Balony (Bologna)

I realized that I don't like balony (bologna, I long ago labeled the actual dictionary spelling to be wrong). It's no metaphor or clever word play. I'm talking about the actual sandwich meat.

Back in the day I used to love me some balony. I used to run around eating balony sandwiches all the time. Balony and spaghettios. The classic ghetto child meal. Lunch. Dinner. Hell breakfast if ma ain't get up early enough for me. Back then there was this ghetto store called Wimpy's (like the dude from Popeye that ate the burgers all the time). You could get a balony burger and a little bag of chips for $1.25 (no tax!). It was a half inch thick piece of balony fried to perfection with onions and cheese running all inside the foil wrapper. That was the ghetto life. Decatur Street, Richmond VA.

I don't touch balony now. Last time I tried to eat it I spit it out and went hungry for the night because that's all we had at the time. I'd like to think I abandoned balony because of the texture of it. It's all types of s@*# processed together into a roll and cut into slices. When you put it in your mouth, it was never meant to be put together anyway and breaks into disgusting little clumps. Real meats don't do that.

Who knows why I don't like balony anymore. I'm thinking that maybe now it could be a part of me that is rejecting what I used to be. Think about it. You leave home and face a whole new world. It gives you perspective on how the world is setup. Looking back I was a ghetto child running around in the hood. Oblivious to the fact that we didn't have a lot. Surrounded by a big ghetto family of everybody like me dealing with the same circumstances. I lived in the hood. Now that I have left and did other things going back is not a realistic option. What would be the point of going back to having nothing and doing little with no hope of ever leaving? Perhaps I've taken something as mundane yet incredible fundamental to living in the hood(like sandwich meat), something that I have nothing but the fondest childhood memories of and made it the focus of my contempt for my past position. Simply put I could hate balony because I loved it then when I had nothing and now that I have achieve a slight but sure measure of success I look down on myself for ever accepting less . Refusing to embrace anything from a period of my life is my way to show that going back to that life would mean living in a world I don't like the taste of.

Or it could be that show I saw that showed them putting cow noses and left over meat into a grinder and squeezing that s#&$ a balloon made of that red lining around the edges of the slice.

We may never know.