I Desire Poutine
It comes as no surprise that people are passionate about poutine since it’s so friggin’ delicious. But what kind of weirdo passion culminates on a chowhound message board debate (in which there are many participants) with the comment, “its not a switch between signifier and signified, but rather the signifier by no means signifies that ‘poutine’ you have?”
I know, right? Wtf? Is this guy serious or what? But then, the debate kicks off with the controversial opinion that “Swiss Chalet pretty much has the best poutine in the GTA now.” These are crazy people! They love food so much that they don’t love anything else. They don’t even love class. They are such food elitists that they’ll choose food over elitism.
All this got me thinking that Swiss Chalet probably makes one tasty mess. You have to be mighty confident to send anyone from chowhound to Swiss Chalet, so that guy must know what he’s talking about. How can I argue with someone risking their foodie reputation to connect me to a good poutine? Furthermore, how can I argue with a food message board that cites semiotics?
It reminds me of Bob Dylan.
Last week I was thinking about desire, and how interesting an idea it is. I thought I would love to write a series of poems about desire and call it “Desire,” but that would be really lame. There is no way I could ever do this thing and live with myself. But Bob Dylan totally did it. He called a whole album Desire, and didn’t even bother to keep it a secret. As it turns out, this worked in his favour because some called it a kick ass album and, you know, it sold.
Bob Dylan’s Desire is that guy’s Swiss Chalet Poutine. Oh, it sold all right. People probably heard the name of the album and assumed serious business was afoot. He’d never risk sounding lame for an album unless it was profound, right?
