Cheeseburger Haiku - Peter Luger

Ladies and Burgergents,

Is your life swirling down the crapper? Are you stuck in a rut, wondering how come you never amounted to anything? Do you relish the discomfort of others because it improves your lot by comparison? Well, I've got news for you: you are not alone. As much as you hate the world, the world hates you. It's true. I have personally spoken with fate and it informed me that it spends the better part of its nights and weekends conspiring little ways to make your life just that much more miserable. Your dull and pathetic life has nothing to do with you, that's just the way it is supposed to be. Sorry, but I'm not going to blow smoke up your bum*.

It's not going to get any better either, so don't even try motivating yourself to getting off the couch and opening up a book, or exercising or anything stupid like that. That's all stupid stuff that will only result in making your life worse via a nefarious agglomeration of  virulent femto-thoughts known as 'aspirations.' You see, these aspirations climb into your head and give you false hope, dreams of a better tomorrow. In my estimation, the aspirations are agents or associates of fate, in that they're main purpose is to make sure your life has an appropriate ratio of terribleness to god-awfulness. They make you think that your life can change, that positive actions will result in positive outcomes. And then, you fail. You go back to the couch, grab a bag of Cheeto's and resume watching that Cheers marathon. Only this time, nobody knows your name.

Sometimes when you're prowling the streets, looking for punks with brightly-colored mohawks wielding switchblades to take out some of your frustrations on, do you ever bust open a garbage can or hurl aside a dumpster in hopes of finding a lovingly-prepared honey-baked ham or Thanksgiving turkey? Delicious meats are never just hiding odd places, waiting to add a bit more life to your health meter. Life, alas, is not a Sega Genesis game**.

As you all know, the only real way to improve your lot in life is to seek out your own delicious meats. It is, as you all are aware, the first burger truth of the Cheeseburger Manifesto. Find yourself a good cheeseburger and you can block out the plain fact that your life is an utter waste, at least for a few hours until the pangs of hunger beckon you to worship at the glowing alter of the refrigerator. To date, burgerologists had yet to find a burger isotope with a half-life of more than just a few hours. Bacon science has done a lot to prolong the diminishing effect of burger-euphoria, but current trends and anecdotal evidence suggest that even bacon has a limited potential for deliciousness***. Guacamole, onion rings, barbecue sauce, deep-fried pickles--even a second or third all-beef patty, these things only add incrementally to the life-improving aura of the cheeseburger and while certain iterations of cheeses, sauces and toppings have been found to show strong results in patients, the combinatorics involved fall somewhere on the scale between astronomic and gastronomic. Though the decoding each person's burger-genome to figure out the optimal combination of toppings would be ideal, burger-omicists have yet to discover a method that is both affordable and reliable.

The tried and true method of personal optimization for maximal burger-euphoria is a noble pursuit, one sure to distract from the ho-hum crap bowl of life, it is, nonetheless, an aspiration. There are many who have claimed to find the perfect toppings suited for their unique burger receptors, but who can say so with any objective certainty? Much like the rent in New York City, the amount of possible burgers in the world is too damn high. So should we stop trying? Should we just eat the same old western bacon cheeseburger day in, day out until the cows come home (to be eaten, presumably)?

I say thee Nay! We here at the offices of Cheeseburger Haiku have found the chosen one, a mythical burger with the single highest concentration of naturally occurring deliciousness****.

That burger is the Peter Luger burger.

Me oh my! Oh me oh my! That is a tasty burger. A tasty, tasty burger. Never in all the history of the Cheeseburger Haiku has such a wonderful conglomeration of meat and cheese and bun crossed these lips. The meat was so juicy and so tender that I can't even begin to describe it. The bun battled valiantly against soggy bottom bun (SBB) and won outright, soaking up buckets of juice but never reaching the point of saturation, like some sort of cosmic sponge. I even ordered bacon with the burger, but because Luger bacon is roughly a half an inch thick, I left it as a side dish. This was the best burger I ever ate and there wasn't even bacon on it! The only thing I put on the burger was two ringlets of raw onion, which added just the right amount of crunch.

Delicious hardly even begins to describe the sensation occurring in my mouth. What prefix is even suitable for such a level of deliciousness? Mega? Ultra? Supercalifragilista? There is none. No amount of prefixes will do. This is where you will just have to take me at my word. This was the most succulent, savory, mouth-orgasmic burger I've ever eaten. It was so good that I didn't eat a proper meal for over 24 hours afterward, as though my belly did not want to have to churn it through the workings of the ol' stomach-gut crap factory. This burger brought a ray of sunshine into my life, and for a brief moment I understood what success was. After eating this burger I had the feeling of true accomplishment; now I understand what Lou Gehrig meant in his farewell speech at Yankee Stadium; what proud and loving parents mean when they point to the birth of their children as their happiest moments; what it is like to be Rod Stewart. I get all that and more, because this burger is better than all of those things combined. My life, as it were, has peaked at 26. And I couldn't be happier about it.*****

*For free. Send me a private email for availability and pricing.
**See Kulwaki and Hart (1998), Metaphysics of the 16-bit Universe. Particular emphasis on Section 2 --There is no high score.
***For trends and discussion on the cutting-edge of baconology, check out the April 2012 issue of Bacon Monthly, on newsstands now. An interesting article, though unrelated to burgers, is this month's "Slice of Heaven," wherein leading bacon-scientists debate with respected bacon-theists on crispiness versus chewiness.
****We all remember the stunning (albeit deadly) experiments of the late 1980's when then-renowned burger-physicist Cal Ignatius channeled $90M (US) into creating the burger-particle accelerator and proceeded to smash two bacon cheeseburgers into one another at near light speeds, thus isolating the highly unstable, (though reportedly ultra-delicious) then-theoretical deliciousness particle, the euphoron.
*****If somehow I wind up dead within hours of this going to press, assume that it is the result of some Rube-Goldberg turn of events that led me to my unfortunate end and not the resounding despair of realizing that the best burger has perhaps been discovered. If anything, the Luger Burger has invigorated the Cheeseburger Haiku, because: what if it's not the best?