The Worst "Meatloaf" Ever, Burning My Mouth So Bad It Depressed Me, and Brief Summations of Panoply

BLOT: (30 Apr 2012 - 12:21:03 AM)

The Worst "Meatloaf" Ever, Burning My Mouth So Bad It Depressed Me, and Brief Summations of Panoply

Take a look at this, and make note:

That is the worst "meatloaf" I have ever eaten. It was $2.89 at my local market, which means that a big-box store would sell it, the "family size", for about $2.50. Let that be a warning. Avoid. The number one ingredient is water, followed by machine separated meat from a small menagerie of different animals, followed by soy, followed by a list of ingredients longer than the one on your average multi-vitamin. It emits a smell not unlike a trash can when fully cooked, a heady aroma of poverty and poor life decisions, and it has a texture somewhere between cheap bologna and over-firm tofu. Except worse. Sarah and did the best we could with a couple of servings and tossed the rest.

This was made all the more diabolical in that I have a burn on the roof of my mouth—earned from over-nuking a burrito—that is (a) possibly the worst I have ever had in that it covers half the roof and requires about half-hourly doses of pain killer to keep it from aching and (b) so bad that it had made me depressed about life. Just sitting here, on the edge of pain, for eight hours now has made me feel like an utter screw-up. I do not think I can explain it better than that. I've thought about crying to just get out of the way, but mostly I sit and try to ignore the constant reminder that mistakes were made. Out of the day's pluses and minuses, the meatloaf and mouth burn predominate, making this a poor Sunday, indeed.

Luckily, most of the weekend was better. Friday night, I was Sarah's personal roadie and carried a large drum for her, along with other sundries, as she was on her way to a performance that night at Panoply. Carrying said equipment led me to tweet this, which speaks truth:

The next day, we went back as mere spectators, which was both fun and entertaining. Also, the only time in my life I have ever seen Tahitian dancers forced off a stage by the rules—they were part of a group that had went over in time while getting costumes on and the stage-handlers wouldn't let them finish the last dance, which probably took more time than just letting them do the dance but at least this way a protocol was what wasted time instead of, you know, arts and stuff. After about two or so hours of surfing the Panopliac wave, the heat was getting to us, and the crowd was increasingly filled with people who looked really angry at finding themselves there, and too many baby strollers were being manned by people who were either agoraphobes or stricken with some strange blindness that stopped them from seeing all the people they were shoving against and through. So, we bailed. But, we did buy a couple of pieces of art, one of which looks like this: