Being Guy Fieri isn’t easy. Beneath the bleach-blond hair, beady, sunglass-covered eyes, and bottomless vats of Donkey Sauce lies a tortured, vacant soul. Reigning over Flavortown is often a thankless task, and for years Fieri’s Kafka-esque existence has been reduced to eating at this country’s most squalid culinary establishments for the public’s twisted amusement.
But now, thanks to one sympathetic YouTube user, Fieri’s unique, existential pain has finally been compiled into one video, with Johnny Cash’s haunting rendition of “Hurt” aptly playing in the background.
“I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel,” Cash sings, as Fieri proceeds to stuff his face over, and over, and over again, pausing only to squirt sauce directly into his mouth. “I focused on the pain, the only thing that’s real.”
Over the years, Fieri has been ridiculed by his peers, with culinary bad boy Anthony Bourdain swinging most eagerly at the low-hanging fruit. Still, last month, in an interview with Success, Fieri revealed that he, too, feels pain, expounding on how “demoralized” he feels from all the name-calling.
“If I probably didn’t have tattoos, or if I probably didn’t bleach my hair, or if I probably didn’t wear blue jeans and a T-shirt to fancy things, if I didn’t do things that make me look like someone who’s whacked out of their mind, it’d probably be different,” he said at the time. “But then again, that’s how I wanna dress. And I like my tattoos. And I like my haircut the way it is.”
“You get enough, you can get beat up,” he added. “You can get hurt. You can get frustrated. You can get demoralized.”
[via Grub Street]