October 28th, 2009 / 1:54 pm
Mean
Sean Lovelace knows nothing about nachos
Anybody who happens to have bumped into the words or online speaking of Sean Lovelace (author of the recently released How Some People Like Their Eggs, which is fantastic and very smart (that will be my last positive reference to Mr. Lovelace in this post)) knows the dude really wants you to know that he loves nachos. It’s hard to get through a week of his blogging without at least some kind of reference to it, and to how much he loves them, etc., etc. He’s even published essays on the subject, including one in the David Foster Wallace memorial issue of Sonora Review.
To me, though, Lovelace’s endless tirading about the food seems overbloated, and in some ways insecure. It seems the food-language equivalent of truck nuts:
Having been a fat kid growing up, ordering nachos at least 5 out of 6 times my family went to dinner, my love of nachos is founded in the idea that I ordered nachos because I HAD TO, because I knew that out of all the things available on the menu, nachos would be the one meal that would be sure to fill my fat ass up. It was a matter of being alive and large. Nachos are the heartiest of dishes, meant to please and please correctly, as only a person with a fat mind can appreciate, and to do so without the worry of more delicate dishes, or in the idea that you won’t get enough to eat. And although I am normal-sized now, that spirit never left me. I have the soul of a fat teen, and it is a real thing. It is the power of the light.
For Lovelace, though, nachos are just another delicacy to be primped and pondered over like some kind of ponytailed foodie. He thinks the spirit of nachos is best derived by discussing cute things like the vertices the chips make, and the distribution of toppings, the flavor compilations. Sure, it’s fun to fuck with meat and bean and hot sauce variations, but what we’re dealing with here is a much bigger question than taste and ‘how pretty the colors look on the nacho plate.’ We’re talking about mental states.
There is the fat soul, and the thin soul, and to be trying to rep nachos as a trophy deck is not only nauseating to me, it’s wrong. We are living in America made of thin man’s humor, a state initiated by the death of Chris Farley while David Spade lived on, an incident which I believe also caused 9-11, as if Spade had died and Farley lived, the soul of our nation would be at least more pleasant, if not intact.
Not only has Lovelace never been fat, but dude runs marathons! No, he does not have the soul of a nacho lover. Instead he is a spectator, a tourist who has made his nacho name simply by beating his drum. I seriously can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve been in where somebody who’d been near to Lovelace’s brainwashing just had to bring up Sean’s nacho love in relation to mentioning the food or his name in public. Dude might as well be walking around in a Bob Marley t-shirt, claiming how he’s the first dude who ever really understood Bob.
So, all this jargon aside, I’m calling bullshit. I’m saying Sean should keep his admittedly very fine words aimed at realms he can actually psychicly grapple, like disc golf and eggs and stuff. I am prepared to publicly face Sean in a nacho standoff, the terms of which may be negotiated by our skin. Sean?
Tags: nachos, Sean Lovelace
nacho contest: i’ll enter my fat mexican kid neighbor against any of yall,… fat-souled or thin,….
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October 28th, 2009 / 2:18 pmBlake Butler—
if i’m a little drunk and hungry, i’ll eat the nachos and the kid
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i got $100 on blake
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or underbloated
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October 28th, 2009 / 2:20 pmBlake Butler—
nice
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Well damn.
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oh, can we have the contest here in january? sean’s not far from ann arbor, is he? you could hold the contest at your reading with evenson. heh. i wanna see a hot wings contest, though. i think you were having a contest with yourself in buffalo, blake. or with the wings. i think you won, though hard to tell for sure. (actually, the place we’re thinking of having the reading has a bigass plate of nachos, now that i think of it…)
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blake,
you’re a white male living in america. you have no right to talk about fat kids.
xo
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October 28th, 2009 / 2:34 pmKen Baumann—
hahahaha
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i want to have a dream where i receive Blake’s future nonfiction endeavor in the mail, and it is titled Insomnia Nachos.
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So wait. Your argument is that you love nachos more because you were a fat kid? That’s it? Fat kids actually despise food, the bane of them. O, Blakey Blake. Naysayer. Shit-talker! Never have I read such hearty filling LOVE-splurging prose re: any food, as I have on that man’s blog. So he’s a disc-golfer?! Shame on you, Blake. SHAME.
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October 28th, 2009 / 4:23 pmAndré—
Not this former fat kid. I loved the fuck out of food.
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October 28th, 2009 / 4:28 pmAndré—
I mean, if some kid pushes you around for being fat or something, and you’re a fat kid, what do you do? You don’t napalm the contents of your refrigerator, you eat everything you can find, and after that you feel FANTASTIC, and make a couple of jokes about the dickhead who made fun of you, and then you sit down in front of the couch and watch television.
