Hey. I’m home sick again. The cold isn’t getting better. In fact, it’s getting worse. It’s so bad in fact that Linette just went out to rent me the first Harry Potter movie (which I have been waiting for just such an occasion to see) and buy me some orange juice. That’s the good thing about being sick, being waited on. Linette’s being especially nice this time, however, since I caught the cold from her. She, I think, feels responsible… as she should.

So, as for the story about fake meat I promised yesterday. Here goes…

Yesterday, we had to go shopping for food, since there was nothing left in the house. Everything we’d left in the fridge two weeks ago, when we left for Italy, had long since sprouted fur. We woke up and started making a list. As we’re trying to live a bit more frugally now that we’ve blown a good deal of our retirement savings in Italy, we looked at the ads that had come to our house from Meijer, a big grocery chain here in the Midwest, Kroger, and a few others. Meijer was having a sale on Morningstar Farms fake meat products. They’re usually about four bucks a piece, but this week they were apparently two for $3.00! Based on that alone, we chose to go to Meijers.

I love fake meat. I know many of you probably don’t share my enthusiasm from textured soy protein food products, but I love them. And, Morningstar Farms is the best. It tastes just like real meat. (They can really do wonders with chemical flavoring agents.) Yummy…

OK, I’ve just lost interest in telling this story. Maybe it’s because I’m sick or maybe it’s because I can already tell it won’t be as nearly as funny as it was when I wrote it yesterday and the Fucking Blogger Incident destroyed it. Either way, I don’t want to tell it.

If I were to have told it, this would have been the highlight:

I overheard the woman working in Meijer’s customer service department tell the obese woman in line in front of me, who was there to return shit-brown size-20 clogs, “Since I cut my toes off with an axe, I just haven’t been able to find shoes that fit right.”

That was the exact moment that I knew for sure that I had returned to the Midwest from Europe. Sick or not, I know definitively that I was no longer in the international fashion capital, Milan.

There was lots of other good stuff I would have told you in the process. I had this whole thing worked out where I compared this, my experience of not being able to buy what was advertised, with the experiences of Bonnie Franklin’s character on the sub-par sitcom of the late 70’s, “On Day at a Time.” I think she, or one of her daughters had tried to buy something from a department store that was advertised, only to find that they didn’t really have any for that price. That was, as I recall, my first understanding of the “bate and switch” practice often utilized by retailers. At any rate, it was really funny when I wrote it yesterday, but it pains me to think of writing it again.

As for the fake meat, the good folks at Meijer essentially told me to go fuck myself. They said that the ad was a misprint and that they aren’t responsible for misprints. Being sick, and not feeling terribly passionate about fake meat after returning from Europe where I consumed many, many real animals, I walked away without a fight.

I had also wanted to write something about making the switch back from real veal to fake chicken now that I’m back in the US. When I was in Italy, I ate a great deal of veal. I’m not sure why that is. I don’t think I would ever order it here in the US, or buy it in a store. It just seemed like the right thing to do in Italy. I suppose it’s like getting a hooker while in Amsterdam… not that I did that. We were in Amsterdam for a couple of hours, while changing planes, but the thought never crossed my mind until right now. My mind is wandering. Did I mention that I have a fever?

I wish Linette would get home with Harry Potter soon. I want something to focus on other than the canal being cut into my face by the constant flow of snot and the fact that I’m back in the US, millions of miles away from guilt-free veal and legal prostitution.

Good day.