I Love to Drink!

September 20, 2023November 23, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

“Do you love to drink?” Barry told a Pocatello, Idaho audience. “Of course you do. Everyone does. We’re not talking about Kool aid, or anything that hydrates you either. We’re talking alkie hall, girls and boys. The National Food and Nutrition Board recommends that we drink eight glasses of alcohol a day, and I think that’s a bit excessive, but I … what? Oh, they were talking about water, eight glasses of water a day. Water. Thank you for the correction. “Eight glasses a day,” they say. “It cures what ails you.” All that. We know it, we’ve heard it, we got it. We should drink more water, we know we should, but it’s just so blah.

Now, I have had some incredible, absolutely unforgettable glasses of water, and they came out of the tap. How could a glass of tap water be so incredible that I’m still talking about twenty years later? You ever drink alcohol to excess? You ever drink so much the night before that that morning glass of water teaches you what euphoria means? You ever dehydrate your body so thoroughly that when you finally drink that glass of water, it’s … it arouses you a little? I’ve put those eight glasses down in the space of about ten minutes before, but that first glass? That first glass makes you happy you survived the night before. It’s like a reward for damaging your body. If you do it right, you can feel that first glass soothing your throat, hydrating and healing whatever ball of hell we threw into it the night before. We can feel it circumnavigating the stomach putting a cool coat on all the wounds our violent, projectile vomiting caused. Do you love to drink? Let me hear you knock one back. Let me hear that after-the-drink sigh.

“Very few people applaud that line wildly, especially on a date. We might love to drink, but we don’t love telling people that, especially on a first date. It’s not a good look. ‘You like what you’re hearing here? I’m pretty charming, right? Enjoy it while you can, because in about a half an hour, I’m going to have trouble remembering your name, Jennniferr?’

“I’m not an alcoholic anymore, but I used to be (pause here) I used to be (add menacing soft chuckle that lasts a little too long). I am probably going to hit on some other girl on our way out, just so you’re prepared, and let’s see here, oh, oh and I almost forgot I’ll probably fall on someone on the way out too. I do that silly stuff like that all the time. I just fell on someone last weekend. I almost forgot about that. Yeah, he was on a date with a certain someone he considered special, and he threatened to have me prosecuted, because he said (stifle laughter here) he said that he thought I fell on him on purpose.” Barry looked over both shoulders and leaned in to whisper to the audience, “And, just between you and me, I kind of did. That’s right, I picked out some fella who appeared to be having a very pleasant date with a polite, young woman, and I fell on him for no reason. Just to see what he’d do. It’s not funny, I know, but I wanted to hear this little feller scream a muffled scream under my shoulder as I writhed around like a turtle on its back trying to regain its footing.” Barry reenacted the effort of a turtle with its arms flailing. “I was almost blackout drunk, so that might be why I did it, but I was also so bored with everyone filing out of the comedy club single-file, like fourth graders. I wanted to see how it would affect his date’s impressions of him when she heard him scream his muffled scream. So, just to let you know, I probably have a trial date in my near future, but they got nothing on me. It was an … accident,” Barry said to the audience with an exaggerate wink.

“That was me. I was what you would call a happy, fun drunk when I was about … your age,” Barry said, picking a random member of the audience, “but I hate the ‘I was so drunk the other night, that I …’ tales now. Are you with me here? I loved them when I was your age. Hell, I was probably telling them most of the them, because I was a sloppy, pathetic drunk, but I had a big old smile on my face when I was falling all over your tables, and I was usually the only one laughing when all your drinks crashed around me. Why were people so disgusted with me, because sloppy drunks aren’t funny in the present tense. They’re kind of sad and pathetic in the present. I didn’t care about any of that at the time. I was having a blast, and I was feeling good. He knows what I’m talking about. High five? Air high five? No? First date? Ok, well, he knows alcohol makes us feel better, even if he doesn’t want to shout loud and proud … stupid, yeah, but better. We love to hear about alcohol stories from the past, because we love to hear about stupid people doing stupid things … if it’s from the past. Some of us are old and boring now, because we’ve learned our lessons, but our stories, the one’s we try to frame in a serious way to teach lessons, they’re knee-slapping-hilarious. If we’ve learned our lesson, it sort of gives us all a pass to laugh, because the guy telling the story is all clean and sober now. What if I told you I’m still quite the drunk? What if I told you I’m tanked right now, as a matter of fact, and I’m working on my tolerance level, so I can drink you under the table? Not funny?

“How did that start? How did that almost universal ‘drink you under the table’ challenge catch on?” Barry asked the audience. “I think the modern incarnation in the United States tradition started in the Old West. We romanticize the Old West now, but if you’ve ever studied it to any degree, one word comes to mind: boring. Boring and grueling. The primary jobs in the Old West were either farming or mining. You could also be a blacksmith, a lawman, a teacher, a prostitute, or a bar owner or banker. All of those jobs, except maybe the teacher, involved consuming massive amounts of alcohol either because it was part of your job, or because it was so boring or grueling that you needed alcohol at the end of the day just to convince yourself that you should go back to your miserable existence tomorrow. They didn’t have the internet, TV, or even books. Books, their sole source of entertainment, were so scarce that most families had the book. The book was called the family book, and everyone had to share the family book, or read it aloud, and they usually had enormous families so that the children could help out on the farm. The book was often some compilation of Shakespeare’s greatest plays or The Bible. They also had little in the way of transportation. If you were wealthy enough to own a horse, you were usually limited to traveling to and from town, and that could take hours depending on your location. So, when the twelve hour day of farming was over, and you couldn’t travel, and you couldn’t read the book, because one of your thirteen brothers or sisters had it, you drank and played cards. And anyone who has played cards, a serious game of cards, knows the rule. You can’t just play cards for an hour or so, especially if you’re lucky enough to win a couple hands. It’s an insult to everyone at the table. You have to give the other guys a chance to win their money back, and that can take hours, five to six hours. So, what do you do in those five to six hours, you drink, and if you drink enough for long enough, even that can get boring, and when your sole source of entertainment gets boring, what do you do? Anyone? Anyone? Drinking games and contests. And contests. That’s right. The act of consuming more alcohol defines your character, and the starting gun for these contests is, “I can put your ass under the table.”

