Monday, April 14, 2008

Getting the Meat Out

We spent a surreal hour Sunday afternoon at the Great American Meatout. Kirst and I were near catatonic with hangover after a whiskey-fueled karaoke debacle the night before that went too far. We did our best to listen to the polite, intelligent people who engaged us but all I heard where Charlie Brown trumpet voices. And while Claire seemed mildly excited to be meeting the rest of her fellow vegetarians, this quickly spoiled into boredom. It's funny, she pronounces vegetarians as "budgetarians." Man, Budgetarians. Now that's a political party I could get behind.

In case you don't know, the Meatout is like a traveling carnival of vegetarian ideals. There are lots of food samples cooked by local restaurants, literature, demonstrations and speakers. If I would have had my wits about me I would have had a hilarious half hour going from food booth to food booth taking samples and then stopping in alarm and asking, dead seriously, "Wait, this doesn't have any meat in it, does it....?" It would be like the time I went on that class trip to Washington D.C. in 8th grade and asked the security guard standing next to the copy of the constitution, vaulted underneath 6 feet of glass, if this was "the real one." To which he replied, "No, the real one's in my living room." Only that time, sad to say, I wasn't joking.

Man, I just remembered. I was a dumb kid.

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