I went to Tampa with Biceps Dave on Sunday to see some awesome friends and hang out at the beach. It took a while to get there but it was worth the adventure. Along the way, we went to Tijuana Flats to eat not-Mexican food. Jess challenged me to drinking hot sauce shots, and being a manly man, I accepted. Hot Sauce is an important ingredient to being a man; it’s even in Maddox’s Alphabet of Manliness, one of the greatest books written by modern man. If you disagree with drinking hot sauce as a means of proving one’s manhood, then you clearly are lacking.

So we went over to the sauce table and she picked one of the sweeter sauces and I decide to get something hotter and she points out that those sauces are on the right side of the table. I saw a sign with spice labels and saw a black face of someone dying and it said “Death Wish” under it. I got pretty excited and asked which one that was. She pointed out the bottle of Endorphin Rush that had that same dying black face on it and I filled the hot sauce cup with a bunch of it.

We sat down and downed our shots. The first ten seconds were okay for me. Then my lungs felt like someone grabbed them and kept violently squeezing and shaking them and I felt the whole inside of my body begin to be destroyed with intense searing heat. There were parts where I felt like the inside of my stomach was bubbling up like a volcano ready to erupt. MANLY TEARS WERE SHED! It was quite an experience and it took me almost an hour or so to begin recovering from the ordeal. I could go into more detail on what drinking hot sauce like that can really do, but I’ll leave it to your imagination. That place wasn’t lying when they labeled that sauce as a death wish. Anyways, I proved that I was the manliest man in the restaurant that day and that is what counts. I probably could have gone just one higher than she did and that probably would have been acceptable. But not me, I have to go for the overkill… and almost got killed because of that!

What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.