I’ve felt that. In my story, I’m an adult out on a date. I order a molcajete dish from the local Mexican restaurant. I’ve had this dish before at a few places. I know it’s usually spicy. I want this. I have a vague memory of the waitress confirming I was okay with a spicy dish. I enthusiastically confirm.

I had never encountered this level of spicy before. Those other molcajete dishes I’d had were milquetoast. This was flavortown gone nuclear. My entire head turned red apparently. The sweat started on my forehead, then my neck, and eventually my entire head was running like a sock over a faucet. I hadn’t encountered real heat like this before. I was in experienced, so I didn’t know that drinking my beer between bites was only making the heat worse. The waitress kept bringing them though. At one point I could hear people laughing together in the kitchen. It was a quiet restaurant, we may have been the only ones there at this point.

I was not bowed or broken. I ate the whole damn thing. It was otherwise also a delicious dish and now that I had broken through into the fire dimension I was tasting flavors I didn’t even have words for. These flavors were here the whole time but I couldn’t experience them until I had set my mouth on fire. I eventually won the day, or so I thought until the next day when dinner had it’s revenge on the way out.

Jalapenos don’t get the respect they deserve. Sure they don’t have the face melting power of some other peppers. But they taste fucking great in ways the other peppers can’t match. They are also sneaky. I’ve had jalapeno with little to no heat, almost like a better tasting green bell pepper. And I’ve had jalapeno that were face melty sweet awesomeness. The secret I eventually learned was to seek the peppers with those little brown stretch marks. More stretch marks mean more fire.