“I was really clicking with this woman in that manner that men and women sometimes click. We all know that moment when a conversation with the opposite sex clicks just past harmonious enjoyment to hormonal. Nothing we say is half as intelligent or as funny as we think it is when this happens, but we’re both in the zone. While she and I were in this meticulously balanced aphrodisiacal, nearly anatomical, part of the conversation, she drops it on me, ‘I might be a ninety-pound woman, but I can put your ass under the table.’ Why? Where the hell did that come from? I should’ve given her a: ‘I don’t give a crap. I’m sure that you can drink more alcohol than me, and I don’t give a crap.’ We can’t say that though, because we’ve trained one another to accept that these moments define our character, and we can’t give up the dream that we’re the Clint Eastwood, John Wayne character in this production. We’re not the supporting actors who revere the main character. We’re the confident, she-doesn’t-know-who-she’s-messing-with Clint Eastwood character.

“I was tempted to play this stupid game with more than just this one woman. I’d have to check my ledger, but I’m pretty sure women have challenged me as often, if not more than men. They think that just because I’m staggering and slurring my words after three beers, they can take me, and you know what they’re right. I have always had the tolerance of a sixteen-year-old girl who hasn’t tried alcohol before. No matter how often I drank, it never translated to a greater tolerance. If a guy challenges me to a drinking contest, I say no thank you fine gentleman. That’s usually not enough, because I’ve usually done something to make this guy challenge me. It’s so stupid. For some reason, they need you in a supine position with unconditional surrender in your heart. You’re going to put me under the table, you’re superior, and … and what else you want? You’re the better man, how about that? Is that enough? Whatever I have to say to avoid drinking whatever the hell a man challenges me to drink, I’m going to say. I truly don’t care what some guy, I’m never going to see again, thinks of my drinking tolerance. It’s different when a woman challenges you though, it’s tough. Even if you’re not attracted to the woman, it’s tough. It’s tough, in general, for any guy to say no to a woman.

“And then there’s Bob. Bob. I got along with Bob. He was a nice guy, deferential, and all that. Bob showed us all the roadmap to becoming Clint Eastwood. It involved drinking massive amounts of alcohol, massive, my-brain-is-probably-half-gone amounts of alcohol to increase the tolerance level. Everyone knew a Bob, back in the day. The Bob I knew was the man when it came to drinking. Someone said he put beer in his Cheerios. Did anyone ever actually do this? I can’t count how many times I heard that such and such was such an alcoholic that he put beer in his Cheerios. I don’t know if anyone ever did this, or if Bob did it, but Bob was our king of the hill, top of the heap, an ‘A’ number one drinker. It didn’t matter what the drink was, Bob could put you under the table. When we spoke of Bob, we did so with reverence. We townspeople whispered tales of the legend of Bob in the hopes that Bob would not hear us and become so enraged that he might challenge us to a drinking game, because Bob could, repeat it with me now, drink twenty beers without even getting a buzz. I will now allow for an obligatory moment of silence to allow you to gasp. I think it’s a rule or something that we’re supposed to gasp here and consider all the ways in which Bob is one of our betters.

“Every culture had a Bob. In Ancient Greece, Bob was the smartest philosopher in the cave; Bob was the greatest gladiator known to man in Rome; and the Spanish Bob was the greatest matador in the ring. When we all came here, we decided to give up on all that junk, because they’re all so hard and time-consuming. We’d much rather commit our lives to destroying as many brain cells as we can. We’d much rather celebrate and venerate a Bob who can drink people under tables. If someone vouches for us and says, “Don’t challenge Bob, he’ll put you under the table,” that’s probably one of the top 100 compliments we Americans can say about another.

“If the bar is our arena, Bob taught me one crucial element to defeating an opponent in drinking contests, stats. What’s more satisfying than actually defeating an opponent in drinking contests, or any contest, drinking or not? Anybody? Anybody??” Barry asked the audience. “Intimidating an opponent from even daring to challenge us. Bob had his twenty beers-without-a-buzz stat line, and everyone knew it. If you didn’t know it, we told you, warned you. Don’t mess with Bob. He’ll put you under the table. But I don’t have stats, you say, I have the tolerance level of a sixteen-year-old who’s never drank a beer before. How do we normal people, who don’t put beer in our Cheerios, intimidate someone from challenging us? Get some stats and make them up if you have to, because very very few will call you out on it. My encounter with Bob taught me that stats silence the mob. I never challenged Bob’s reign, because Bob’s twenty beers without even getting a buzz stat line intimidated me, because anyone can say I’ll put you under the table, but stats prove that you are so capable of it that no one will dare challenge you.

“I used to have a 150 I.Q.,” I told this ninety-pound woman, “but I’ve dropped down to a ninety-seven.” Then I gave her one of these intimidating looks,” Barry said glaring at the audience with raised eyebrows. “It was one of those Clint Eastwood, quietly confident raised eyebrows. The raised eyebrow asks us to ask ourself, ‘Do you who you’re messing with here?’ She asked how an I.Q. score mattered, and I said, “I’ve destroyed more brain cells than everyone in this whole bar put together, and if you think you can put me under the table, sweet mama, you got another thing coming.” I thought of dropping my improvised I.Q. score to the mildly impaired or delayed levels, but I realized that that would probably do more harm than good, so I decided to go from some gifted or very advanced level to just a tad below average, and it worked. Now, she didn’t want to date me after that revelation, but she didn’t go anywhere near trying to drink me under the table either. She was intimidated by my stats.

“I never had Bob stats, or any other kind of stats, but I did my darndest to work on a tolerance level. I didn’t drink the massive amounts of alcohol I did for the expressed purpose of increasing my tolerance level, but it would’ve been a nice byproduct. It never happened for me though, and this aspect of my life comes with a big old asterisk. At the bottom of that page, is a short paragraph that reads, “I don’t care. I have a number of character deficiencies, missed opportunities, and things I wished I did sooner and better. If I had a time machine I would go back and try to fix all of them, except for my ability to consume massive amounts of alcohol.”

