i ate a regrettable sandwich: southwest chicken wrap edition

my friend said: "a regrettable sandwich". sounds like a fun post in its own... "look at these pathetic crumples of lettuce... oh dear me."

heh. here goes nothing.

this sandwich cost me six dollars and was some kind of "southwest chicken wrap". i usually really like this sandwich shop. it's right by my work, has lots of variety on the menu, uses fresh-tasting ingredients and good bread, and lets you substitute and add on without grumbling at you -- without charging extra, even. eventually they recognize you and say hello to you by name...even if they don't get your name quite right.

but this day i was sorely disappointed. i liked the idea of corn and black beans in my sandwich, and the idea of barbecue sauce as a dressing. they had something called "barbecue ranch" for the dressing, and i was sort of skeptical about the combination, but melissa said that "white barbecue sauce" was not unheard of and not weird.

but there turned out to be way too much of it, and it was too sweet and sat around in wet pockets. the chicken was flimsy deli slices instead of the grilled chunks i'd imagined, and the black beans were mushy and unevenly distributed, and the wrap bread was over-folded in some parts so that all you got was a mouthful of dry bread.

you know when something's not very good, and you find yourself speeding through bites so that you won't taste it too much? that's fucked up. yet there i was, speeding through the wet mushy barbecuey pockets of the sandwich and the dry-bread folds in hopes of finding the next well-balanced, crisp-corn-fresh-lettuce-shredded-cheese-light-sauce bite soon.

i really hate wasting food and wasting money. i use "waste" sort of subjectively here -- what i mean is i'd rather spend forty of my own dollars on a good dinner than ten of someone else's on a mediocre lunch. in a way, the real crime about the whole thing is wasting a mealtime, an opportunity for genuine enjoyment. we do it already in the pursuit of convenience or in thrall to the lifelong conditioning of our tastebuds to go nuts for sodium and saturated fats. there's so much food out there to experience and savor and understand, and so few meals in all my lifespan -- what the fuck am i doing eating this regrettable sandwich?