DORITOS

        You’re alone on a stale couch. You could be anyone, anywhere. You want something, but what? A nameless, triangular hunger beckons to you, as the ghost of cheese tiptoes to your taste buds.  It’s that time of night again. You reach into a red aluminum metalized biaxially-oriented polypropylene bag and pinch a Nacho Cheese Dorito. It feels right. You’ve done this before.
        You will do it again.
        You like Doritos because their ratio of flavor to fillingness is higher than that of any food ever conceived. The Challenger Depths of the Marianas Trench may still be unexplored, but somewhere in a lab, humanity has found the summit of food science optimization. This pleases you.
        Each chip, a shaved layer of shale, a synecdoche for some singular, alien rock of Dorito. And even that wouldn’t fill you up.
You bite through its glossy veneer. Yellow shrapnel bursts, lodging itself in the crevices between your teeth. Salt, sugar, garlic, fat, Romano cheese—the wondrous things of the world—gentrify your molars. Disodiums Inosinate and Guanylate decorate your gums with murals of umami, giving your mouth an air of hearty protein. You sense the concept of full, yet you are not full. Lactic and citric acids call in a favor from saliva. It gathers the red-orange pile of litter in front of your uvula and incinerates it in a flash of fire. Your tongue probes those crevices we talked about. Ahh, my, now what have we here? A crescendo of dopamine, neural napalm in flight, anticipating an explosive landing. It does not quite disappoint. You swallow an amber mess.
        Relief. A hard, jagged thing has become soft. Such a dynamic evolution of mouthfeel, engineered just for you. Your eyelids droop without losing their shape, like aluminum metalized biaxially-oriented polypropylene bags.
        And did you get what you wanted? An answer to your craving? Melted Dorito mush drips down your esophagus, as present drips into past. Already, you cling to the future.
        There is a moment here, a brief flicker of awareness, in which the whole scene is illuminated. The hum of the air conditioning unit, the orange stains on the couch, the creepy, fluorescent glow of the TV screen—only light in the house—the shadows of the fern in the window, the faint odor of cheddar, the rise and fall of your chest: this lonely, avoidant existence.
        Then it’s gone, and you’re rushed once again into the future.
        You lick the chipdust off your fingers.
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