“Whatever problems I may have had with alcohol, I had my high school buddy to thank. I don’t blame him, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t have to drink, I could’ve made other friends, but Lou was so well-schooled, and so gifted in the art of persuasion that I fell in line. He and I didn’t drink all the time. We played sports every chance we could. We watched sports, read about sports, and talked about sports when we weren’t playing it or watching it. Sports is so compelling, because it’s a natural, adrenaline high. Competing against your fellow man, and defeating them in what they practice at as hard as you do is an adrenaline rush to adrenaline junkies. The one negative element to sports is that you can’t play them all the time, so what do adrenaline junkies do when they can’t play? They do drugs, they drink, they gamble, or whatever they can find to try to replicate that high.

“When Lou and I drank, we put that stuff away! We didn’t consider ourselves alcoholics, of course, because we only drank on weekends, at parties. Alcoholics, to our mind, were people who drank alone, because they either enjoyed the taste, the high, or the combination thereof. We didn’t drink, because we liked the taste. We drank alcohol as a social lubricant to unlock those incredibly fun personalities that only come out at night. We drank what we could afford, and the stuff we could afford was the kind of alcohol that we had to force down until we couldn’t taste it anymore.

“I don’t know if the term binge-drinking was invented in those years, but if it was, we never heard about it. When we did, and we went through the bullet points, we were like check, check, check. Woops! We were party fellas.

“Where Lou and I parted ways was his desire to see to it that others got hammered too. I didn’t really care if others drank, and I didn’t understand his obsession with it. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want to drink alone, and I never did, but I didn’t really care too much if you knew when to say when. Lou did, and he was so skilled at his trademarked brand of peer-pressure that he should’ve probably considered putting a college course together. He could’ve called it Killing Them Softly 101. He didn’t mush us in the manner mushers will in the Iditarod with those kissy sounds. Lou’s mush words were, “Drink!” and “Drink gawdamnit!” and he considered me the international pace car of his parties. If Barry doesn’t get hammered quick, no one else will, or so he feared, and Lou feared that if we didn’t all get hammered quickly, we could, could end up talking about deep thoughts and feelings. To further prevent this, he refused any requests to play Pink Floyd at his parties. He liked Pink Floyd, in casual moments, and in his car? But Parties? Drinking parties? “Nope, Pink Floyd leads to thinking. It causes deep conversations.”

“Don’t think! Drink!” would be the first thing Lou wrote on that college chalkboard, and, I know, they don’t have chalkboards anymore, but he would probably have those words displayed behind him in some manner, for his Killing Them Softly 101 lectures. “Don’t think! Drink!” He’d say pounding each word with his professorial pointing stick. “It’s what you say loud and proud, if you want your party to be considered a success.”

“If you’re a proper host, you’ll work the room, asking them, ‘How much have you had to drink so far?’ And don’t believe what they say, check. Ask to see their bottle in a polite, interrogatory manner. Tell them you’re just curious. “Let me see your bottle, Barry?” Then, when they show you, you not only condemn him, but his mother for ever giving birth to him, and whatever the hell he drove in on. “What are we doing here tonight, Barry? Drink. Drink gawdamnit!” We’re to say that as if we’re disgusted by their pace, and we’re always disgusted by their pace. Never satisfied. That’s vital. Focus your condemnation on someone who can take it, and the weaker ones will fall in line to avoid your condemnations.

“Your drink of choice should be whatever drink gets your party goers get so hammered that the fun portion of your party only lasts about a half an hour. If you do it right, that half hour will be the only thing anyone remembers anyway. You might want to refrain from confrontationally shouting “Drink!” in their faces when they’re drinking the hard liquor that you two fifteen-year-olds found in old, aged decanters in his parent’s basement. We grew up hearing that alcohol gets better with age. They vintage right? It turns out that that depends on how they’re stored. Yeah, so that bourbon your parents housed in decanters, in some dark, dank closet in the corner of a basement no one has opened for thirty years might not be vintage. They might’ve been fermenting, and some fermenting processes can kill you. “Rock on!” the fifteen-year-old says when they’re downing eleven shots of fermented bourbon in a little over two hours. The proper host should know that if that happens, their party goers will probably learn less about hooking up and fighting, and more about creating interesting murals on your walls with projectile vomit.”

“Who loves to drink!” Barry asked the audience. “Let me hear you!”

I Love to Eat: Part Deux

September 16, 2023December 2, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

“You don’t know how to eat,” a friend of mine said. She wasn’t talking about health and nutrition, or the staples necessary for informed eating. She was talking about the method I used to eat food. I chopped up my spaghetti strands, and this offended her Sicilian spaghetti sensibilities.

“You’re supposed to fork twirl the strands on a spoon! Like so,” she said, showing me. “It’s so much more elegant.”

When I said, “Nah!” she hit me with another:

“You don’t know how to eat.”

“Have you heard this line? People love it. It’s sweeping the country. They have this method of eating that if you just followed it, or tried it out, it would unlock the floodgates to the glory of eating. My dad used to tell me to combine roast beef and mashed potatoes on the same fork. He considered it divine. I disagreed.

“You don’t know how to eat.”

When a friend told me about his ingenious method of combining marshmallow and chocolate on a graham cracker, that we would all later call a s’more, I said, “Nah!” Boom:

“You don’t know how to eat.”

“I don’t know if they say this to humiliate us or just break us down, but I rebelled against the whole notion of it. I kept eating the way I enjoyed eating my whole life. My dad was the exception. He was so constant, and so insistent, that it’s basically his fault that I eat the way I do,” Barry said, “and it’s his fault that I place such value on food and eating too. My mom shares some of the blame. She was a pretty decent cook, and she made some decent choices for our meals, but she decided to die, so we were stuck with my dad’s definition of a meal.

