December 16, 2023 — Poop Deli
It’s bit night with the boys. Pass a phone around the kitchen, point it at your friends, and what could you get? What could you create? Where could you go? To Poop Deli. Poop Deli is a bit that’s too brave for TV, but it’s found a home on the clock app.
The universe of Poop Deli, in which we are grateful (though maybe mirthfully, perversely disappointed) not to live, asks that under the deli counter, behind finger-smudged glass, among the dozens of refrigerated smear and salad tins, plastic wrapped checkerboard hams (sliced only and immediately upon request), and bright hard blocks of cheese so big they might not pass as a budget airline carry-on, there lies one prized sandwich item: poop.
I don’t live in a place with delis now. In Canada, bought sandwiches tend to be pre-made, pre-wrapped in plastic. They are for grabbing and for going. Fresh sandwiches made to order are reserved for gourmet eateries, your own personal kitchen or a subway franchise (and even there, the meat is sliced in the morning, and sits out all day in stacks of sycophantic little triangles).
Watching Poop Deli, I’m brought back to my youth, where as a tri-state area suburbanite, everyday luxury was a freshly made deli sandwich, ubiquitously available, at gas stations, strip malls, grocery stores. A deli sandwich is ordered piece by piece, built up with moist, fresh slices of meat and cheese (carved thrillingly at your behest on the world’s scariest machine: the meat slicer) by the loudest, burliest Italian man town could find. The second and third-loudest and second and third-burliest Italians are ahead of and behind you in line and would each in turn perform a full-body, operatic hem and haw of ingredient selection, remaking each day their order, as though they don’t get the same sandwich from Burliesco’s at the same time, five days a week.
At Christmas these deli lines always got longer. Catering orders were carried out gingerly by men in butcher’s aprons, around the long counter, into the acrylic-tipped hands of a tiny, overwhelmed, smiling woman: these wide trays, roofed with beveled-edge clear plastic, displayed meat slices rolled up and speared with green frilled toothpicks, or, earlier in the day, layers of lox and lemon aside tubs of cream cheese. The shop’s familiar maximalism would be even busier than usual. Amid pyramids of pannetone boxes would hang garlands, tinsel and red velvet bows.
This would be where I hear the man ahead of me in line say, after swaying equivocally and pointing at meats to and fro, uhh and put a half pound o’ poop on there. In this world, in this inaccessible universe, this addendum doesn’t shock me. Hope they don’t run out of poop, I might, in this place, even think. I can never go there, nor would I want to, but for one brief surreal moment, the boys and their bit let me peer, with amazed wonder, into the land of poop deli.
Poop Deli highlights, from user itsfrankie13:
“is this satire”