Popeyes Is The Lord Our God

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Popeyes is the Lord our God. He has engineered the perfect blend of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats to promote maximum dopamine production. It is called Popeyes Spicy Fried Chicken Tenders. Insert it into every orifice of your body and feel the endless existential horror of your life drain away. Blessed child, this is your only purpose in life: to satisfy cravings. That is all.

Have it your way. Eat mor chikn. Full flavor, full pockets, full life. Making people happy through food. Life tastes better with it. America runs on it. You’re lovin’ it. Love. You love it. Food is love. God is love. Popeyes is God. Embrace God.

What are you eating for dinner tonight? Turkey? Stir fry? Or, Heaven help us, a salad? Sacrilege. Your organic, local, gluten-free food will not save you, will not grant you the eternal life you seek. Eventually, you will die just like everyone else, except you will have spent your limited time on bland flavors and abstemiousness, a fate far worse than death. Soul-death.

Our Lord understands the magic of “orosensation”, that is, the tactile/textural qualities of the objects plunged into our face holes: the soft, spongy taste of a Swiss cake roll, the crunch of a pepperoni pizza Pringles chip, the crackly chewiness of a pumpkin pie pop tart. With the Popeyes Spicy Fried Chicken Tender, orosensation is refined into high art. Food companies spend millions of dollars to identify the precise level of snap, crackle, and pop to stimulate opioid release and use advanced technology to synthesize the most mouthwatering substances. This is our Lord’s creative process: the live unplucked chicken is the paint, and the Spicy Fried Chicken Tender is the Sistine Chapel.

Another aspect of particularly delicious foods is “dynamic contrast”. This is the combination of different sensations within a food like the crunchy outer cookie and soft cream filling of an Oreo. Crème brulee, French fries, fried chicken—all have dynamic contrast, a crunchy outer shell followed by a soft flavorful interior. The Popeyes Spicy Fried Chicken Tender, with its fried batter and supple meat filling, provides a mixture of textures your brain perceives as novel and thrilling, even as you shovel, say, 18 of them into your gaping maw.

Popeyes also provides sauces to increase salivation and submerge your taste buds in a macronutrient bath. Dunk your tender in the honey mustard. Feel it spread across your tongue like a salty sweet blanket. Anesthetize yourself with hedonic taste solutes. Fill the bathtub with confetti sweet and sour sauce and dunk your whole body in it. Let the thick viscous fluid seep into your lungs, salty emulsions chasing your soul out of its husk and into the ether. Go meet our Lord of Authentic Louisiana Cooking. A beautiful death for a hideous unworthy animal.

Do not buy the mild tenders. Why would you do that? Eating non-spicy chicken tenders is an affront to God’s Will. Spicy foods lower blood pressure, relieve pain, and may even help fight microbes, but more importantly, it is the taste of His Red-Hot Love for you. Observe the red “Nawlins” fury injected into the batter. Benign masochism compels you to savor this burning sensation, to relieve it with a sip of ice cold high fructose corn syrup.

As you devour more and more tenders, dumping dopamine into your reward circuitry, your brain will remove more and more dopamine receptors, and inevitably, you will build up a tolerance. This raising of the satiation bar is God’s test of your will to eat additional tenders. Do not allow poverty or physical degradation to prevent tender consumption. Do not listen to your friends’ dietary criticism. You may lose your job, your home, your very life—it’s all worth it for His Divine Love. I would let my whole family burn alive if it meant additional tenders. I would sever my arms and legs, inject myself with HIV, bathe in acid, for I am a modern day Job, and I will suffer for the strips. We are but ambulatory mouths, yearning to be filled with chicken.

Receptors in your mouth try to detect the caloric content of your Popeyes Spicy Fried Chicken Tenders, but it melts in your mouth too fast, so your brain thinks it’s getting far less calories. This is by design. Though you might eat eight or nine tenders, you won’t feel full, will, in fact, crave even more tenders, ever more tenders, infinite tenders for the gaping maw. Fill it. Fill your maw until you’re a swollen ellipsoid, until your flesh is stretched condom thin, until you’re crying, and now the baby’s crying too.

Wait, whose baby is that? Is it your baby? Do you have a baby? You can’t remember through the glucose haze. You try to get up but slip in a puddle of ranch and fall on a dead cat. Oh God, how many days has it been since I last fed Cat Stevens? you wonder as you lick up calcified red beans and rice. These are all extraneous questions compared to His glory. You’re awash in it, coated in it like a layer of hot grease. And now it’s dripping down your chin onto the floor.

O taste and see that the Lord is good. – Psalms 34:8

image – Elvert Barnes