My dad was an old man when he took the reins. He lived through The Depression, he was a military man, and he spent the next twenty years a hard-working bachelor. My dad spent the majority of his life eating whatever was placed before him, and he was grateful, so grateful that he’d eat just about anything.

“Dad didn’t understand this notion of preferences. Finicky was the ‘F’ word to him. We displayed some preferences, but in the grand scheme I’d argue that we weren’t finicky. We just preferred to avoid eating crap whenever we could. “You’d eat that,” he’d say over his schlop, “if you were starving in The Depression, or all you had to eat were C-Rations.”

“So, if you were to put two plates before us, one with this piece of crap on it, another plate of worse crap, and nothing at all, we’d choose your plate?” we would ask. “You’re right, we’d probably choose yours, but that’s not what I’d call a brilliant marketing strategy.”

“This isn’t to say that my dad didn’t enjoy a well-prepared and flavorful meal. He enjoyed it as much as the next guy, but in his mind, any man could eat a meal that tastes delicious. What separated the men from the boys, in my dad’s worldview, was what that man did to a meal that was less than flavorful. Based upon his internal sliding scale of characterization, eating a foul-tasting, poorly prepared meal was a tribute to his ancestors.

“You ever see those Old West movies with characters eating pork and beans on a slice of buttered bread? That was my dad’s definition of nirvana. We all know this image of a bunch of carriages surrounding a cook, usually named Schmitty, who cooked up some beans and put it on bread. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but I have to believe the traveling cowboys would’ve loved it if Schmitty dropped some fried chicken in their lap.

“The pièce de résistance of my dad’s personal campaign to pay homage to those who came before him, arrived in the form of a flavorless, bare bones sandwich. This hallowed sandwich consisted of one slice of the cheapest bologna mankind has been able to produce, between two slices of bread so flavorless that I doubt any competitors in the bread industry even knew this manufacturer’s name. Did he enjoy a condiment or two, well sure, but he didn’t need one. The notion of needing condiments was my dad’s definition of inherent privilege. “You mean to tell me that you can’t eat a roast beef sandwich without barbecue sauce?”

“No, dad, but we prefer to eat it with a little barbecue sauce on it,” we said. “That makes the sandwich taste better.” He tried to break us down on the differences between need and want, and we conceded that it was all about want. He backed off a little, but he was disgusted by our preferences, because we never could’ve survived on World War II’s battlefields with our preferences.

“Even with all that, though, it was obvious that if he had his choice, he wouldn’t eat his own schlop, and he made that apparent when an aunt informed him that she wanted to come over to our house to prepare a meal for us.

“Your aunt has agreed to prepare a meal for us,” he mentioned to prepare us for the moment of her arrival. Nothing wrong with that, right? Like just everything else my dad did, he overdid it, “and it might just be the last decent meal we ever eat.” His intention was not to scare us, of course, but to instill in us a sense of gratitude for all of her efforts. He scared the hell out of us. I considered it possible that I might never eat another quality meal for the rest of my life after we finished The Last Supper of any quality.

“Comparing this meal to The Last Supper might sound like hyperbole, but that was my dad. He had us so amped up for the arrival of that meal that when it was placed before us, my brother leaned over to whisper something to me, I shushed him. “Shh, for God’s sake, eat. This could be the last decent meal we ever eat.” And, boy, did we laugh. My aunt laughed, my dad laughed, and we all had a whale of a time analyzing my admonition. I wasn’t laughing. I didn’t even smile. I didn’t get it. I thought it was almost a guarantee that I would end up eating schlop for the rest of my life after this meal, and I wanted to silently enjoy every last bite, as if it might be my last.

I didn’t care about the quality of the food but what kid does? If we drill a kid down to their basics, it’s all about Burger King, McDonald’s and Taco Bell for them. They’re forced to eat just about everything else. A nice, home-cooked meal is little more than a mandatory break from playtime. “Kids, it is now time to eat!” Aw, crap. You have to eat when you’re a kid. You have to take a break when it’s time to eat. You don’t care about quality. You just eat to shut your parents up, unless those who know the definition of quality food insinuate that it’s possible you never will.

“My dad’s war on food, namely eating, and the proper procedures therein, might lead one to believe that he was a strict father. He was anything but. In every other area of life, my brother and I had total freedom, perhaps too much. By the definition of our friends, we lived an almost parent-free existence, but they didn’t have to abide by my dad’s near-militaristic meal time rules that would’ve been welcome in most penitentiaries throughout the world.

“Much later in life, decades later, I found out my dad was actually quite proud of my eating habits. He didn’t say anything about the emotional or financial stability I achieved as an adult, and he never mentioned my ability to attain consistent employment through the years. For him, it was all about eating. “You’d eat anything,” he said to begin the greatest compliment he ever gave me. “I never had a problem with you, but I had to constantly be on your brother at the dinner table, or he’d drift off into la-la land.” My brother would chat at the table, he’d pause for a brief period of time that drove my dad crazy, and he’d drift off, or space out, as we called. My dad called it going off into la-la land. My brother didn’t do this to rebel, or to be naughty. He’d just forget to eat in the systematic keep-your-utensils-locked-and-loaded procedures my dad required. If he slipped into la-la-land, my dad would pounce, “Eat Arnie!” My brother would shake out of whatever daydream he was in and resume eating. My dad tried everything to keep my brother on task. He tried patient reminders, and he tried heavy-handed scolding. Nothing worked. His frustrations eventually drove him to develop a little ditty that we now call the Eat Arnie Eat song, and it went a little something like a this,” Barry said clearing his throat and humming out a couple chords, until he could find the right one. “Eat Arnie eat, eat Arnie eat. Eat Arnie eat, Oh, eat Arnie eat.”

