Lunch!

On cloudy days like today, I sit around and think. I think about where I left my ham sandwich that day. I think about who might have eaten my lost ham sandwich. Did anyone even eat it at all? Did that pig die in vain? Was his meat just tossed into a trash can, uneaten?

If I was a pig and was about to be processed into some type of ham-type item, would I want to be eaten, or would I rather not be eaten? If I were a slice of ham, would I even have the cognitive ability to be able to articulate my wants and desires? It’s doubtful, although perhaps ham communicates at such a high frequency that it is discernible only to dogs and fishwives.

But even if a dog could hear a slice of ham as it spoke, would the dog understand the language spoken by lunch meat? Is it a variant of Yiddish? I would suspect so. So where does that leave a Yiddish fishwife? In the thick of a desperate struggle against oppression and chicken substitutes, that’s where!

If lunch meat could talk, what would it say when it was not being threatened by imminent engorgement? Would it discuss mathematical theorems, or would it prefer to lie back and reminisce about the days before refrigeration? Would a slice of lunch meat even know how to spell such a long and complex word?

Is it presumptuous of me to assume that lunch meat would speak in human-style sentences? Or would they communicate non-verbally, by transmitting their wanton desires into the minds of those they choose? Lunch meat. Lunch meat. I find myself increasingly afraid of lunch meat. Save me from it, and I will continue to do my utmost to propel myself into one sticky situation after another. At least that’s what Anthony Kiedis would do. And Lord knows he’s not shy about telling everyone!

He even wrote a book about it. It’s called The Inner Workings of Meatish-Hungarian. It’s named after an album by the Beatles called Rubber Soul. Strangely, he never even mentions me OR my hard work on behalf of NASCAR! To say nothing of Dick Trickle!

Seriously, say nothing about Dick Trickle. Nothing. It’s a secret that’s strong enough for a man, yet made for a woman. So we’ll just leave that little query unanswered, won’t we, champ?

Jon Voight was never a very good actor, he just had a winning beard. Prior to the beard, I’m not sure HOW he made his mark. Probably with a felt-tip marker he’d saved for just that purpose! Saved in a lockerbox at the end of his cotton-pickin’ cot.

You can buy cotton-picking cots at Sears these days for $49.99. Then all you have to do is lie down and let the cot do all the work! Cotton-picking cots could have helped wipe out slavery hundreds of years earlier, if only we could have convinced George Carlin to travel back in time in his phone booth and donate one to George Washington.

And now, back to the story at hand…

When last we met Dr. Mephistopheles, he was trying to explain why he changed his name from Dr. Thompson. He claimed it had nothing to do with his incipient Satan-worshipping, and everything to do with making his name easier to spell. This seemed a daft argument to Dr. Jesus H. Christ, Jr., who challenged Dr. Mephistopheles to a banana-cream-pie fight.

“Put up yer dukes,” said Christ.

“Aw, go jump off a bridge, why don’cha?” retorted Mephistopheles.

The pies flew about the room in a frenzy of fun, friends, and flexible hours. Just like Mickey D’s. At this point in our narrative, some readers will complain that there is nothing resembling a story here at all, and that this whole thing seems very much like the random thoughts of an extremely bored writer with a bit too much knowledge of pop culture. Three and a half grams too much, to be exact.

These readers would be correct, which is why your humble author has decided to get going with the actual purpose of this pithy missive: Telling the story of how tigers got their stripes! It’s called a fable, you dick.

Once upon a time, there was a tiger named Peter Tosh. He was the namesake of reggae star Peter Tosh, but that was still many years in the future. Peter loved to romp and play, splashing about in the surf while eyeballing gazelles for culinary reasons. But Peter had no stripes! Instead, tigers at this time were covered in a paisley pattern that had been designed by none other than Gloria Vanderbilt!

Peter went to the local wizard, Diego Maradona. He asked the wizard to change his paisley pattern into stripes. So that’s just what Maradona did! And ever since, tigers have had stripes. And then they all went out for a light lunch at Susan Feniger’s new Burmese-Hungarian restaurant.

Alright, so it’s not the greatest fable you’ll ever read. But you can’t deny that it has more celebrity names per line than any fable you’ve previously experienced! And that’s got to count for something, doesn’t it?

Well, screw you then.