THE MODERN JUNGLE
by Uptown Sinclair Brown

Coiled meats make tasty treats!

The other day I was at the grocery store waiting in line at the deli counter and the woman in front of me asks for a pound of bologna. I notice the guy behind the counter starts scooping out actual dog shit instead of bologna onto wax paper from a bucket. He measures out a pound and he gives it to the woman. She doesn't even bat an eyelash - not even the smell gets her attention! I get up to the counter and I ask the deli guy if he knows he just sold the woman actual dog shit, and he says, "Bologna, dog shit, she'll never notice the difference." We both had a good laugh over that I tell you.

You know, if it weren't for the fact that soy burgers taste like gym socks soaked in urine (which I tasted at my initiation into Promise Keepers) I would be a vegetarian.

I won't lie. I like a good hamburger... and the more gristly the meat, the better, but you gotta admit, sometimes that shit just grosses you out, man. I sometimes picture Marlin Brando, all 400+ pounds of him, diving headfirst into a pile of raw hamburger meat, rubbing it over his pendulous man-boobs. I imagine his little fist-sized heart pounding to beat like "The Little Engine That Could". After thinking of that I can go a good two weeks on saltines and iceberg lettuce.

	Meat...shit...same difference.

Hot dogs, for instance -- people eat that careful blend of mule lips and rat feces every day. Believe me, I have spent enormous numbers of hours lurking in gas stations picking up female truckers, and I can tell you the hot dogs rotating on those metal rods stay there, not for days or weeks, but for seasons. They only get discarded on the first snowfall of the year and the Ides of March. Its almost like they are numb to the repercussions of meat-eating and are just jonesing for that 10 seconds of hot dog taste in their mouth - like some sort of meat cigarette.

When I was in 10th grade I worked for a certain Scottish-sounding fast food joint. As a joke and out of laziness, my restaurateur friends and I would rotate the metal clip that indicated the age of the meat so we wouldn't have to bust our hump cooking new patties. One time, we managed to keep a dry, shriveled burger under the heat lamps for six hours before we served it to some super-dickhead Amway salesman who used our burger joint as his "office". I would even serve hamburgers that I accidentally dropped onto the greasy, dirty floor. Okay, I dropped them intentionally. Yet even knowing that, for every guy like me working back there, there's ten more who do even more demented things with meat, I still eat there on occasion.

Whatever. We're human beings. Today you can tell a guy that his meat is riddled with animal feces, sawdust, flies, and bacteria that will drive him crazier than a shithouse rat and he'll just ask for an extra side of mayo.

In the end, the only really offensive thing about ordering a burger is when someone from Boston does it. He'll invariably order a "buhhhh-guh" and I just hate that friggin' accent.

*editor's note: 1/2 of the EasyMidget staff is from Massachusetts and were extremely offended by that last joke.