Four Hot Dogs

July 1st, 2016

Today, I have four hot dogs to write about. I ate three of them in Japan; I ate one of them back on Earth. They are four of the many millions of hot dogs I have eaten in my life. I chose these four because:

One week ago, I went to Richmond Centre mall. I bought new clothes. As I was leaving, I bought a cheese dog and a medium tripleberry julius from Orange Julius. I drank this julius and ate this cheese dog while standing outside of a Cobbs' Bakery, waiting for my mom to buy bread. As I ate this hot dog, I thought about the four hot dogs I'm about to describe, and I wrote this entire essay in my head during the course of a single second.

Hot dogs are my favourite food, I say now, because I have recently found that all foods make me sick, and once all foods make you sick you see the world of food in an entirely different way. There is nothing about a salad that makes it better than a hot dog, if you are going to die after eating either one. There is nothing about anything that makes anything better than a hot dog, and there's nothing about any hot dog that makes it better than any other hot dog. However, having said that, there's something about these four hot dogs that makes them more important than any other hot dogs, and that something is connected to the hundreds of neurons that were simultaneously activated in my brain during the eating of the fifth hot dog.

Hot Dog #1

I ate the first hot dog at a flea market in Mito, Japan. It was called an Ibaraki Dog. It was entirely covered in green onions. It is the most important hot dog of my life. It is not the most important hot dog of my life because of its taste; it is the most important hot dog of my life because of who I saw while I ate the hot dog.

You: with the one large earring and the one small earring, eating a hot dog.

I saw you ten days after the third end of the world. You were sitting five steps below me on the stairs. You were eating the same hot dog as me. You ate it with chopsticks; I ate it with my hands. We were eating the same hot dog from different ends. I could say you were beautiful, but I don't remember what you looked like. I remember that I said you were beautiful. I remember that you had dyed your hair. You reminded me of a world that is beyond my reach; you reminded me of another world that is within my reach.

You were alone. You were living; I was considering thinking about how to prepare to start planning to live.

Will you wait for me? Will you wait for me, with a hot dog?

I lived in Japan for five months. If I wrote a novel about being in Japan, seeing you would be the inciting incident. You struck me in every way possible. You changed my life by making sure that my life stayed the same. I wrote a haiku that's partially about you. However, it is also partially about the girl I saw while eating the next hot dog, so I will wait until after that story to share it.

Hot Dog #2

I ate the second hot dog at the Hitachi Seaside Gardens. I was there to look at flowers. I was there to take terrible pictures. I turned that beautiful place into a fuzzy mess. I turned that beautiful place into what I wanted to see. There were a thousand couples there. I saw all of them.

I ate the second hot dog after descending a hill. At the bottom of the hill, there were seven elderly Japanese men playing bluegrass. I wanted to sit down and watch, but I was hungry. One hundred yards away, there were booths serving food. One booth sold hot dogs and ham-on-a-stick. I bought one of each. The hot dogs were twice the size of the buns they were contained in. It was not a good hot dog. It was a clumsy hot dog.

As we sat down, the elderly men ended their set. You walked onto the stage. You wore a blue dress, and carried an acoustic guitar. When I try to picture you now, I picture another girl who I am putting in your place. She was a short, excitable girl with a voice like an idol. She lived in my dorm. I saw her only six times. Eventually, I will forget her and she will become you, and you will become her. I've accepted this as a defect of my memory.

You introduced yourself to the audience. You said that you attended a local university, and that you were twenty-one years old. I thought, "I'm almost twenty-one years old." You spoke a small amount of English. I was sitting with the five other non-Japanese people in the audience; I assume this was for our sake. Thank you. However, I understood your Japanese better than your English.

You sang three songs. I watched you sing these three songs while I clumsily attempted to eat a hot dog as tall as my head. I got ketchup on my shirt. I assume that, as you sang, the audience was only a blur, which is probably for the best. You didn't have to see one Canadian and two Americans fall in love with you while clumsily consuming oversized hot dogs. I knew you couldn't love me. I could barely love you. But I tried.

