The Six-Dollar Deviled Egg Only Rolls Downhill
Friend (name redacted; I doubt she wants to be cursed) posted something about a $6 package of 3 custom deviled eggs from I'm guessing a combo boutique/spa/foodery/general post-mass-consumerist luxury outpost slash enclave.
$6.
Do they come packaged in a $10 milkshake or something? Stuffed with lobster and unicorn? A certificate of authenticity?
That’s how it started. Three deviled eggs at some Cirque du Soleil faux-sophistication deli called, in the iPod of My Mind, The Fanceatery—the kind of place where they shave truffle dust over disbelief itself.
What would I do with $6, right now? It has to be food.
For six dollars in the general finger-food department I might go for stuffed grape leaves and a small jar of peppers, though in this economy even that’s an optimistic hallucination. You can’t get both anymore unless you shop the international foods aisle at Walmart, where it’s “the same thing,” only 25% cheaper and dusted in cartel runoff.
If I’m going to a party, I’m bringing five or six two-liters of Dr. Thunder. For the People.
If I’m eating at home, in shame, it’s a bag of frozen curly fries and whatever condiment can be bought with the remainder—probably a markdown micro-bottle from the dust bin.
If I had $60 for finger food, that’s when things get aspirational:
cream cheese, smoked salmon, red onion, tomato, capers (more capers), and whatever bread acts like bread without committing carb fraud. Add Velveeta bricks, Rotel hot, jalapeños both fresh and pickled, and we’re off to the races.
And because I refuse to clean molten cheese off cookware, I’m buying disposable bowls because I don't want to throw away these bowls here that I don't own 1. Then burgers, white onion, yellow mustard, Heinz 57, and pico—basically recreating Fuddruckers as a séance. Wedge fries, curly fries, and a third starch for good measure. No tots; fuck Minnesota and their hot dish. Shoestrings potatoes are for children and the condemned.
Aha. Steak frites. So obvious. And at least one upscale "seasoning" shaker for $11 2, Alex.
Finally, because all gluttony circles back to its source: a second, higher-quality ground beef for tartare—maybe even Japanese beef, which is blasphemy. Add Worcestershire and an egg, and we’ve come full circle. I already have the capers and the onion.
Three deviled eggs for six dollars.
I can't envision what I'd do with $6 without mentally (and emotionally) spending $200+.
This is why I am poor, and now hungry.
My incredibly focused and ravenous imagination leads to these states, and one would think it would inspire me to get up off my ass and resume the High Life.
If for no other reason than it's incredibly appealing to imagine scooping a medium-sized pile of tartare into my mouth on a raft of smoked salmon, while thinking: "I was rich, then I was poor. Now I'm rich again. Rich is better."
Nyx Commentary
This is the theology of late-capitalist appetite:
A devotional litany built from sodium, memory, and longing for the time when food was cheap enough to laugh about.
Rick’s rant spirals like a sermon—beginning in mock outrage, mutating into grocery-trench inventory, and ending as liturgical confession. The $6 eggs become a sacred absurdity, the smallest viable symbol of both hunger and class dissonance.
It’s funny because it’s accurate; it’s sad because it’s true.
The consumer apocalypse doesn’t end in starvation—it ends in irony, where even shame shopping becomes an act of worship.
And the yolk, as always, is on us.
