One morning, as Greg Samsa awoke from an anxious sleep, he discovered he’d been changed into a giant Wendy’s Fried Chicken Strip Salad™. He lay on his leafy green back and saw, after nosing aside a recalcitrant crouton, his golden brown abdomen—oil-soaked and glistening, ridged in that bumpy way deep-fry batter bubbles then settles crust-like on a stretch of succulent all-white chicken meat. From this strange position he noticed his blanket bunched near the foot of his bed, kept from the floor only by its tenuous embrace of the two unripe cherry tomatoes which had settled toward the lip of his black plastic exo-skeletal tray. Scattered carrot shavings, pitifully thin and lost-looking alongside wan, nearly opaque slivers of what he assumed was once a radish, seemed almost embarrassed by their garnish lot, and he imagined them struggling to slip into crevaces left by overlapping Iceberg lettuce innards, a place where they could hide their ignoble carrot fate.
“What the fuck,” he thought. It was no dream. His room, a typical duplex-sized non-master bedroom, lay predictably between four well-known walls. Beside him, a nightstand—where he kept a Kleenex box and a small travel-sized digital alarm clock—housed nothing unusual, save for an oversized plastic tub of honey mustard dipping sauce and a stack of bright yellow paper napkins
Greg’s glance then turned to the window. The dreary weather rain drops pelted the single-pane glass like the drumming of toddler fingers on a highchair tray  made him quite thirsty. He scanned the room hoping to find an equally improbable large beverage cup—an inviting straw poking erect from its lid—but instead he saw only a familiar chair, across which lay draped his jeans, a t-shirt, and a pair of once white tube sock grown dingy from years of inattentive laundering.
“Why don’t I keep sleeping for a little while longer and forget all this bullshit,” he thought. But this was entirely impractical; Greg liked to sleep splay-legged on his stomach, and in his present condition such a maneuver would only soil the sheets with roughage and chicken grease—and without making him appreciably more comfortable. And besides, he hadn’t any legs to speak of.
It was Sisyphus, he recalled, who was sentenced by the gods to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a steep incline, only to have it slip from his grasp and roll back down each time he approached the hill’s pinacle. For the Algerian philosopher Albert Camus, such an exercise was liberating, in that it concentrated man’s attention on the task rather than on the outcome—on the condition of existence that we must learn to embrace should we hope to negotiate a universe cold to our travails while somehow striving to remain sane.
But Greg was never much of an existentialist—if anything, he’d probably describe himself as a proto-hedonist, were he to describe himself at all—so he cleared his mind of Camus and his overdetermined stone and instead strained what passed for a neck toward the adjacent nightstand, where the rich creamy tang of honey mustard dipping sauce lay tantalizingly just beyond his reach…
This is exactly why I gave up eating at Wendy’s…
He was later awakened by the sound of buzzing flies at the window, noted that he had become a bit ripe, and asked himeself why he couldn’t have become a Twinkie instead.
The only real disconnect I see here is that the salad as described doesn’t have any eyes, so looking around becomes problematical. Now throw a small unpeeled new potato into the mix and the scenario becomes much more plausible.
A philosopher salad???
Nope…not buying it. Now, if you had a thinking foot-long chili dog w/cheese…and extra chili…now THAT’s different. That I could sink my teeth into…but wilted lettuce? Never…
spamword: appear…as in you appear to have a food fetish this afternoon…or you’ve lost your mind.
The microcosm has become the macrocosm.
And that is a great lesson for us all.
Looks like Jeff finally found Hunter Thompson’s stash.
Anyone want to start a pool to guess the date when “Goldsteinesque” enters the literary lexicon?
“Do you work for Wendy’s?”
“Waiter! There’s a Samsa in my salad!”
However, on closer examination Greg came to the disturbing realization that what he’d thought at a glance was his new golden brown abdomen atop a stretch of succulent all-white chicken meat was actually not that at all. Unless of course his penis had somehow become a giant woman’s fingernail partially painted in a pleasant shade of radish red. What Greg had at first thought was his abdomen of golden fried batter now appeared to have the faint ridges of what could only be described as a fingerprint. Sadly it became clear to Greg that he had not become the tasty Wendy’s dinner entree that he imagined, but rather had been damned to an eternity of life as a disembodied finger, golden deep fried, and hidden behind meats that were his better.
Heh.. “Goldsteinesque†indeed
I like the part where a crispy chicken nugget gets stuck on his back and rots. But i may be wrong, since i read it in the original german.
‘since i read it in the original german’
Ahhhh…Mein Salat…
Original German, you say?
“Ein Morgen, als Greg Samsa wachte von einem besorgten Schlaf, er entdeckte auf, daß er geändert in eines riesigen Wendys gebratenen das Huhn-Streifen-Salat? wurde. Er legt auf seine belaubte Grünrückseite und Säge, nachdem sie beiseite einen recalcitrant Crouton gerochen haben, sein goldenes Braun, das Abdomen-Öl-getränkt werden und das Glitzern, zerfurcht dadurch, daß holperige Weise Eierteigluftblasen dann fritieren, vereinbart Kruste-wie an eine Ausdehnung des saftigen all-weißen Huhnfleisches. Von dieser merkwürdigen Position beachtete er seine Decke, die nahe dem Fuß seines Betts gebündelt wurde, gehalten vom Fußboden nur durch sein tenuous umfaßt von zwei unausgereiften Kirschtomaten, die in Richtung zur Lippe seines schwarzen PlastikExoskelett Behälters vereinbart hatten. Zerstreute Karotteschnitzel, verdünnen mitfühlend und verlieren-schauend neben dem wan, fast undurchlässiger Splitter von, was er war einmal eine Rettichschicht annahm, geschienen fast in Verlegenheit gebracht durch ihr schmücken Sie Los und also stellte sich er sie vor zu belasten, um die crevaces link zu finden durch chunky Eisbergkopfsalatinnereien, in denen sie versteckten konnten, was sie geworden waren….”
Not sure if it reads better in the native tongue.
BLT, you forgot the title:
Die Verwandlung, Jetzt
(Skipping obvious “Sideshow Bob” inspired joke)
Excellent, Just Fuckin Excellent.
New frontiers in product placement.
I look forward to Target Presents: William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch.”
“The, Bart, The.”
I’m not afraid to go for the obvious joke.
“overdetermined stone?”
I LIKED “overdetermined stone.” Pluralize it and I’ve got a brand-new description of my testicles.
A friend of woke up one morning to find that her husband had turned into a dick. That’s probably different, though.
…and then Greg’s tantalization crashed hard on the rocks of disappointment, as he realized that the chili bowl on the headboard wouldn’t lift a finger to help him. That lazy bitch.
You need to lay off the pipe dude.
I like it.
You know, I didn’t realize Camus was Algerian. Just assumed he was French (which, I realize, was roughly the same thing in his time). It does explain why The Stranger (the only thing of his I’ve read) is set in Africa.