9 Ways to Know If You Are a Line Cook Named Philip

1. To annoy your girlfriend, you have begun shouting out surprising things as you orgasm. “For the Fatherland!” you cry. “Holy Meatballs and Hand Grenades!” “God Bless Sacajawea!” You spend each day thinking of a really good one to use that night.

2. You have learned everything you know about cooking from watching Chopped. You now love food you cannot afford to actually eat. You will never go to Europe, and you are obsessed with French cuisine. The pining you feel is real and piquant.

3. In high school you were straight edge because your dad was a heroin addict, but also because you liked feeling better than other people. Now you drink a lot, every night, until you puke, and you are suspicious of sober people.

4. On Saturday nights, the head chef leaves at 10 pm, and you continue on solo serving the bar food. You use this chance to make the waitresses a pizza with anything they want on it because you have a genuinely good heart and you know they are hungry and hate their lives.

5. You are saving all of your money for a tattoo of the monsters from Where the Wild Things Are that you plan to pair with a quote from Nietzsche.

6. The idea of ever having kids creeps you out. It isn’t so much that you don’t like kids or that you don’t see yourself as a dad. It’s the idea that your sperm could take shape and become something else. What you picture is just a puddle of your semen reforming into a fist rising up into the air.

7. You have a cat that you have had since you were eight years old who is now nearing twenty. You love this cat more than anything. Her name is Muffin. She pees everywhere in your room. You are in denial about the fact that she will die soon. “She will live to at least thirty,” you say, “if not forever.”

8. The older you get the more you hate things. You hate business men, banks, credit cards, suits, ties, capitalism, hair cuts, socks without holes in them. You also hate rodeos, men who beat their wives, dog fighting, cock fighting, ketchup and crystal meth. On top of this, you hate mommies, children, minivans, cute school pictures and Facebook. Your world is narrowing from both directions and you are paralyzed with hatred for the upper class, the lower class, and the middle class. What will become of you? You have no idea. There is no place in the world for you, and no one cares.

9. You intend to die young, but you really like your girlfriend, so not yet.