A Blind Eye's View

In looking around my apartment this past December, I noticed that I hadn't been outside except to go to barbeque joints in weeks. To remedy the situation, I decided to hit the road for the holidays. After a none-too-brief stop at Allen & Sons (they shudder when they see me coming) I was on my way.

I headed north to play some darts (tossing a few seemed to be the, er, point of my trip) and, in the immortal words of Seattle Supersonics coach George Karl, "to eat my ass off" (you just can't make up something that good). And remember, folks, George is my friend (quoth the big doofy dog in the Warner Brothers cartoon). So is the derrick I now need to move from room to room. My previously reported 400-lb. bulk has now been increased to sideshow proportions, thanks to my holiday gastronomic feats (I'm now large enough that I can't use, let alone see, my other feats).

My road to near-planetary mass (it's made me more attractive, simply because I'm large enough now to have my own gravitational pull) began in Philadelphia, where I returned to the old homestead to see my folks and my also-visiting brother (he's older, of course; after me, my folks wisely abandoned the concept of reproduction). My bro and I made our annual pilgrimage to Jim's Steaks, where Linda Kurth's record of consuming 11 cheesesteaks in 1.5 hours remains unbroken (the record she likely set immediately thereafter could be broken only by the obese projectile-vomit character in Monty Python's Meaning of Life). When it comes to cheesesteaks, some diehards claim that you can't beat the whiz (liquid cheese, that is). At Jim's, you couldn't take one: the bathroom was broken (liquid...oh, nevermind). We left seeking relief ... and soft pretzels with mustard. After having been accosted by a Philadelphia cop (who—and I swear I'm not making this up—wanted to know if we were sure we hadn't just been shot at a few blocks away, to which we dutifully responded that we would likely have remembered such a thing), we capped off a day of indulgence in a fowl and unnecessary way. It was fowl because we consumed much duck at our favorite Peking Duck House; it was unnecessary because we then went home for dinner.

Leaving a trail of empty supermarkets in my wake, I left the city of brotherly love and bingeing and continued north to New York, where it was cold, cold, cold (hmm ... I seem to have moved from gastronomic feats to little feats). To keep warm I naturally increased my food intake to more than that of a developing country (Sally Struthers beat me with a stick ... but only because I tried to snatch a pot roast away from her). I proceeded to honk down Chinese, Korean, Malaysian, Indian, Cuban, and Thai food, not to mention a couple of Patsy's pizzas with extra garlic (that's using my, uh, head). And that was just for breakfast the first day in town. I ate so much that I'd have been down for the count had I not gotten up for the down stroke.

Yes, on New Year's Eve I went to catch Maceo Parker lay down the funk. Outside it was colder than the proverbial brass monkey's ass, but inside the show said brass booty would be feeling the heat and doing more shaking than a junkie going through withdrawal. Actually, I think Maceo himself was dancing the monkey at one point during the show (and that has nothing to do with the monkey dance he was likely doing after the show with the backstage redhead who either finds the Spice Girls to be too primly attired or was all out of clean laundry and had to use the dress off her Barbie doll). The most frightening dancing on the stage was that of "Sweet George," the percussionist whose steps were so derivative of bad kung-fu (maybe that's just how he gets his kicks) that he looked like an epileptic Bruce Lee, and for a minute I could swear I was seeing bad English subtitles flash across the stage-which is nothing compared to some of the stuff I've seen flash across stages thanks to the overindulgences of New Year's past. In any case (except a briefcase, which is far too small), a funky good time was had by all, even by George (who's my friend).

At least that's the way I saw, although by the end of my trip my eyelids weighed too much to open fully. Now I'm back in my apartment, where I'll likely stay until the fire department comes to cut down a wall so I can get outside. Feel free to drop me a line here at the Prism-or at least send some barbeque.