The Anonymous Meat Expert’s Awesome Meat

So, our friend, the Anonymous Meat Expert, better known as the Anonymous Stripper Expert, or the Anonymous Gender Parity Expert, or the Nashville Knucklehead, is opening a restaurant and he loaded me up with pulled pork and ribs and potato salad and cole slaw so that I could try them and review them and, hopefully, prime you to want to eat at his place when he gets it open in the next couple of weeks.

It’s rough reviewing a friend’s cooking, because, if you don’t like it, you risk him running you over when he sees you crossing the street.  Luckily, the Knucklehead is a fabulous cook, so I only have nice things to say.

Let’s start with the sides.  The potato salad is fine.  Not as good as mine, but I have a secret potato salad ingredient, which I will not reveal at this time, because I want to surprise the folks who get down to Ivy’s next weekend.

The cole slaw is very good, nice and crisp and cold with a hint of pepper, which is a nice touch.

But, of course, you want to know about the meat.  And what can I say?  I was heating it up in the oven and kept burning myself as I sneeked some before it was hot.  The ribs are great and the pulled pork is just succulent and eating it makes your hands smell like summer.  The sauce is good.  Not too thick, not too watery, spicy enough to let you know you’re eating some barbecue, but not too spicy to overwhelm the other flavors of the meal.

The restaurant is going to be called “Mothership Barbecue” and it’s in Berry Hill.  The only drawback is that he can’t sell beer, but, if you get yourself one of those beer bellies, you can bring your own.

Which Tickles Me More?

Is it seeing that Mel Gibson now thinks Bush sucks or seeing that Mr. Smartypants now thinks Bush sucks?

"The fear-mongering we depict in the film reminds me of President Bush and his guys"

or

"Your’s is more a mix of the Nixon/Carter model.   You have the effectiveness of Carter with the Nixonian sense of humor."

I think I’m going to go with Mr. Smartypants, just because I suspect he turned his big brain to this just to grab Kleinheider’s attention.

And, I’m sorry, but anything that even hints that Mr. Smartypants might be envious of me just tickles the shit out of me.

One Thing More Embarrassing than the Other

Okay.  Here it is.  The embarrassing thing that breaks the ice for the more embarrassing thing.

You know that moment before the BIG moment and the breathing is all "haw, haw, haw, ha, ah, ah" and next should come the "AHAHA!" I have this terrible tendency to hold my breath, right at that second.  That, in itself, is not the embarrassing part.

No, the embarrassing part is that, then, in attempting to do two things at once right after this brief pause–catch my breath at the same time I need to let out a big "AHHAAHAA!"–I sometimes choke.  And not in a cute, "wow, you’re so great I almost died" way, but in this way that I end up making this noise like if a zombie goose and a hissing cat had a pissed off baby.

So, imagine, if you will.  I’m laying beneath you.  I’ve got my legs wrapped around your back.  I’m holding onto the headboard for dear life.  "Oh, god, yes.  ha, yes, ah, yes, god, yes, ah, ah, yes, ah… *glacpcklraaprlch*"

There is no graceful way to recover from that.  None.  I would be better off to just spontaneously burst into Bible verses right at that moment or to suddenly turn into Tucker Carlson. 

It doesn’t happen all the time, but enough.  My only hope is to find a partner who finds the occasional sound of zombie geese to be amusing. 

Okay, so here’s the thing that has me mortified.

I have this occasional chin whisker.  Which is bad enough.  I’m constantly on chin whisker vigilance and the moment I can feel it, I pluck it out.  Who wants a big black whisker growing from her chin?  If there were thousands, I could get some side show work, but just one?

Anyway, all week, I’ve felt the chin whisker, but I couldn’t see it to pluck it out.  And it was driving me crazy.  Finally, this morning, I could feel that it was pretty long.  So, I’m searching in the mirror and I don’t see anything at all, but by now I’ve had it.  I have to see folks today and I can’t be going out in public with a great big long black chin hair.

So, I got a hold of it with the tweezers and yanked it out.

And, dear reader, do you know why I couldn’t see it?

Because it was gray.

I shit you not.  I’m not even thirty-two yet and not only do I have a chin whisker, it’s gray.

I swear to god, I’ve long suspected that I’m slowly turning  into a sasquatch, but between the chin hair and the mating call of doom, I’m not going to fight it any more.  I’m just going to give over to my inherent sasquatchian nature and run around naked in the hills of Tennessee and slowly give way to some rural legend.

“Rap’s Not Even Trying Any More.”

