Later this summer Alanna and I will be heading out to Arizona to celebrate her grandparents’ wedding anniversary. Deer season isn’t open out there in early August, so I’ll have to hope I luck into a bear or mountain lion tag. Carnivores and omnivores usually aren’t eaten, but if I’ve learned anything over the past five months it’s that hunger is very good at making silly social conventions seem pointless. I figure if I spend a few thousand dollars on a guide I’ll have a better than even shot at success in four days of relentless hunting, which will leave me with a day or two afterwards to hang out with everyone else while I roast my haunch of mountain lion over a campfire. Of course, I’ll drop ship a whole pallet of potatoes and what not to stave off starvation, and maybe I’ll make a few pouches of jerky, or better yet, pemmican, so I can keep eating a reasonable amount of protein and fat. After all, the biggest contribution I can make to a celebration of sixty years of marriage is to make it all about my ridiculous diet.
I hope I don’t need to say that I’m kidding, but I guess it’s not actually that much weirder than what I’m already doing. Although this sort of deluded plan appeals to me a tiny bit in the abstract, I have no desire to follow through on it.. (Unless someone wants to give me a huge book advance to write about this year. In that case I’ll do all sorts of dumb things to punch up the narrative.) Instead, from the moment I wake up at two in the morning to drive my little family to the airport, I will be going off the diet. It will be a holiday not just New York, but from my current abstemious lifestyle.
Over the course of the weekend we will visit with a variety of people we know and love, and most of this socializing will involve eating meals. As much fun as it would be to rely on a BYOH (Bring Your Own Ham) to sustain myself, it would actually be stupid for everyone involved. So when I’m going to dinner with friends I am going to eat whatever they graciously prepare, and I am going to enjoy every last second of it.
-Garth
