Even though this is actually July 5th, and unless I get off my butt it’ll end up being July 6th, cause I’ve got the procrastinating bug kinda bad. It comes from excessive use of a charcoal grill. In a completely scientific study, which I conducted over the past several years, I’ve established that charcoal smoke seems to have a significant effect on a subject’s ability to get anything else accomplished. Peer review has pointed out that my test population was limited to a total of one, and that I did not correct for other influences such as environment (summer, warm days) and chemical anti-inhibitants (beer, frosty, bitter). But great scientific minds are always are always subjected to jeers and ridicule from lesser minds so I’ve learned to take criticisms of my methods in-stride.
This year I grilled all four evenings during the holiday weekend. And not just because, as opposed to normal type kitchen type cooking, one can sip a beer while he’s waiting for the coals to turn white. I grill because quite simply, I like to grill. I grill, therefore I am. Especially here in the mountains where there’s no mosquitoes, chiggers, gnats, no-see-ums, flies, and especially those flying roach things that people down South like to call palmetto bugs, because they think it makes them sound less awful, but they’re really flying roaches, which makes them like three or four times worse than the ones that scuttle along the floor. Cause they can fly and get into your hair, if you had any, or worse yet, down your shirt, and then you’re trying to NOT to squash them because then there’ll be roach innards all over the inside of your shirt and yet at the same time, the only thing you can think of as the roach skitters all over your sweat slicked skin is, “where do these things lay eggs?” and “oh, go, oh, god, getitoffofmerightnow”.
There’s also no humidity, unless of course it’s just after a thunderstorm, in which case the humidity will peak up around 30% for the next twenty minutes, upon which it then descends back to the usual ten percent or so. And of course, along with the low humidity there’s the swooping descent of the temperature as the sun goes down below the ridge above the house, which occurs around four o’clock, and then it settles in for a nice bracing evening in the mid sixties. Pretty much perfect grilling weather, again established by scientific study.
So yeah, grilling, which I believe is the correct terminology today, having left behind the obsolete terms like barbequing, which belongs to a rude, brutish age when men wore skinny ties and animal skins while they tended the fire. Worse yet is BBQing, which is just a term that should be relegated to the dustbin of history, like ‘jitterbugging’, and ‘twenty three skidoo’. We’re more evolved now and we grill instead of BBQing and we drink cold crisp small batch crafted beers while we do it. Grilling, as I like to perform it, is a lifestyle, perhaps even an art form. Wonder if I could get a grant from the NEA?