I’m standing around with three slices of bacon, the last three slices in the original packaging so the whole’s such a greasy thing to hold that I keep thinking about washing my hands. Three slices of bacon is hardly worth the offer of sharing, a niggardly gesture at best, especially since the one slice of bacon is the one slice you always get in the end of a package so thinly sliced, shaved, that the challenge of cooking it properly makes you want to just throw it away with the packaging.

Since no one’s around no one will notice that I’m not offering to share, so I walk around and open cabinets to find the best pan to use. I prefer an aged cast-iron skillet, and there are tons of them around, but none quite the right size for just three strips of bacon. I’m even thinking that hell I can cut the three strips in half to halve my size requirements.

But so many of the pans are fucking filthy! Or rusty. There are so many pans and no one knows how to take care of them. And there are cabinets devoted to these baby cast-iron skillets too small to even let a single egg spread out to fry. I’m getting to the point where I’ll just settle for any goddamn pan. I want to get the stuff going, and I’m so very much wanting to rid myself of the carrying so I can finally go wash my hands.

It’s then that I notice all the other kind of bacon just hanging around. Like the already cooked kind you just pop in the microwave. Five seconds per slice. But it’s not even that. The stuff is stacked around all over the place, by now cold but nevertheless done. It all looks to be beyond the sogginess of fat, cooked to crisp. The stacks of the stuff look like slices of stratified rock. Even so I’m beginning to be tempted, thinking how it’d be so much easier than dealing with the real thing. The drool’s pooling in my mouth. You could just crunch the stuff cold.

Further on in search of a sink I see even vaster stacks of the fake bacon, still in packaging. Each box, I notice, bears a stylized image like a logo, but more like an instructive pictograph. The background glows a bald yellow. The bacon looks like the bacon on old outdoor signs, outlined with lipstick, given a couple internal wisps to indicate the bit of lean. The goddamn strips of bacon look like they’re fucking smiling! Dashes to indicate motion. As they complete their journey: it looks like, instead of a microwave, the bacon is meant to be cooked by sort of wafting, being trailed through a vat of golden molten deep-fry fat.

The bad thing is I’ve known fuckers just like that.

I'm talking about guys with real grills right at the ready who’d still just drop the stuff in the deep-fry vat; sling the strips like flatworms into the metal baskets, let ‘em bubble like hell and then call it good.

I never could; I couldn't.