“Anyone eavesdropping on this one-off performance might have mistaken my dad’s brilliant “Oh” crescendo with a pleasing and creative bridge to the fourth stanza, but aesthetics did not motivate this tool man. Creating tools was his profession, and it defined him, outside-in and inside-out. He created tools to fill a need. His whole world was about need, not want, need, and he created that song to fulfill a need. He composed no other lyrics for the song, and once it served its purpose and my brother began eating, dad had no further use of it. He never sang the song again. He didn’t create this brilliantly simplistic song to be humorous. If you laughed, or thought it was funny in any way, that was your preference, but that wasn’t why he created his incredible Eat Arnie Eat single. If humor, or the looming threat of it, got my brother to eat then his brief foray into the world of art was worth it. Once that tool fulfilled its utilitarian purpose, my favorite single of all time could whither on the vine for all he cared. When we called for an encore at get-togethers and company functions, he shot them all down. He was not one to perform on demand, even with a couple of beers in him.

“I wish that I could look you all in the eye tonight and say that all these exaggerated concepts and rules of food appreciation are complete nonsense. I wish I could say that I considered them such nonsense, and the minute I became an adult I laughed them all off as so over-the-top foolish that is nothing more than halfway decent material for a joke.

“I mean, who cares if we chit-chat when a meal is before us? Who cares if we look around the room when we should be eating? The big difference between my dad and I is I don’t talk about this nonsense, because I know it’s nonsense, but that super-secret part of me that no one will ever see or hear is absolutely disgusted by signs of a lack of appreciation for the food before you. I cannot stand it when you chit-chat with a perfectly good meal before you. When you take a break, I have to swallow my disgust if I want to have friends, or I want to avoid having others consider me a special freak. “Your entrée is getting cold!” I want to scream. The idea that you can’t, or won’t eat food without condiments absolutely disgusts me. I’ll talk about the need, need, that you have for mayonnaise on a ham sandwich for years. Want is fine, but need? C’mon, isn’t mayonnaise a first-world preference? Then if you dare to commit the cardinal violation of food appreciation, according to my dad, of leaving a restaurant with some food on your plate, and you don’t ask for a doggie bag? I will secretly decide, without noting it for you in any way, that I might never be able to dine with you again. Seeing it once will forever affect our relationship, but putting myself in a position to view it twice is a shame on me, in my book.”

“I still don’t understand why my dad was willing to go to war over food appreciation and eating, and I’m sure if some psychiatrist asked him why he did all that, he’d say, “Hey, I don’t get them all either.” The question I have for myself now, standing before you tonight, is why did I start doing it, why do I still do it? Why, after I spent my teens and twenties trying to do everything 180 degrees different from my dad for the expressed purpose of doing it different from him, do I now mimic all of his quirks and eccentricities? The only thing I can come up with is his great-granddad probably did it to his dad, and his dad did it to him, and he did it to us, and I now do it to you. I would love to be that fella who broke the chain and allow my friends and family to eat normally without some form of internal, critical analysis, but it’s too late for me now. It’s ingrained the way propaganda ministers once taught us that if you repeat the same line often enough, it becomes true to you. And if you insist on eating the way rational, well-adjusted people eat, I’m eventually going to implode in such a way that a “You don’t know how to eat” comment is going to rain down on you in the fallout.

[Standup comedian Barry Becker is The Unfunny comedian, and this is one of his sets. If you enjoy this style of comedy, there’s more available at The Unfunny.]

I Love to Eat

September 15, 2023December 2, 2025 Rilaly1 Comment

“How many of you love to eat? I’m talking to the people who love to eat tonight. C’mon, how many of you love to eat? Let me hear you!” Barry asked the audience in Kalispell, Montana.

“That line never gets much applause. Most applaud politely and softly, thinking, ‘I don’t know where you’re going with this, but yeah, I enjoy eating a thing or two.’ Very few people leave their seat with, “EATING! YEAH! Sing it sista!” Yet, we have to eat food to sustain life. It’s true. Look it up. In your research, you’ll find that not only does eating food sustain life, it provides the protein and vitamins we need to maintain certain energy levels and strength, but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to rise up and scream at the top of our lungs to express our passion for it in an open forum like this one, because people are going to consider us a pig.

“But even those of you who were on a half-bun, ready to rise and scream your heads off about the glory of eating, won’t do it on the first date. It’s just … It’s not a good look. Most prospective lovers won’t mind hearing that we enjoy eating, as long as we do it in moderation. They don’t want to hear about our plans for massive weight gain. “You like what you see here, babe, because there’s going to be a whole lot more of it soon. Once you start to love me, and make me more comfortable with myself and my physical appearance, it’s only a matter of time before this,” Barry said loosely circling his belly, “becomes a big mess of Frito’s and Skittles. That’s right, this is only the beginning. I love to eat hon’.”

“Women don’t demand skinny, most don’t anyway, but they don’t want us to be all hooting and woo hooing about food either. They do it, though. That’s right, they don’t mind talking about how much they love to eat, because they’re all thin and stuff. They’re not afraid to share it with the world. “I love to eat!” They say it all the time. Really? You love to eat? I don’t think you do. I don’t think you love it near as much as I do sweetie. Here, here’s a rack of spare ribs. Prove it!

“Starting today! Right now! If you’re a little chubby, or planning to be, shout it with me. “I love to eat!” Shout it loud, shout it proud. I like sleeping, and sitting around, and do nothing for unusually long, unhealthy stretches, but nothing compares to eating.

“Have you ever had a friend say, “Let’s go grab something to eat, and then we can-”

“Wait, wait, hold on, hold on, there little doggie,” I interrupt. “For me, there is no and then. I don’t know what you plan to do after this meal, but the meal is the event for me, the night out, and the fun. I’m sure your other plans will be a blast, but I’m old, and keeping these beautiful curves ain’t as easy as it used to be, so I’m not into your and then. If I’m only going to be able to eat two meals a day now, and one of them has to be a light one, and you’re going to tell me to reduce my sugar intake and cut back on all those delicious, salty snacks that are probably going to lead to a painfully slow, premature death, you better bring your A-game if you’re going to ask me to have a meal with you. Use your words. Seduce me.

“Hey, I want to live a long life as much as the next guy. I want to live so long that someone at my funeral whispers, “Good God he was old!” and I know I’m going to have to sacrifice some to get there, but at some point, I’m going to have to sit down with a spreadsheet with one column titled, ‘How long do I really want to live?’ and the other titled ‘How much fun do I plan to have while I’m here?’ where I add, multiply, subtract and divide the quality of my life from a proposed quantity.

