A Story for the Ages

So, the other day, no, not that one, the other other day, I was cooking up a pot of stew. No, that is not a "metaphor." I was literally making a giant pot of stew, and if you have anything against stew, well, you suck. Stew rules. Anyway, this stew particularly ruled because it had sausage in it. Basically, the sausage took the place of the traditional potatoes. It was even preservative free kielbasa. I got it at Whole Foods. And before you say it, no, buying preservative free foodstuffs from Whole Foods doesn't mean I'm a yuppie if I'm buying it to make stew. So, we needed to go to Whole Foods AND Safeway, and I turn around in the car and realize it's a terrible idea to turn around when you're driving (see the results of Virginia Tech's 100-car Naturalistic Driving Study) and turn back to look at Tenley Circle and ask my son whether we should go to Safeway or Whole Foods first. In response, he says "when I get older, can I have a trombone? I want to have a trombone and play music about tigers." Obviously we went to Whole Foods first. And obviously that is a brilliant idea for a moderately successful band. If the Decemberists can be moderately successful while singing, essentially, sea shanties, then I could be moderately successful playing the trombone and singing about Tigers. You don't think so? Go tell that to Blake. Wait, he died in penury. Uh, go tell that to Blake about 100 years after he died. Also, in case you were wondering, no, we don't believe in paragraphs any more. They are superflous.

But that is a story only for the minutes, not the ages as my title suggests. The following is that story. It is also related to the stew. As you know, stew has beef. Well, maybe not all stew, but certainly the stew I made this weekend. Now beef is one of the more useful materials. You can eat it, you can throw it, you can build bridges with it, you can climb mountains of it, you can launch it into space. But before this weekend, I didn't know that you could carry on a conversation with it. Oh wait! That's the denouement of the story! Crap! I just ruined it foreshadowing, yes! Well, actually that's basically the whole story. I was just cooking away, browning up some beefs when one of the last pieces says to me "Dude, don't throw me in there! I hate those guys! Cook me with the parsnips!" "Oh, I'm sorry, I already cooked the parsnips!" I replied curmudgeonly. "You jerk!" said the beef, "you know I've been hooking up with that one parsnip!" "Actually I didn't know that. I hope it wasn't anything serious because I probably peeled and chopped her." "Nooooooooooooo," moaned the beef as he began to cry bloody tears, which for chunks of beef is, I guess, not too unusual. He just kept moaning and moaning and I got sick of it so I threw him into the crackling oil and that was that. The moral of the story is: before cooking something, do not drink an entire bottle of vinegar. Well, maybe a little one, but certainly not a liter. The second moral of the story is, just throw the beef in the pot right away. Don't bother talking to it.