The pickled tomato that was almost my last

I live a very safe life. I rarely drink, I don’t pick fights, and I watch videos about longevity, which have a nice placebo effect of increasing your longevity. Some people don’t let their friends drive drunk. I don’t let my friends drive period, because I don’t trust anyone to drive safely other than myself. Safety first, that’s my three cardinal rules.

A week ago, I was visiting my parents and stopped by the Russian store. There’s this brand of Russian pickled tomatoes that I love but that I don’t get to eat very often.

Later that day, I’d taken it out like a prized bottle of scotch and I was trying to open it, but I’d forgotten to work out for the last ten years, and I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have a time machine, so I settled for a bottle opener. Usually you can use it to get the seal to pop, and then it becomes a lot easier to screw off.

Unfortunately, I must have not lined up the bottle opener correctly because it took too big a bite out of the bottle. There was a nasty scraping sound. I had shredded a chunk of glass off the thread. Lifting the cap off, I couldn’t be sure, but I thought a tiny piece might have fallen in. It probably didn’t…but it definitely might have. I peered into the depths of the brine but didn’t see anything.

Damn it. I was in a pickle, no pun intended. I really liked those tomatoes. And now I was going to have to throw them out. Eating them would be highly irresponsible and hypocritical. If those longevity videos could see me now, they’d be ashamed of me. I imagined the autopsy, and how they would go through my browser history and see those videos on longevity and decide it had to be murder, because neither idiocy nor temporary insanity could explain the evidence.

But then again, said a skeptical voice in my head, what were the chances I was going to die even if I did swallow a bit of glass? Didn’t some people chew glass for a living? What were they called again? Charlatans? I googled it a bit just in case and decided that I didn’t believe the glass eating thing was real after all, which dampened my spirits a bit.

But then my eyes fell on the tomatoes again, and I instantly knew I was going to do it. I felt a little thrill, like I was doing something sexy and illicit, then a flush of shame for even thinking about taking such a risk. If I ended up in the hospital, I was going to have to just die quietly to avoid them having to update the Guiness book of world records for stupidest death.

It was suddenly too late to back out, for no good reason at all. I looked both ways, to make sure my wife wasn’t heading over to see right through my nonsense and make me do the right thing. She was watching one of her Chinese shows. Perfect.

I stabbed a tomato onto a fork, took it out, rotated it around to see if there were any suspicious sparkles, then took a tentative bite out of it. Holy crap, it was good. I swore to myself I’d be careful and spit it out at the first sign of intense pain, then devoured it. I normally give myself a little mm mmm mmmm to make it even more tasty, but I couldn’t take the risk my wife would hear me and slurped as quietly as possible, like a serial killer.

And then it was over. I was still alive! Well, not exactly, the jar was still mostly full. And really, it’s the brine of this particular brand that’s the best part. I usually drink most of it before pretending I’m pouring it all out in the toilet like a sane person. Looking back, I could have easily poured it through a cheesecloth, but I think by that point someone else was driving my brain.

I ended up finishing the whole thing over the next few days, the battle against guilt and sound logic getting easier every time. Every time I opened the jar, there was this nasty scraping sound, the kind designed to jangle your nerves, and I would still go through with it. But it’s been over a week now, and I haven’t had any blood in my stool...

This was a one time thing. I will NOT make a habit out of this. This was my skydiving and my taking home a slutty stranger from a bar and my letting my wife drive me around town. I will now be a responsible person and live forever.