“Meals are the event of the day. They’re what we look forward to throughout the mind-numbing hours of inputting data into a computer. The meal is our reward for putting up with the family, home repairs, and the dog that we wanted so bad at one time. We do what we’re supposed to do. We drop the kids off at school on time, pick them up on time, and we work our tail off to crunch the numbers for Mr. Jamison to try to get one small smile out of him, and then we’re supposed to go home and eat a sensible salad with a side of broccoli? Screw that! I want meat. I want a steak. I want a big old artery clogging ribeye, with a side of mashed potatoes and a beer as my reward for putting up with all that.

“I’d love to eat all I want and be as slim and trim as you, so I don’t have to see all of my chins in photographs, but to do that they suggest that we might want to consider skipping a few meals, or at least think about mixing in a salad here and there. Have you heard this joke? This ‘Feel free to mix in a salad’ they say, or, ‘Have you ever heard of a salad?’ Yes, yes, I’ve heard of salad. Somebody, somewhere told me about how they ordered a salad instead of a steak at one of the finest steakhouses in our city, because he thought he could use a little more ruffage in his diet. He didn’t order it as an appetizer. It was his main course. He wanted to be healthy, and he thought it might help him live longer. You can eat salad with a side of broccoli all you want, to live longer, but I got news for you, brothers and sisters, you’re probably not going to outlive me as much as you think. I’m not going to live forever, I know that, we all know that, but while we’re here we should live like we’re going to die tomorrow, and a portion of that means I’m going to eat whatever the hell I want.

“If you don’t view meals as the event of the day, it’s because you’re not married. The first question the wife hits you with when the two of you arrive home from work is, “What do you want to eat tonight?” It happens so often, you should be prepared, but you’re not. “Ah, crap, I didn’t even think about it today, sorry.” It’s almost stressful.

“Then, when you do come up with something, she uses her veto power.”

“I don’t want to eat there, Henry. We ate there so recently.” Why is it so important to space out restaurants, because if we eat at the same place, in a too narrow a space in time, it will ruin the event of eating that particular meal. “Let’s try something else,” she says, “and I don’t want red meat tonight, and no more pizza, for God’s sakes Henry.” Ok, well, I don’t know where to eat then. You pick. “I picked last time.” This unlocks the dreaded ‘who picked last time?’ phase of the back-and-forth. Why is this important, because you both know your tailbone is on the line to pick the greatest place to eat every time out. She picked last time, and the two of you both know what an epic failure that was, and she can’t take the pressure of picking two times in a row, especially after that last one.

“Do you have these little, internecine battles with currents and undercurrents of tension flowing back and forth between your words? We all do, right? Eating is what we must do, and what we talk about nonstop. The what, when, where, and with whom are we going to eat tonight dominate all discussion topics. “I don’t want to eat at that place, because I hate their side items. The entrees are all right, I guess, but their sides are so ordinary and bland.”

“If you’re anything like me, you take such criticism personal. You have no stake in the success or failure of that restaurant. You don’t own any of the corporation’s stocks, but you love their food, and she knows it, and that agitates us, because she seems to reject everything, we hold dear. She doesn’t do it with that purpose in mind, and we know it, but we like that place so much that it’s kind of our place, and some weird part of us takes proprietary ownership of that place in our marriage to the point that any insults directed at it are personal. Yet, we abide her veto power, and we come up with another place. “I don’t want to eat there, either, the service sucks, and their bathrooms are dirty.” Their bathrooms are dirty? I’ve heard this more than twice. How did the cleanliness of a bathroom become a bullet point in this debate? What are you going to do in there? Exactly! You’re going to do your part to dirty that tiny, poorly ventilated room up. “Cleanliness of bathrooms, she says,” we mutter as the squabble comes to a close.

“Except, we don’t mutter that, because we know what starts out as a minor rebuttal can turn a back-and-forth discussion into a squabble, which can lead to a back and forth that can somehow escalate into an argument, and on rare occasions even a fight. A fight over where to eat? If that’s not a first world problem I don’t know what is. The larger point is that the two of you will never look back on the incremental progressions of this fight with a laugh, because it’s such a silly thing to fight over. You won’t, because you know that this is the meal, the hallowed parent’s night out meal. The parent’s night out meal is not just important, it’s an existential pivot point. If we want to continue to enjoy the freedom and fun that comes with our Tuesday nights out, and we hope to keep our marriage exciting and new, we know we have to do this night up right. We have to plan, discuss the details of that plan, and iron out any differences to one day, hopefully, look back on this night as that night. “You remember that night, right?” The ‘that night’ designation is the gold standard for all nights in romantic relationships, and those of us in such relationships fear we might never get back to them, and there’s no sense in trying to duplicate them either.

“Why don’t we just eat at home?” she says as we enter the ‘give up’ phase of our process. I do not want to eat at home Mildred, we always eat at home. “It’s healthier and cheaper.” It’s not healthier. Do people ever ask you that question? They ask me that all the time. ‘How often do you eat out?’ It doesn’t matter what we say. We could say we haven’t eaten out since the Coolidge administration, and they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s so unhealthy. You have to eat at home more.’ Screw you, I like to eat out. It’s special, and I’m paying them to treat me special. When they don’t, God help them, I’ll rage. When people say it’s healthier to eat at home, I say, “Doesn’t it depend on what you eat, no matter where you eat it? What if I chose a healthy entrée and healthy sides at a restaurant? Now, I don’t, I won’t, and we all know I won’t, but what if I did?

“When we’re not talking about what we’re going to eat, we talk about what we ate, and where we ate it. Have you eaten there yet? No, OhmiGod, you absolutely must eat there, and you’ve got to eat there now, before they have to start feeding you through a tube.

