BURNT MEAT

The house smells like the most horrible, disgusting, burnt meat of all time. How can my family eat such nauseating junk? As soon as I entered the house I felt like going straight to the kitchen and tossing whatever that garbage was that was cooking right out the window. My god, I knew that my inspiration to write would be stifled as soon as I came through the front door and noticed what I knew would be there, but am always naïve enough to hope has gone away—my lazy, coward, son-of-a-gun father.

I think seeing him makes the smell much worse. Of course, if not for his presence, the kind of burnt, toxic meat that I smell today would rarely be tolerated in this house. He lowers the standards for everything. People get dumber and everything just falls apart when he’s around—it’s the nature of slime. I can’t stand the way he walks: his feet make this gross thump on the floor that I know comes from the falling weight of his toxin-laden, over-arching, hard-stuffed alcohol belly (ughhh). He moves his legs as if he had no joints or knees, as if his legs had been replaced by wooden boards. I just know that every muscle in his nasty body is stiff as hell—dead and totally non-flexible. I’d confuse his back for a boulder if I didn’t know better. The man is simply beyond repair. Burnt meat cannot be re-cooked.

I look at him; then I think of Noam Chomsky, whose work I was just reading in Barnes and Noble—what a difference in courage, intelligence, and integrity! Chomsky makes the world a better place; my father lowers all standards (yuck!).