When I was a child I loved pickles. Not a normal amount. I loved pickles so much that my mother had to institute a pickle limit. I have no idea how many pickles it takes to make a very absentee parent set a pickle limit but as I was a child of excess let’s assume I craved an unholy bacchanal of pure pickle madness.
After the Pickle Rationing began I was like a poor wartime child deprived of sweets but the sweets were pickles. I’d piteously beg for more than my daily allotment and when the regime of two pickles a day stayed firmly in place I began to develop a system. A pickle system.
I couldn’t get more pickles. But I could draw out the pickle eating experience to hitherto unknown lengths to wring as much joy from each one as possible. The first pickle I ate in a fairly reasonable manner, if more slowly then a regular pickle experience. The second pickle though. The second pickle resembled the first only in the first bite or so. And then I’d take each bite and carefully chew it. And chew it. And chew it. But never swallow. As it began to lose flavor I would carefully dole nibbles of what was left, each fresh burst of pickleness sparking a fraction of the joy of a real bite. But as long as I was chewing, I was eating a pickle.
I could spend hours chewing. Every infinitesimal bit of flavor was systemically worked out of every shred until I was chewing a pickle adjacent cud every day. It took a while for my mom to figure out why I always seemed to be chewing. It could last from lunch to dinner, really, and if I could have saved my disgusting facsimile to resume chewing after dinner I would have.
My mom tried to ban this behavior but ran into my overwhelming stubbornness and autism. I would not be swayed. If there were not more pickles then I would insist on this perverse charade of getting to enjoy them for as long as I could torture their spirits with my mouth.
So my mom lifted the Pickle Ration and I ate myself sick for a week and never mummified a pickle in my mouth again.