underground City. You’re actually eating very horrible fries with this really horrible panini, so, together, you Christen it Un Repat Combiné Horrible. You look in anger at the second half of your panini. In line, still desperately hungry and headache-disoriented, you thought to yourself: Right—Panini is one of those foods nearly impossible to fuck up! You would have been better off licking the gobs of discarded poutine oozing down the outside of the garbage can nearby. You’ve eaten half your sandwich, and now you eat your words or your word-thoughts, sound-images, whatever. 

           If you made a film version of this culinary episode, you would call it Reflections on a Horrible Panini or perhaps—more Nouvelle Vague!—Reflections of a Horrible Panini. You would model the film on Last Year at Marienbad and do all the clever things the two Alains —author Alain Robbe-Grillet and director Alain Resnais—did, except even more flamboyantly You would focus on the subjective experience of the panini itself, and the film would end with a huge, digitally enhanced battle sequence in the Grand Canyon between Gobzylla—who would wear a tight-fitting “Je Deteste Panini” T-shirt twenty stories high—and a giant version of the panini, with spindly French fry arms and legs and an enormous wobbly mushroom head.

           Yes, yes, yes!

          And to show your respect for Montreal, the site of the film’s conception, you would have the world premiere take place at the Cinema du Parc, after which you would have a CD or MP3 release party at Foufonnes Électriques for the soundtrack, which would be released by Relentless Records. The soundtrack-promotion tour, Le Panini Apocalyptique, would be orchestrated by Mistress Barbara and Kid Koala, who would spin heavily scratched and sampled Montreal techno on sixteen Technics turntables and blast a million watts of sound from a newly imported Dynacord sound system built to specification at the old location of The Omen nightclub in Frankfurt and shipped up or down (or both!) the Saint Lawrence in a giant custom-built supercargo tanker named the Mazui Panini Maru and staffed entirely by Harajuku girlz fluent in Joual. 

           Oh yes. Oh yes! Yes. Yes! Yesyes!

          This will be followed by the first volume of your memoirs: The Horrible Panini Years. Better still: an inspirational best-selling self-help book written in the combined styles of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Helene Cixous (yet still eminently accessible to anyone over ten years old) entitled How I Turned Eating a Really Horrible Panini into a Quintoquadragintillion-Dollar Empire Located on an Islet of the Philippine Sea, Where Everyone Got Rich by Singing Manchester United Fan Songs, and—More Importantly—Where Suffering Was Abolished, Along with Death Itself, at Least for a While, or Eighty Days, whichever Came First.

          Yes, you will turn it around, this horrible panini experience, transforming the negation into a negation of the negation: out of the abyss of the horrible panini will crawl forth, proud and terrifying as a molten moon, the dragon of your recovery from the sandwich (if such with good conscience it could properly be called), belching from the fuming nostrils of its gastric discontent the fire and brimstone of your belly’s Gotterdamerunging rejection, and thus all would be well that ended well, if well it ended or ended it did.

           Yes, you think.
           Yes! Yes! Yesss!