Last weekend, I blew my palate across the sky in a shower of beautiful sparks. I’m not talking about sucking on a Roman Candle, either. I’m talking about drinking bacon-infused vodka.

My friend Rob had some around his house that a chef friend had made. It’s smoky, a little greasy but not in a bad way. Like, kinda slippery-tasting. It’s not the sort of thing you’d want to gargle with or drink out of a full pint glass. But it would make the mother of all Bloody Marys (Maries?) for a hangover breakfast drink. Or sipped straight, stirred with a slice of avocado.

Here’s a recipe that I found for the stuff — could make for a great Christmas gift, too.

And before people start cutting their eyes and warming up the snark for the comments, just remember: I know that bacon’s a big Internet meme right now. Possibly cliche, even. But there’s a good reason for it:

Bacon is awesome. End of story.

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I saw this sign in Union Square last night:

I love bacon, don’t get me wrong — but I wonder sometimes if it’s like zombies and robots and monkeys online — awesome, sure, but also just this stuff the Internet fetishizes just to be fetishizing something. I mean, as cool as I think robots are in the abstract, I’m not actually that thrilled about having a world crawling with them. I just like looking at them and writing about them. Is bacon the internet’s meat robots?

According to Eliza, hell no:

Bacon is the number one meat that vegetarians miss, and the one that eventually breaks most of them.

She’s right. I never could be a vegetarian in the first place — couldn’t give up bacon.

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Things have been dark lately — dark and funky. Not like a good Jamaican dub record from the late ’70s, either. I’ve been getting migraines in the middle of the night.

I feel sort of numb, like a deep cut that’s had a band-aid wrapped very tightly over its surface. When I sit still, things are sort of okay but moving around hurts like hell.

I have a good job and I’m surrounded by loving people but I can’t shake the terrible feeling that life is whistling past while I sit in the corner staring at a glowing screen. The seas are warming, ice is melting, and we’re all just pushing pixels around.

I know I’m not going to live in New York forever. At some point I’m going to have to — going to WANT to — go back to Virginia and help take care of my family. In the past month, four close family members have had some horrible health scares. One of them died. I feel removed from it all, not that my magical Superman doctor powers could help if I were down there, and I’d be miserable in Norfolk, VA — but I can’t help but wish I were on the scene helping out.

On the other hand, I just got here in July. My big fancy New York life has barely gotten started. But enough about that. The three paragraphs preceding this one have all started with “I,” a sure sign that I’m weeping salty tears onto my colon, crying the blues with my head jammed right up my ass.

This cartoon really put it in perspective for me. It’s from Cat and Girl, by Dorothy Gambrell. The image above is a cut-out from “Grace,” a cartoon that perfectly summed up my self-indulgent whinging and ended it all with a sweet, greasy ray of hope …

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BLT Sandwich
Originally uploaded by jasonperlow

You can’t conjure up resonant, universal truths on purpose. They just have to happen, right in front of you or dribble out from between the lips by accident for someone else to discover.

There was this discussion on Metafilter today about bacon salt. Not that it wouldn’t have caught my attention anyway — who wouldn’t want to learn more about bacon salt — but having just read about bacon ice cream in the Post, I clicked a little faster.

The chat itself was okay, pretty good by Metafilter standards (read: nobody got crapped on), but this comment from a guy called Divine_Wino slapped me in the face like a big cold carp made out of universal truth:

I don’t know about bacon salt, really, but just think about this for a minute:

You cook up some of that thick slab bacon, slooooowly. Then you take some fresh sliced sourdough bread and toast it lightly. Then you cut up one New Jersey beefsteak tomato (wait till you get a good one!), you need four thick slices because you are going to end up eating two of these, then one (ONE) piece of red leaf lettuce or Romaine (you need about 1/3 stem/thick end to leaf ratio), not too wet from when you rinse it under the tap. Mayo, fresh ground black pepper …

Here is the amazing thing about this amazing sandwich, really, really, anyone can make it and it’s fucking delicious, it’s the most democratic thing in the world a BLT, with a BLT every man is a king, every woman is president-for-life, every dog is a pony.

Drink ice water while you are eating your BLT’s and then quickly go wash your hands and face and lie down on a freshly made bed in an airconditioned room, read sci-fi paperbacks from the seventies, take a little nap.

That’s about as good as being a human being gets, I’m pretty sure.

That’s summer afternoons at my grandparents’, trips to my aunt and uncles’ farm, long slow weekends with plans for later but nothing much to do right now and the splendor of simplicity all in three paragraphs. Try pulling that one off on purpose and see how it goes.

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