Society’s necessary changes seem to move at a glacial, unacceptable pace and I am sick of it. I understand our world has plenty of issues to sort out but I’m officially requesting we move this one up the list: We HAVE to normalize taking your shirt off at a restaurant when you’re eating a hefty bowl of incredibly hot chili.
First I ask: Have you ever had a bowl of piping hot, spicy chili at a restaurant? You’re sitting there in your best button-down shirt tucked into your finely creased slacks, just trying to keep it together. The beads of sweat are rolling down your forehead at a faster pace with each bite, some drops managing to land on your glasses, pooling into the corner of your lens.
Suddenly, your shirt feels too tight, wrapped around your neck like a boa constrictor. You swear you’ll be able to start sweating through the fabric of your slacks, the perspiration desperately tracking down your legs, looking for an opportunity to escape. Every logical part of your mind is screaming at you to simply disrobe, free your body from its shackles to continue enjoying this fantastically spicy meal.
But instead, you are bound by society’s puritanical standards of how to conduct oneself in public. What did the shirt lobby gain from forcing us all to keep them on throughout a meal, anyway? It’ll go right back on after I’ve simply had a chance to cool down.
I love hot chili all year long, but when fall begins, I turn into an absolute animal. You can’t tear me away from my chili when the leaves start to turn, and the hotter and spicier that chili is, the better.
When I’m home, that’s not such a problem, because I can adjust to the heat of the chili with ease. When things really start to heat up – like when my wife makes her famous Carolina Reaper chili on football Sundays – I can simply remove my shirt and embrace the sweat bursting out of me.
But when we dine in at a restaurant and I remove my shirt to feel more comfortable when eating my chili, I get nothing but icy glares, which surprisingly do nothing to cool off my body overheating from the heat of the six-bean ghost pepper chili I insisted upon having. Or, even worse, I’m forcibly removed out of the establishment after the restaurant’s manager decides to make an example out of me by having two goons pick me up aggressively by the back and toss me onto the sidewalk into a pile of trash bags.
In turn, I’ve lost the respect of my fellow people who witnessed this, and that restaurant has lost itself a customer. Is anyone really gaining anything here?
There is a path forward out of all of this, so long as we all finally understand the absurdity of these rigid societal rules that have been put in place.
Let’s rewrite our societal contract, with updated terms accounting for eating delicious hot chili in public and the pressing need to take off one’s shirt to properly enjoy the heat.
We can do this, America.