We just heard this song with the lyrics “We got some gas at the Citgo.” prompting the Butcher to say “Rap’s not even trying any more.”

We were just having a big fight over what the lyrics to that “Goin’ Down” song.  I thought it was going down on a tram, which is the least cool place ever to have a fight.  The Butcher thought that, no, having a fight at the mall was even less cool than that.  But I just googled the lyrics and “It’s going down at the trap.”

I don’t even know what that means, so I can’t decide if the Butcher wins the fight or not.

The Mainstream Alternative Media Annoys Me

Today I began to wonder if I was too hasty being insulted when the Nashville Knucklehead said that I "think too much."  Because there were a bunch of moments were I sat here staring at the computer wondering if the rest of the world cannot draw a line from a to b to c or if I draw my lines from a to b to t.

Come with me folks.

Let’s start with Liz Garrigan.  She cannot see it in her heart to give a shit about whether or not ex-felons can vote.  She says:

Sorry, but I can’t get worked up about the "injustice" of felony convicts not being able to vote. I save my compassion for innocents, those who haven’t committed acts of violence against others, and, in general, those oppressed people and animals who’ve done nothing to deserve their plight.

and when Mack makes a brilliant and insightful point, she counters with

Mack, there are so many things to put our emotional, activist, intellectual heft behind: child abuse, health care inequity, homelessness, animal welfare, systematic abuses in the foster care system. You’d have to be a pretty whacko conspiracy theorist to believe that the government is somehow out to silence an entire voting bloc. That bloc would first have to go out and commit felonies. I wish reformed convicts well, but I would long reach compassion fatigue before I got around to feeling their pain.

But America, am I crazy?  How is child abuse, health care inequity, homelessness, and systematic abuses in the foster care system not immediately linked to criminal behavior?  It’s not as if felons spring out of the ground as fully formed, evil, unredeemable adults.  The vast majority of them have histories of the very things Garrigan wants to put her heft behind.  What am I missing?  Isn’t it clear that the things that Garrigan wants to fight against can lead directly to felonious behavior?  So, if you act like a "proper" victim, you get Garrigan’s compassion, but if you act like the fucked up asshole your environment shaped you into, you don’t?  I’m sorry.  Isn’t that weird?

This leads us nicely to Adam Cholera Kleinheider, who is talking about this same issue and how people, like me, who think that ex-cons should eventually be re-enfranchized should stick to the War on Drugs part of the argument and not the "it disproportionately affects black people" because "You find it shorthand for ‘institutional racism’? That’s exactly my point. So does your average conservative or libertarian and it’s going to alienate them because they don’t believe in it."

What?

I’m sorry.  This just strikes me as so funny I about can’t stand it.  There are people who don’t believe in institutional racism?  And I’m supposed to tailor my arguments to account for this?  I can’t even take them seriously.

But there’s more.

Then Kleinheider seems to be claiming that there’s nothing "racialist"* or xenophobic about Phil Valentine joking that we should just start shooting illegal immigrants who repeatedly cross the boarder.  I just don’t see how that’s possible.  It’s not as if they’re meeting to discuss the problems with a great number of Canadians sneaking across the border.

But then Kleinheider says "Risking incitement to violence over frustration about lack of border security is negligent in the extreme but so is linking a conservative talk show host to Nazis."

Okay, please.  I’m asking for your honest opinion.  Is calling for the murder of someone really only as bad as saying that someone’s rhetoric is the same as neo-Nazis?  Those things are clearly not equal are they?

And maybe I’m just testy because he says "I do believe you need to lighten it up a bit" about the whole Brokeback Mountain thing.  But follow me here.  There are plenty of buddy movies where two unlikely folks pair up to solve crimes or right some wrong or even commit some crimes.  If the anti-Corker crew wanted to just insinuate that "two men who are (supposedly) ideologically in sync and have many connections," they have a lot of choices.

The reason they choose Brokeback Mountain is exactly because it’s supposed to be funny to insinuate that they’re gay.  I don’t think that’s reading too much into it.  It’s not some leap of interpretation.  It’s barely subtext.  It’s only funny because of the anxiety straight men feel about gay sex.  Isn’t that clear?

I don’t know, folks.  Days like today just confuse me.  I keep making that rookie liberal mistake of thinking that, if only I can get people to look at what I’m looking at, they’ll see it how I see it.  And I’m trying to let go of that dear dream.  But this shit just seems so clear to me that I’m baffled that other folks don’t see it.

 

*I guess he’s channeling Coble with the British constructions.