Tonight I entered a Five Guys and ordered a cheeseburger with every topping except mushrooms. Not the "cheeseburger all the way" menu item, which contains many - but not all - of the toppings. Instead a cheeseburger with every single available topping, except mushrooms. The toppings are free, and I wanted almost all of them because I am both glutinous and an enjoyer of free toppings.
I enjoy the free toppings even with a full understanding that the freeness of these toppings is a basic smokescreen akin to free bread in a restaurant, or the 10th coffee on a loyalty card being free. Some people might think themselves too educated to buy into these delusions willingly, and they can very well luxuriate in their own superiority and smugness until the end of days, because despite all of this self-inflicted ignorance I am in possession of a glorious burger. A burger which not only has 14 free toppings, but is free from philosophical pessimism. Make no mistake, the only reason it doesn't contain 15 free toppings is because I do not like mushrooms.
The nice Five Guys gentleman facilitating the order wished to confirm the toppings. Instead of saying "everything except mushrooms", he listed all 14 of the other toppings individually to me, inputted them one by one into the computer. I admired this approach because it demonstrated a specific disdain towards the mushrooms, painstakingly reducing the menu to its individual components and wiping out mushrooms entirely, not even making reference to them on the system. This was an entirely unnecessary process because I know for a fact that the computer has a quick option to work backwards and say "all toppings, minus mushrooms", and I know that he knew that because he has served me an identical 14-toppings burger in the past using this precise method. For that reason, the new pointlessly longwinded approach was even more admirable.
When eating my burger, I began to consider whether or not it truly was identical to the 14-toppings burgers of the past. Those burgers were made on the assumption that they contained all toppings minus mushrooms, but this one had no mention of having no mushrooms. This burger had "no mushrooms" in the same way that it had "no giraffes" or "no sadness". The absence of a thing combined with the absence of the illusory freeness of that thing was a confusing combination, so much so that it made me forget to order a milkshake.
I felt a similar confusion a few months ago when I was in Tesco enquiring about the location of floor cleaner. The man asked "what type of floor?", I said "wood", then he said "we don't have any floor cleaner". That's the kind of logic that works very well if your objective is to fry the motherboards of time-travelling killer robots. It's weird to transpose your pieces from one chess position to another and then be told the c5 square never existed to begin with.
Sometimes I wish mushrooms didn't exist so they didn't have to be avoided as a burger topping. I hate eating mushrooms. The texture is weird and they taste like cardboard. I am happy they were swerved this evening in a new and more complete manner, much like the time I was in Waterstones Piccadilly and used the lift from the lower ground floor to reach the bathroom located on the stairs between the second and third floors. I rode the lift to the third floor and walked halfway down, rather than riding the lift to the second floor and walking halfway up. If the objective is to skip the up, then it's better to commit fully and skip all of the up. I fully committed to the undignified, abject laziness of avoiding those stairs. The Five Guys gentleman fully committed to erasing mushrooms from the toppings equation.
Tonight's burger had "no mushrooms" in the same way that life has "no death". The two things never really intersect. Previous burgers contained concrete reference to the absence of mushrooms. Tonight's burger was a burger at peace with itself, a burger that would quote Mark Twain in saying "annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born - a hundred million years - and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together."
Overall, 8/10 burger.
This blog entry is dedicated to the friend who told me to write about the burger, most likely as an attempt to make me stop talking about it on a bus at 11pm.