It's when you're fresh from smoking with your hippie friends and you're sitting on the porch and suddenly you are overcome with the munchies. You get up carefully, smiling, and saunter back into your apartment. There is nothing else left, you realize, because you've spent the envelope marked "groceries" on the pocket marked "party."

You have bologna, you have butter, and if you expend a great deal of effort, you have a frying pan. You are reminded of your days growing up in the trailer park. Your mother would have handled this situation without worry.

You fry the bologna.

All of it.

And you walk back to the porch grubbing a paper-towel-laden bowl of this delight, and suddenly it occurs to you that all you'd need to be a true blue redneck is a few slices of fucking Wonder Bread. Perhaps a Bud. And a Nascar race.

The feeling in your gut, the buzz-ruining feeling of defeat, of roots reaching up and grappling your soul, never being able to escape the past, is known in some circles as Fried Bologna Guilt.

Much like White Guilt, Fried Bologna Guilt is reserved for the college students strapped for cash and left to their own devices. It is a guilt like no other in that it is not ever-present, it's situational, and it usually does not occur until one or two of your new age and ghetto neighbors have walked by and given you a dirty look which you return with one of puzzlement.

But it's there. Right now. The guilt is digesting, and you're contemplating a nap.

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P. H. Madore is currently at toe-tapping piss alert level. Recently his work has been accepted by mud luscious press and Thieves Jargon. He has a book for sale, see http://np.henrychalise.info