“You are what you eat. We’ve all heard that. I have a friend who won’t eat chicken. Chicken. I understand not eating red meat and pork, but chicken? She said she doesn’t like the texture. Every time I run into her, ‘How could you not like chicken?’ is the first and last thought in my head. I have more of a problem with her than I do vegetarians. I actually respect vegetarians and vegans. I could never be one, but you have to respect the amount of discipline it takes to go into a backyard brimming with all those gorgeous smells of red meat and pork and say, “I think I’ll take the beans, lentils and organic chia seeds on that side platter over there.” I take my hat off to them, because I could never do it.

“I respect you if you’ve managed to limit your diet to legumes, flax, and chia seeds, and you only drink water that comes from the finest springs in Demark. I respect anyone who can limit their diet in that manner, but my question is always why? Well, to be healthier, they say, and being healthier actually leads to more happiness. I would never say that consumption alone leads to happiness, but it’s definitely part of the equation. If you doubt that, try having someone try to take it away from you. I saw that firsthand. Someone very dear to me told his caretakers he would rather die than give up oral consumption. He went to the extreme of threatening a lawsuit over it, because when someone threatened to take eating away from him, he wrote: “I’d rather die! Eating is the only joy I have left in life, and I’d rather die than have that taken away from me.”

“Some of us who have no limits on our joy of oral consumption choose lentils and legumes over barbecued ribs and steak, because they think those decisions will help them outlive the rest of us. They might be right, if we take accidents and other freak occurrences out of the equation, but will they be happier? It’s a leading question, because I know they won’t. They can’t be happier. We’re talking about the quality of life here.

“Eat eggs,” they say. “Eat tons of them. They’re nature’s perfect food.” “Don’t eat eggs; they’re evil.” What? “It depends on how you prepare them.” Drink coffee, don’t drink coffee. Eat steak, don’t eat steak. Eat butter over substitutes, and everything your body recognizes in the digestion process. Everything in moderation: Eat less, play more.

“Various studies suggest that if you eat less, you will have more energy to play. It makes sense and it doesn’t. We need food to sustain energy levels, but if we eat too much, the digestion of it saps our energy. Even without the science we know what happens when we eat huge. To prove their point, the study brought on some fella who tight ropes the very lowest levels of caloric intake possible. He says he’s happier and healthier than he’s ever been. I don’t question the science, but I know what I know, and I know that if I go out to eat at a big steak house, and I choose salad with a side of broccoli, I’m not going to be happier. I might have more energy, and I might be healthier, but when I’m 105, playing pickleball and parcheesi, I’m still going to be thinking about all the steaks I passed on in life. Healthier? Yes. More energetic and playful, sure, with some asterisks. Happier? No.

***

“You see me here tonight. I could stand to lose what 10, 20 … 30 pounds?” Barry asked. He turned to an audience member with a smile. “You think I could stand to lose 40?” All right, I could stand to lose a lot of weight, but I’m not a glutton. Yet, I receive sensorial joy from eating delicious food, and I find going to a restaurant and eating their food eventful. I, like the distant kings and queens of yore, get to point at a menu selection, “I shall have your finest meal on this eve.” When the server walks out with my food, or what I think is my food, most of them understand how majestic we consider their arrival. The ones who do it up right, share a knowing smile with us, and they add a very subtle element of pageantry to their arrival. If you watch them, the best of them, they have it in their stride, both of us knowing our moment has arrived. They also have a big, glorious ‘your moment has arrived’ smile on their face.

“We all know this ‘your moment has arrived’ smile. When it’s directed at us, it’s glorious. I think, I think she just directed that smile at me. Praise the heavens, she did. When I was younger and more attractive, and young women gave me that ‘your moment has arrived’ smile, it meant something entirely different. It took me a while to deal with the fact that that’s over for me, but I’m okay with it now if it means food. I’m okay with it, because when I see that smile now, it comes after I saw all the other tables around me have had their moment arrive first, while I silently implored my server to bring my food.

That smile suggests she knows what we’ve been through. Even though were good little soldiers, silently waiting, she knows. We know she knows, because she a couple minutes ago she stopped by to say, “Don’t worry, your moment is near. I just checked with the cook. It will only be moments. I promise.” Then it happens. “Look, there she is! She has that big smile and that majestic stride. She knows. She knows, and she’s still young enough, and she hasn’t done this so often that she’s lost her enthusiasm. She loves this moment as much as we do. “Wait a second, did I see pork on her tray. I think I saw pork. No! God, no!” That smile was for someone else. If feels like, in a weird way, that’s hard to explain, that she’s cheating on us, when she gives that big, glorious ‘your moment has arrived’ smile to someone else.

“What the hell is going on here?” we say, rolling our head up to the heavens. “I’m going to say something.”

“Don’t,” the wife says.

“I’m sorry, I have to say something. This is getting ridiculous.”

Then the true moment arrives, and the server knows firsthand what this means after everything we’ve been through together. She has a majestic, almost parade-like stride to deliver our food. How many of us go to the bathroom, hoping, just hoping that our moment will arrive while we’re in there? We all do this right? We all think things up to pass the time until our moment arrives. We talk. We look around at our neighboring tables, and we whisper awful things about them just to waste time, until our moment arrives. We go to the bathroom, and some of the times it works, but most of the time it doesn’t.

“And you, you in your distant, ivory tower of health and nutrition, you want me to give all this up? To what? To live longer? You’re telling me that I shouldn’t go through the cinematic highs and lows of food arrival for nutritional and health reasons? Yeah, I’m not going to do that, and I’m not even going to cut back, even if it means I’ll only live to 65 as opposed to 105.

“The event today was this big, old beautiful ribeye. Ribeye was the word that popped into my head when I woke up today. Do you hate mornings? Everyone does. We hate waking up? Today, I sprang out of bed singing, “Good Day Sunshine, Good Day Sunshine!” and I was doing it with this smile on,” Barry said pointing to an exaggerated, toothy smile. “This is my ribeye-eating smile. Ribeye was the first thing I thought about when I woke up, and it was the only thing on my mind when people spoke to me. They all became a Simpsons’ jokes, talking ribeyes.

