Memories of Random Meat

Several years ago I took my daughter and my nephew for a walk in a park in Chicago. The park had a pond in the middle, and we decided to walk around the pond.

We passed what looked like the remains of a picnic. Someone had dumped most of a bucket of fried chicken on the ground, and it was covered with ants and flies.

We walked on, and passed the remains of a barbecue. Someone had dropped a large piece of raw steak, and it was covered with ants and flies.
We walked on, and passed the remains of a fishing trip. Someone had left two fish without heads, tails or guts, and they were covered with ants and flies.

We fled for home, where we had cheese sandwiches.

A couple of days later we went for a drive and while we were sitting at a stoplight near downtown, we watched a man unload eight or ten pig carcasses (two at a time, one over each shoulder) into a laundromat. They were not covered with ants or flies.

I moved to Berkeley, and caught BART into the city one day to go to the Buddhist community center in SF. I had to take a bus from the station, and after I was done, I was waiting for the bus home when I looked down and saw an entire fresh package of balogna, exploded in the gutter at my feet. It was so fresh that the ants and flies hadn't heard about it yet.

A few months later, I was in Chicago again, and had to take a cab from my hotel to downtown. As I got into the cab, I noticed a neat row of three eggs in the backseat. The one in the middle was cracked, showing a portion of the white and revealing that these eggs had been boiled. Or perhaps they had just spent WAY too long in the back of a cab.

I'm beginning to fear that I'm due for another sighting.