Maybe once dinner comes around and you have to eat again, and you’re up to the challenge but you feel bloated afterwards, maybe you feel bad then, but only because you’ve got to burp and your body isn’t happy, and you recognise that it’s that bloat which is making you fat in the first place… but you don’t blame the food. No way. You’d eat it all again, you wish you could eat it all again, that’s the whole point.
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October 28th, 2009 / 4:54 pmAni Smith—
Exactly yo. That’s eating out of pain! Eating out of violence like Blake scarfing on babies! It is not done out of love for the form, like my man Sean.
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October 28th, 2009 / 7:43 pmBlake Butler—
women don’t know anything about nachos, so i’ll let you slide for this
Who cares about damn nachos anyway? More importantly, Sean Lovelace knows sweet fuck-all about Yorkshire Puddings.
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October 28th, 2009 / 3:59 pmNathan Tyree—
spotted dick- that he knows
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Is that a vicious rumour, Mr Tyree? I do hope so. I love a vicious rumour. Especially in Mean Week (sorry, MEAN WEEK).
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October 28th, 2009 / 4:24 pmNathan Tyree—
it may well be a viscous rumor. who can tell
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i can’t be the only one anxious as all hell to see Sean post here, right?
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the problem with sean’s love for nachos is his pretensious, elitist attitude. that nachos made of ingredients that aren’t good enough for mr. lovelace aren’t worthy to be eaten. come on sean. dont hate on a fucking nacho bell grande. you too good for taco bell?
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October 28th, 2009 / 5:03 pmAni Smith—
Cry for me, there is no Taco Bell in London! Spotted dick at 2am just isn’t the same.
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those are some weak bumper nuts. i saw some stones on a t-bird once that made me jealous. the mullethead driving the piece revved his, looked back, and peeled out.
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I work hard. I mean today I got up and bow-hunted. The woods were dark like matrimony. I graded two papers and kind of (I was watching helicopter crashes on Youtube on my laptop during) went to an important faculty meeting and then I played disc golf (walked the course, like 1.7 miles) and had a Dos Equis and some nachos for lunch (I always have nachos for lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays and Mondays). Anyway, I’m saying I had a typical rough working man’s day. It’s dog-eat-dog or whatever out there, as we all know. So I see this, and I’m thinking, I’m thinking of RIPPING a post right now. But this is going to be BIG. It’s going to take a while. I chart my nacho consumption, and I have eaten 211 servings this year, took photos of 114 of them and I was thinking of just posting all 114 in a row. But is that possible here? I don’t think so. My head goes whoosh-whoosh now. I feel like walking marbles on someone. Like a bird machine of Fuck. Like maybe going exponential on someone’s ass. Epic.
But do I want to? I have to go big, or not go. Do I have the training for this?
I’m going to eat dinner and think on it. Beer.
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October 28th, 2009 / 7:44 pmBlake Butler—
no one cares
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October 28th, 2009 / 8:12 pmBlake Butler—
actually, i do care. i read too many comments on that other donkey thread and it got in my blood. i’d like to see what you write in response.
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October 28th, 2009 / 8:12 pmBlake Butler—
you really chart your consumption? we are very different eaters.
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I just had some wonderful nachos. Lunch was level 4, but these were 8. Ah, life.
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truck nuts
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I think this contest should have multiple events, like a triathlon or something, and one event should include nacho tots.
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One thing for sure MEAN WEEK has given me is a respect for SEAN LOVELACE. The man-sports, the nachos, the mean-speak. Sean, you have my eternal blessings for eating and writing big-nacho-style. But what does that matter to you?
I’m now more interested in / likely to read your EGGS book.
I love Chris Farley. I want his lunchlady to live in my house, to give me a hug when I get home from work.
And the word “overbloated” sounds, well, it just sounds overbloated. But I still intend to read Scorch Atlas.
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Today is national nacho day. Please eat.
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November 6th, 2009 / 1:51 pmBlake Butler—
national nacho day
jesus christ
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November 6th, 2009 / 1:53 pmBlake Butler—
you are the barack obama of nachos
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November 11th, 2009 / 8:08 pmAndrew C-K—
This is the funniest thing I’ve caught on the blogosphere in a long, long time.
[...] dudes in the playground scrap, “Yeah, mother fucker! Yeah!” style, just to say, in the Nacho Love Battles: Sean Lovelace v. Blake Butler, I’m tossing a benjamin on Lovelace. Dude is coming out with salsa lust, swinging nacho [...]
[...] also mentions a certain trash talk, a certain Nacho Battle that has been brewing in the hipper dodecahedrons of the [...]
oh man this is some good Literary Laffs
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