Potlucks. Blech. Pot-yucks is a much more apt name.
We’ve all been there. Standing around an oversized dining room table full of delicious, delicious homemade dishes. Queso. Casserole. Brownies. 7-layer bars. Cookies. Salsa. Hummus. Chips. A healthy vegan salad no one is eating. Heavily mayonnaised pasta salads. Pulled pork. Crock pots full of mystery. Dips. Cheetos. Green jello. Orange jello. Cheese and crackers. Deviled eggs. Chicken salad. The list goes on and on.
Many see this as a dream come true. But the reality behind pot-yucks is much much darker than ever imagined.
You pick up a paper plate and move toward the chicken salad which you notice has a light coating forming around the top. A congealed layer of warm mayo — the riskiest of all kinds of mayo. So you do a little quick math, calculating the number of hours this shitty soiree has been underway divided by how long it takes mayo left at room temperature to make you violently ill. You ask yourself, is it worth it? Maybe just a little? The answer is an unequivocal NO. A little piece of rock solid advice to live by: IF YOU HAVE TO THINK ABOUT THE MAYO, DON’T EAT THE FUCKING MAYO.
So you figure you’ll just stick to some “safe” items. Good fucking luck. There are no safe items. Trust no one’s prepared food.
Yes, even a bag of fucking chips is remiss. Do you have any idea how many hands have gone into that bag? How many random unwashed, unidentifiable hands have skimmed each and every portion of the inside of that plastic bag? And where were said hands previously? In butts and on balls. That’s where.
You may be thinking: I don’t know what kind of company this woman keeps or what kind of perverted potlucks she attends but my friends and family aren’t gross like that.
Really? Really? At your next unfortunate potluck outing throw a general question out there about recently touching your butt or your balls and see who blushes over some warm fucking mayo.
Which brings us back to old standards like cheese and crackers. Take a closer look at that sliced cheese. Nope, look even closer than that. What’s that you see? It’s shiny? Oh fucking shocking. That wee little bit of gloss from sitting unrefrigerated for an immeasurable amount of time on a hot metal tray under the dining room lamp has turned perfectly good dairy into a raging case of sweaty cheese. The crackers on the other hand are probably fine. PROBABLY. But what, are you going to be the guy who only eats crumbly crackers? Your host will either assume you have man-orexia or that you’re a total elitist douche, only the latter of which happens to be true.
Do NOT even get me started on nut mix. It only takes one cashew-hunting asshole to ruin an entire bowl of what were perfectly good, extra-fancy mixed nuts. Look, no one likes Brazil nuts but that doesn’t give you the right to stick your dick in the bowl. Get over yourself, nut-guy.
Deviled eggs = NO. Hard no. Because I said so. You’ll end up contracting something between botulism and full blown herpes. I can’t say why, you just will.
At this point you decide you’ll skip dinner and just have some dessert, which is likely the biggest offender of all things potluck. So much time and care had to go into baking it that you can never be sure what other garbage ended up in there too. Alas, you’re naive and since there’s only one brownie gone from the ginormous pan you think how bad can it be? Just as you reach for a knife to slice one for yourself like a human fucking being not a goddamn animal the worst of the worst happens: A child.
A disgusting disgusting unsupervised sugar-loaded sticky obnoxious child.
He comes at you with an orange rim circling his mouth, some sort of goo on his shirt, and his fly unzipped. He reaches his bare, diseased, child hand straight into the brownies without hesitation like a fucking monster. You witness baked chocolate come squishing out from between his little fingers as he giggles and rams a fistful of dessert onto his own face. Suddenly an unknowing pan of delightful brownies has become a pile of actual shit being flung around by a young ape.
Now this salmonella party has left you with nothing but half a plastic cup full of boxed Chardonnay, dry semi-stale crackers, and a bowl of untouched crumbly kale chips that smell like salty farts. There’s not enough hand sanitizer in the fucking world for this. So the next time you get invited to a potluck, consider yourself, in fact, quite pot-unlucky.
