Ricky'S Lunch Blog

Yesterday I had a leftover turkey sandwich for lunch. I like it with a lot of mayo and black pepper. I also nibbled on some cold stuffing as sort of a side dish. I ate it with my fingers.

I watched a football game while I ate but I wasn’t really paying attention. My mind was elsewhere, thinking about all the cool stuff I wanted for Christmas but didn’t get.

I shuffled back over to the kitchen and scraped the second-to-last piece of the pecan pie onto a plate. The whipped cream I’d made on Christmas day was in the fridge and was starting to get a little liquidy. You know how after a few days it starts to revert back to just heavy cream? That’S what was happening. I didn’t care though. I poured a bunch on top of the pie. When I sank back down into the couch with plate in hand, I realized the sash had come undone and the front of my robe was wide open.

This will be a two-part blog, as I have two subjects I’d like to do a deep-dive on. I’m not interested in taking the 1000-foot view, and neither subject is a slam dunk.

Part 1. My Spirit-Crushing Diet
I’ve lost a lot of weight. I’m not going to lie to you—I once again have the lean body of a sinewy, strapping young buck. Yet we all know how my lunch-blogging has suffered as a result. I never meant to hurt you, the most loyal and dedicated enthusiasts in the lunch blog-o-sphere. With only sporadic thought-leadership, though, it’s as if we’re clutching at each other, rudderless on the stormy seas of lunch. Unacceptable.

I’m seriously thinking about abandoning the diet, packing back on those 20 pounds, and heading straight to Dairy Queen for a Blizzard with Oreos as soon as I upload this high-quality post. You need me, and I need you. Let’s stop pretending otherwise. It’s time I put vanity aside and accepted the cross destiny has bestowed upon me to bear.

I just said bestowed.

Part 2. Offensive Auditors
We have auditors in this week. They’re holed up in a conference room and refuse to make eye contact. They emerged for lunch and sat in the kitchen all by themselves. When I went in to heat up my organic, low-fat can of minestrone and prepare my Battle Ax salad, I noticed they were flirting with each other. This made me uncomfortable. I’m certain when I was 12, which is about how old they are, I didn’t act in such a shameful manner in front of my clients. No, out of respect, I’d keep that sort of behavior confined to the janitor’s closet…but not with the janitor, of course…I mean we’d go in there, but it wasn’t like there was anybody else…god, with all those solvents and the bags of saw dust for the vomit…what was I thinking taking her in there? No wonder why she said those things afterwards. I wonder how she’s doing now. I should send her one of my Christmas update letters.

This post did not end well. It did not live up to the “high-quality” prediction I made in the third paragraph.

I enjoy lamb. I’ve crafted a few excellent lunch blog postings about it over the years.

From a thought-leader’S perspective, lamb is a lot like one of those cheap, large crystals that college kids buy in head shops and hang in front of their dorm room windows, so that when it catches a ray of sunlight it dots the walls with trippy little specs of color.

Man, I have no idea where I was going with that. By the time I finished the sentence, I wasn’t even sure I was lunch-blogging any longer. Let’s be clear about it: Lamb is nothing like a stoner’s trinket. For starters, I’m pretty sure it can’t refract light. Alright, that’s enough. We’re not having this conversation now.

Lamb is the one meat that when I think about it, I see the actual animal in my mind’s eye. Show me a rib eye, I don’t see a cow. Mention a Cornish game hen, and…hell, I don’t even know what a Cornish game hen is so how can I possibly visualize one? Bring up lamb, though, and I immediately see it. And it’s always standing in a moist, green meadow staring at me with a coy look on its face. I imagine I experience this because of all the meat-producing animals I find lamb to be the most attractive.

This morning I found a seal-a-meal bag in the freezer that had lamb and red chile in it (see Figure 1). It was from last August. I brought it to work and had it for lunch. That’s my point.

I haven’t produced a blog posting of such low quality in a few months. I guess I was due.


Figure 1. Lambs bleat, right? Because that’s what I’m hearing echo off the aspen grove on the far side of the valley when I look at this.