“It sang out to me, this ribeye, calling me like some evil siren beckoning me to my doom. I couldn’t understand the lyrics, but I can tell you that she had a beautiful, alluring falsetto voice.

“When our moment finally happened, the server slid that big old block of meat in front of me. I love everything about that moment, the majestic arrival, the “Who had the ribeye?” question, and the, “Right here!” answer I give with pride and joy of ownership in my voice, followed by the almost cinematic sound of a plate sliding across the table. These are a few of my favorite things.

“When I finally have that big, old before me, I cut the entire thing up into small, serving portions. I no longer have a big, huge ribeye before me. I have all these little ribeyes. It makes me think I have more ribeye. I don’t and I know it, but a secret part of me thinks I can fool myself into thinking I have more. I also want to enjoy chewing each bite as much as I possibly can, and cutting them into smaller portions allows each piece an ability to do that for me. If I don’t cut up my steak before taking a bite, I’ll either cut while I’m chewing, which diminishes my enjoyment somewhat, or I’ll be thinking about my next cut while I’m chewing. Either way, I’ve calculated that I’m diminishing my enjoyment of a chew by fractional percentages by cutting while I chew or thinking about my next cut. By cutting my steak into small pieces before I take my first bite, I also get all the work out of the way, so I can sit back and enjoy those cuts of beef without having to worry about any future cuts while I’m chewing, savoring, and soaking it all in.

“We all know it’s not healthy to eat large portions, but when that server puts that plate of ribeye before me, I don’t see plate, fixings, or side items. It’s all ribeye. I’m not going to complain. I’m not going to tell that server, “I’m sorry, that’s too much ribeye.” Have you heard people do this? “Oh, that’s too much ribeye.” Excuse me, excuse me, what the hell is too much ribeye? I ask this not to boost a joke. I’m genuinely curious. How can there be too much ribeye? The premise of this guilt makes no sense to me.

“I really shouldn’t have eaten all that,” is another way they express guilt. Yeah, you didn’t say jack when they slid all that in front of you. Some people suffer gastrointestinal issues in the aftermath, and they say that that seductive, siren song I hear is the voice of a gargling monster in their head who says, ‘Go ahead, but you’re going regret it,’ followed by maniacal laughter. Food fights back some of the times. I know that, but I think most people say it just to say it, because they feel guilty eating too much.

“So, the question I hear in your heads is, do I feel some guilt when I have a twelve-ounce ribeye sitting before me? Some? They stress that word some as if it will unlock some false wall we have before guilt. No! No, I don’t feel guilty. Not only do I not feel guilty, I think I’ve found my purpose in life when a ribeye sits before me. I feel guilty about a lot of things, I’m Catholic, but eating a big, juicy, medium rare ribeye is not one of them. We all think we were put here with a greater purpose in mind. “What’s my purpose?” they say. “I need to find my purpose.” “It’s your job in life to find your purpose.” We all say various forms of that. Well, I found mine. You can laugh and call it stupid and simple, all you want, but when it slides across the table at me, I know I’m going to love that piece of meat so much that I will make noises eating it. “And some of them won’t be what you classify as human noises,” I warn my date.

“They listen, they nod, and do you want to know what they say, it’s so cute, they say, “Hey, I like to eat too Barry, and we all make noises.” They think they know what they’re talking about when they say noises, but they ain’t ready, as evidenced by the fact that they’re all shushing me a couple bites in.

“Hey, I told you I love to eat,” I say, “and I told you that I make noises.”

“I know, but people are staring, Barry. They’re uncomfortable. We’re all … uncomfortable.”

“Then, some busybody saunters over to the table. You know what he looks like. I don’t even need to describe him. The minute he steps up to the table, with his phone out, you just know he’s going to drop some kind of busybody crap on you, talking about how he and his family are trying to enjoy a meal, and how his kid is crying, because she’s scared. He says all that, and then he adds something about public noise ordinances. Noise ordinances? Did you just say noise ordinances? Noise ordinances are about firecrackers, sirens, and barking dogs. It’s got nothing to do with the sounds a fella makes eating a delicious ribeye. Mr. Busybody shows me his phone, saying, “Here you go,” and he conveniently has a copy of section 27 of article 4 of the city’s noise ordinances all pulled up, “And you’ll see here,” he says with professorial authority, “that subsection C of article 4 specifically addresses public eating noises in restaurants.”

“People like this busybody, some of my friends, and the women who state they’ll never eat with me in public with me again, think these noises are a problem, a real problem. We all know I could control myself, and these noises better, but I have to tell you that I don’t consider it a pressing issue. I wish I could find some way to enjoy eating more, and I fear that if I tried to temper my noises that might diminish my enjoyment of the meal by fractional percentages, and that’s just not a risk I’m willing to take at this point in my life. Because, as great as the meal of the day is, it doesn’t last long. I eat and what seems like a minute and a half later, I’m done. It’s all over. The whole event I looked forward to all day is … over. It was so hot and juicy that I ate it too fast. I didn’t chitchat. Chitchat ends with the sound of a plate sliding across a table. I don’t even look around the room when a big, old juicy ribeye sits before me. Taking in my surroundings is over too. I even forget, sometimes, that I have someone sitting across the table from me. I hate reaching the end of a meal and having to force down the last few lukewarm bites. I want it hot! So, I eat all of those beautiful cuts of ribeye so fast that some of the times I can’t even remember how good they were. I know I just met these delicious, little morsels, but in a strange way that’s tough to describe to those of you cringing throughout my testimonial tonight, I kind of miss them. I miss them so much that, look at me, I’m salivating. I know it’s disgusting, but I can’t help myself. I loved eating them so much that I almost wish I didn’t eat them, so I could eat them again. I apologize for getting so emotional, and I know I shouldn’t get so emotional over such a stupid thing. It’s unseemly and not very professional, I know. I just love them so much that it’s hard for me to accept that they’re gone now. All of them. They’re all gone. I just loved eating them so much.

[Standup comedian Barry Becker is The Unfunny comedian, and this is one of his sets. If you enjoy this style of comedy, there’s more available at The Unfunny.]