This year, for only the second time in my life, I left the apple pie-ness of the U.S. and went to another country where the hot-dog is considered the root of all evil, but they'll happily serve you a slice of grey loaf containing recognizeable pig nuts/faces/bones. I loved my time in Italy, but damn if that loaf didn't make me long for the completely generic pink of absolutely processed meat.
And that of course leads me to think about what that longing means. It's basically a longing for ignorance, because I'm wishing I could eat all the parts of the pig/cow/manatee that are in a hotdog, without knowing they're in there. Without a reminder in the form of a bone I have to pick out, I'm able to pretend it's a hotdog from the hotdog tree in Hebrew National Park.
Obviously that's not ideal.
But it's also, I think, how most people survive in the world. If we look too closely at things as they are, we have a tendency to become depressed by them. Spend an hour with the evening news and you'll see what I mean. But if we don't look closely, we gloss over things that we need to fix. Ignore at your peril the religious right, and gasp in shock when you find they've distorted our society's constitution to suit their own desires. Ignore at your peril the fact that corn subsidies have dictated the use of high fructose corn syrup in just about 90 percent of products on the shelf in your grocery store. (statistics TOTALLY made up to prove a point, YOU AREN'T PAYING ATTENTION!! You don't know if it's true or if it's just somebody saying something on the internet to prove a point. Go find out!!)
The point is, that grey Italian loaf of pig brain/colon/eyesocket is what you're eating when you chow down at the ballpark, it's just way less grindy, and it's way more remindy. Today, ask yourself what else you need reminding about. And while you're at it, remind yourself that you need not be depressed by the things you're paying more attention to. You can actually choose something different and make the attention into a positive one. For my own part, I'm choosing (after the soda that's on my desk right now) to drink only a single cherry coke a week at the movies, if I go, and to not eat another hot dog until next summer. Attention, meet INtention.
Happy Pigloaf to you, my friends, and on a personal note, I ask you to take a peek at the ingredients list on that package of hotdogs that the GOP is trying to sell you from Alaska. From what I can see, she comes complete with pork barrel spending, religious intolerance, and a big steaming pile of bullshit. But I may just have bit down on a bone that the processing plant didn't catch.
