I was struggling for something to write for this guest blog, then I get an email for our upcoming Spring Break Work Potluck. Let the flood gates open…

First of all, it’s not spring. At all. So let’s just get that right out of the way. Second, there’s no luck involved here. Potlucks are soul-crushing events, designed to rob us all of the God-given right to be left the fuck alone. It’s a display of everyone’s sorrow and defeat in life, dumped sadly into chipped, discount dishware bought right after a divorce. Plus, work colleagues wouldn’t actively choose to be socially involved with one another. If they did, it sure as hell wouldn’t be in potluck form.

And okay, I might be a food snob. I typically don’t eat processed or pre-made foods. But I’m not so much of a snob that I can’t shut my organic, homemade piehole and enjoy that stuff if served by other people. That being said, there’s a line… and potlucks cross it. No one wants to deal with cooking or spending money on work people – half of which you know to be shitheads – so the quality quotient of what’s provided plummets to the “fuck-these-people-I-hope-they-spend-tonight-shitting-water” level.

Allow me to recap the fare at our last work potluck, and perhaps you’ll agree:

Enter 20 different pasta salads, all of which were SWIMMING in what I assume to be a mayonnaise/ranch/mustard/cream incest-fest. I could make out the rotini (because that’s the pasta you use when you’ve given up on life) but I couldn’t make out the rest. Chunks of something that were the color of my cat’s vomit that time I took her to the vet? And I guess some curd-like things? Perhaps shavings of carrots, or skin. A couple of them had what looked to be the ‘healthier’ flax or wheat noodle, though they were drowning painfully underneath a pool of milky goo.

Baked beans, brought by a secretary who mentioned she’d “hopefully heated them enough to kill bacteria.” Way to sell your dish.

Rolls dethawing in a fancy basket, gumming together in a sauce of ice and napkin. There was a corner of the gummy breadblock cracked off from where someone tried to separate a roll, but clearly gave up after losing the battle. You could still see the fingerprint embedded in bread putty. Next to the fancy basket? A stick of margarine from the early 70’s – before margarine was proven terrible for health – with some toast crumbs engraved on top. Points for the fancy basket though.

Three plates of some dip that’s apparently a potluck favorite. It’s made with a layer of red (??) and a layer of crabmeat. And by crabmeat, I mean Krabmeat. I’ll eat canned fish, but I draw the line at Krab. It’s the hot dog of the sea.

A heated tub of, oh I don’t know, maybe slices of ham? Or slices of beef? Or slices of a decayed leper? It was graybrownpink and scaly. So whatever’s that color and consistency, it was that. And it was stewing in its own wet. At one point, someone whispered, “Is that the meat?” Unclear. But go ahead and give it a try. I’ll just dial “9” and “1” on my phone just in case…

A table of six hundred 2-liters of pop. And no water. Look, I don’t drink pop, but if I did, I’d at least want it to be fizzy. A 2-liter is just pop that’s given up on life. In any case, all six hundred bottles were empty within 20 minutes. People. Love. Pop.

And then the dessert table. I mean, if nothing else, you can usually count on dessert, right? WRONG. There were plates and plates of depressing cookies, and I imagined the person baking them the night before, pissed, and sweating under a fluorescent kitchen light at 11:50pm while her distant, unloving husband watched Two and a Half Men reruns in a stained t-shirt and black socks. I chose two different cookies that looked halfway decent, but ended up tasting like a stick of butter someone carried around in their ass-crack. In the middle of the table, a beautiful coconut cake sat on a glass-domed cake stand. It looked great. It looked like salvation. And then someone cut into it, revealing the horrific innards – dry, dusty, and brown. Like Arizona’s anus. In fact, the knife kinda made the sawing sound that happens when you rip cardboard. And in that moment, you could hear everyone’s hopes die a suffocating, painful death.

So yeah, fuck potlucks. I ain’t goin’ to this one.