On The Precipice of Meat

11 days. It's been 11 days of no beef, no pork, no poultry. I've had fish up the wazoo; sushi for lunch, seared salmon for dinner. In fact, last night's salmon--which was very good salmon, from McCall's in Los Feliz--made me a bit queasy, probably because, at that point, I'd become a human aquarium. Today, at lunch, I had a vegetarian meatball hero at The Oaks near where we live and though the vegetarian meatballs were impressively good substitutes for the real thing, they weren't the real thing. And all afternoon today, after going to the gym, I've been craving a hamburger. A big, juicy hamburger. I think I may just snap.

Once again, as I talked about in this essay, it comes down to experience. I'm a man who loves experience. And by giving up meat (beef, pork, poultry) I've given up hamburgers, steak, pork chops, pork shoulder, lamb chops, lamb shoulder, meatballs, ribs, brisket, dumplings, soup dumplings, gui zhou chicken, prik king with chicken, seared duck breast with garam masala and grapes, Thanksgiving turkey, Christmas prime rib, and that's just a tiny fraction of a tiny percentage of all that I'm giving up.

I can't give it up anymore! Craig is sitting behind me and I think I may swivel in my chair and tell him that, for dinner tonight, we're getting burgers. He's going to laugh and say, "I knew it." Well: I knew it too. In my first post about this I said, "[this'll] probably end with an Umami Burger somewhere down the road." Well, maybe not an Umami Burger, but a burger nonetheless. Or ribs at Bludso's. Or anything with a dead animal in it. I'm throwing in the towel and admitting defeat. Meat, you win.