I've spent my entire life trying to fall in love. I see people every day and wonder if I could fall in love with them. By asking the question, I answer the question.

My haiku went like this:

食べながら　美人を見えて　考える

which means something like:

As I eat　I see beautiful people　And I wonder

which sounds like a terrible haiku, and is.

Hot Dog #3

I have never written about the third hot dog before. I ate the third hot dog on the street between the local 7/11 and my dorm. This hot dog may not technically be a hot dog; it was a hot dog & tomato sauce & cheese wrap. You can buy them at the 7/11 and the Family Mart, but the 7/11 version is better. People may hate me for this, but that hot dog & tomato sauce & cheese wrap is my favourite Japanese food.

I ate this hot dog on December 26th, 2015, after returning from a three-day trip to Osaka. I returned from this trip with a renewed love of Japan. I had lived in Japan for ninety days by then; I had discovered many reasons to dislike Japan. I had discovered these reasons by imagining that Japan hated me. I imagined that Japan hated me because I tried to love Japan and I failed.

The first time I seriously considered returning to live in Japan was while eating this hot dog. I realized, while eating this wrap and drinking a Mitsuya Cider while walking alone in the dark outside of a 7/11, that I didn't dislike what I was doing. In fact, I kind of liked it. I realized that I might be able to live like this every day and be okay. I realized that as long as I could scream Japanese rock songs at a karaoke booth once every few weeks while drinking Suntory Rich Malt, finishing the night off with a beef bowl at Matsu-ya, that I could be relatively happy. This realization came with the accompanying realization that I couldn't do that. I would be leaving Japan in twenty-nine days. These were the longest twenty-nine days of my life; they were still only twenty-nine days. I had (and have) no compelling reason to return, other than that I don't know what else I should do.

I arrived at my dorm, dropped my stuff in my room, made a cup of hot chocolate, and walked upstairs to the common room. I moved a blanket, and sat underneath. I looked to my left, and there you were. You said something. I don't remember what you said, but we all know it was beautiful.

(I wrote a haiku about you once as well. It went like this:

君のそば　足は大根　になっちゃう

which means something like:

When I'm near you　My legs turn into　Daikon radishes

which sounds like a terrible haiku, and is.)

Everyone I know is a symbol, is a ghost, is an archive. I look at you and I see everything wrong with me and the world. I look at your smile and see pure joy, and I hate it. Now, we're all everywhere.

Hot Dog #4

I ate the fourth hot dog at Oakridge Mall in Vancouver on a Wednesday afternoon. The hot dog was from New York Fries. I ordered it with a poutine. I put ketchup on it.

Two days earlier, I wrote to a friend: "can't eat hot dogs because i'm convinced they will fix all of my problems and i don't want to be disappointed." Then, I decided I wanted to be disappointed. I spent a whole day thinking about poutine, so that I could eat a hot dog.

I don't eat fast food often. Eating fast food for me is an event. I have to psyche myself up in order to do it. I have to think about fast food for an entire day before I can eat it; this is one of my weaknesses. When I convince myself to break out of my routine and eat fast food, it's a big deal. I feel like I've achieved something. It turns a day into a special day.

Oakridge Mall is one train stop away from my school. I had only been there once before. When I went there once before, I watched my then-girlfriend get ripped off by someone else's friend. She had agreed to make something for them for much less than it cost her to make it. They paid her even less than they had agreed upon. I had stood far away, watching the conversation from across the food court. I found it hard to care about anything.

This time, I ate a hot dog and poutine next to an elderly man. I ate the hot dog and the poutine in under six minutes. I didn't taste the hot dog. I felt very sick. I didn't learn anything about myself.

The End of Hot Dogs

I wrote this essay while eating mini sausage-rolls. Unfortunately, sausage rolls are not hot dogs, and therefore can not be written about in this essay. As you have seen, this essay is only about hot dogs. Sometimes I think that I haven't done much with my life, but when I look back and realize that in just the past year I have eaten five important hot dogs, it puts everything in a different light.