Recently, a few friends and I got together to make sausages. Yes, real sausages, with the casings and everything. It was a great idea and we had a great result – check out these juicy babies:
Fat, tasty tubes of ground meat, stuffed in pig intestines. Oh yeeeah.
Great – all great! It was a great afternoon. Everyone showed a natural aptitude for sausage stuffing. (Well, everyone but me. You don’t have to tell me how surprised you are right now – I was equally shocked. )
What stopped it from being a stupendous afternoon? We had all the ingredients for a record breaking day of good times: ground meat, casings, machinery, booze, more booze, ribald sausage humor. How did this not end up being a day to end all days?
Pork Death Rays.
As it turns out, one among us (who will remain unnamed) had a lingering paranoia about unwashed hands and pork. I don’t want to belabour just how hung up Greg was about this, but Jesus Henry Rollins he never fucking let up. And it’s not as if we weren’t washing our hands, he just wasn’t there to witness every single scrub. Take two steps toward him and he would shriek at us, like an early pork warning system. Def-pork 4!
But I shouldn’t judge. Everyone has their thing. As some of you may know, I hate spiders like they are Hitler. In fact, I suspect that if I walked into my bathroom and found Hitler perched on my toilet, copy of Mein Kampf in hand, I would not jump, wee a bit, gag and have a full body shiver all at once. That happens most times I find the tub-spider. Hang on…did I just say “I shouldn’t judge”? Oh ha ha ha ! Rich! No, I will judge. The world we live in has become too paranoid about cleanliness. A few germs here or there never hurt anyone. Trichinosis? I laugh in the face of those little flukes that could get all up in my gut causing nausea, heartburn, dyspepsia, and diarrhea from 2–7 days after infection, followed by edema, muscle pain, fever, swelling around the eyes, and splinter hemorrhages in the nails, not to mention ataxia or respiratory failure and even death. Ha HA! Why when I was a kid, I remember we used to play a game called Lick the Chop. It was much like tag, except no one ran or tagged each other – we just stood at the counter and licked whatever was waiting to be cooked for dinner.
Good times.
We need to consider whether or not we are coddling our digestive tracts these days. Maybe a good spell of salmonella or a hardy parasitic infection is just nature’s way of culling the herd.
Anyway, I tell you all this simply so I could have a venue to post the below doodle. I made it special for Greg Poirier. Feel free to print it off and hang it over your sink.
Wry and Ginger 