Fuck You Dad, I Mukbang Now
How did I get started in the mukbang game? One word: Survival. It turns out my 23.7 average hours of fear-driven daily screen time were, somehow, starting to really get to me. Refreshing the news and the socials on an endless cycle, I found myself growing paranoid. How long would it be until a war, a famine, or a disease came knocking on my door? I looked in the mirror and saw myself for who I was: ill-prepared to survive even in the comfortable present, let alone the hellscape that was the coming future. It was time to do something. Time to prepare. Time to stock up on the essentials.
I carefully laid out my plan for society’s inevitable collapse: 430 packets of Singapore-style spicy fish-flavored noodles. I swear, I meant to pick up other things too; a sleeping bag, a flashlight, a manual can opener, a few liters of water. But these noodly bad boys were deeply discounted at 15 cents a bag due to an outbreak of chicken fever at the plant they were produced in, and that is a special breed of value that I cannot turn my back on. Survival? In this economy? I think so.
“Lifehack,” I whispered to myself as I clutched the somewhat slimy package of noodles. I’m sure that’s just the flavor waiting to burst out of the package, not a communicable trait of the horrible chicken fever. “The next time I see these, the world will be a very different place,” I said to myself as I stowed the noodles away.
“Just one packet,” I told myself as I opened four packets and dumped them into a pot later that night.
My first mukbang was a bit of accidental circumstance, to be honest. With my platter of noodles in one shaky hand, I opened my laptop to watch my favorite new show, “The Denial of Deals with Ernest Becker.” I was about halfway through my platter when I began to notice a “dinging” alert sound from my browser. I had a few tabs open (65), and I began to flip through them, careful not to close any because I do intend to read them all. Somewhere around the 19th tab, I found the root of the problem: it was a Twitch stream that I had started at some point about a year ago while trying to capitalize on the trend of rubbing 12-sided dice together while lonely people watched, for some reason. Apparently, I had forgotten to end the stream, and unbeknownst to me, every time I opened my computer, it had continued. Surreptitiously, I had gained large fan base of absolute creeps and several of them were logged in and had been observing me eat noodles and watch TV. The “dinging” that I was hearing was a number of people sending me money. I was up around 30 dollars when I finished my plate, and a few of the creeps begged for more.
“Gimme gimme gimme,” Ankle_skinned_poet typed.
I wasn’t hungry anymore, but also for the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt no anxiety about the future at all. Maybe it was the community I had built in the chat, maybe it was the intensely spicy off-brand noodles that had burnt away the reasoning receptors in my brain, but I felt like I wasn’t done broadcasting that night. I threw in 6 more packages of Singapore-style spicy fish-flavored noodles and watched the super chats pour in.
“Happy Daddy's Day,” one of the absolute creeps superchatted me for the third time that day. I ignored the message, as the tone had a vaguely “I have my dick in my hand” vibe. I had been in the mukbang game for a few months at this point, and I had observed that holidays always brought the true weirdos out of the woodwork. Yom Ha'atzmaut and Truman Day were bad but nothing like the freak show that forced me to close my laptop on the day of the Kentucky Derby. Today was Father’s Day, and it had been relatively quiet. I clicked on a fresh DM, and a picture of a shadow darkening a door frame appeared on my screen. An image I’d seen so many times as a child. This was my father.
“Son. You ate so many noodles. I am proud of you. I love you. Do you want to meet up today?” he asked.
Mukbanging had afforded me much in my life. It had so far given me the things he could never have hoped to provide me with. I sat back in my professional streaming chair and looked at myself in my professional 72-inch monitor. I looked at the lines on my face, the ones he put there from years of disappointment and ache.
“Fuck you dad, I mukbang now,” I sent the response and blocked him. I threw 8 more bags of Singapore-style spicy fish-flavored noodles into my pot and silently watched the starch create a fine foam in the boiling water. More months passed and more money rolled in.
Some people create legacies; I have created an empire. My YouTube cover photos: repugnant. My tax situation: v v complicated. My chat rooms: Flowers for Algernon adjacent. They told me it was only possible by going to their schools, getting their jobs, joining their institutions, but I did it by eating food on a webcam for lonely strangers who give me money. It would take me five years to explain that concept to a battlelord genius like Genghis Khan, and yet I have what he has always wanted: the world by the short hairs and feet so swollen that I need to own shoes in 6 different sizes depending on the humidity and if my meager blood pressure medication is having any effect at all against the dump truck of salt I’m pouring into my body on the regular.
And when those bombs begin to fall or that disease finally breaks out, I will hide with my ultra-rich friends in our tax-free sex bunkers off the coast of New Zealand. We will live free and without worry; we will eat the finest foods, like Singapore-style spicy fish-flavored noodles and extra spicy Singapore-style spicy fish-flavored noodles, and most importantly, we will survive because we’re survivors.
Prepare for the end. Boil some water. Turn on your webcam. Mukbang while there is still time.
