i can just hear you getting fatter.

this weekend, i came across this piece of magnificence, which, despite my altogether overly-commented upon extensive vocabulary, defies description:

The Fatty Melt.

this work of art, as you have now witnessed, is a juicy beef hamburger ensconced in the love of two grilled-cheese sandwiches instead of the regular bun.

the boy’s response:  wow.  gross.  i totally want to make one now.

the father’s response: laughter, followed by faux-vomit sounds.

the mother’s response: blank stare.  blinking.  unbelief.

see, my mother has been eating raw food nearly all year.  this comes with quite an apparatus, as you can imagine, but she has taken the time to take classes, rearrange her kitchen, and stock the refrigerator full of glass (not the evil plastic!) containers full of nuts, leaves, vegetables, pebbles, etc. to make this a workable life for her.  she also started a garden in the backyard, which we have feasted on for most of the summer – not a small feat for the not-always-amenable-to-planting colorado soil.  it should be mentioned that this is not a fad for her, but the latest step in the last 15 years of moving in this direction – lest we all be completely discouraged that we could not do such things.

i explain all this to preface how i lost a bet, and now find myself in polar opposition to the oil-greased existence of a fatty-melt.

i come home last week to find my mother in the kitchen, as usual.  she asks if i would like to take a shot with her.  being that she is out of my eyesight, i answer “sure”, thinking perhaps it is a dessert shot, or (as happened one crazy christmas many years back) alcoholic.  something tells me i might be wrong, but it’s been a long day, and my answer to shots is nearly always “sure”.  [good thing i don’t get asked this question very often, no?]  i walk into the kitchen to find a kelly-green liquid in a shot glass, sidled up to a brownish liquid in the adjoining shot glass.  apparently this is my chaser.

“um, what is this, exactly?”

“this is wheatgrass, and then you follow it with apple juice.”

[blank stare]

“it’s good for you!”

[smelling, worried look]

“it doesn’t taste that bad.  and the apple juice is sweet.  DRINK IT.”

true to her word, it doesn’t taste that bad.  i use this phrase comparatively, as you have to imagine that it’s not like eating a big piece of chocolate cake, but more like if you had to lick the bottom of the lawnmower, this lawnmower would be the best tasting one on the block.

my mother than proceeds to explain to me how amazing wheatgrass really is, because it’s a complete food blah blah blah and how (and this is the key part here) if the economy plummets and food is scarce, i could live solely on wheatgrass and sprouts, essentially.

no. way.

i mean, i could live, in the sense of avoiding death, but not actually live.  she says i totally could, and if i added some raw vegetables/nuts, it would be even better.

yeah right.  i tell her to try it.  she tells me to try it.  i tell her to try it.  she tells me to try it.

and then i feel myself saying…”fine”.

and this is how i find myself on a 21 day (as it takes about 21 days to break/form new habits, so the story goes) regime of eating nearly all raw food.

if i ate a fatty melt right now, i think it would kill me.