who’s the beef?

(originally posted 2/28/2016)

Driving in Atlanta the other day I saw an enormous billboard featuring a hamburger from one of the local fast food establishments. Traffic was moving slowly so I got a good long look at it.

The bun.

The lettuce.

The meat.

At some point in time that meat had been a cow. Walking around with all the other cows. Eating grass. Pooping. Staring blankly ahead. Herded into a pen. Transported to a facility that killed it and hung it up on a hook.

That very hamburger at some very real point in time breathed its last breath.

Now that cow was ground up and sitting on a billboard that thousands of people a day looked up at. Famous in a way.

It made me wonder if other cows looked up at the billboard with a vague sense of being star-struck. Maybe even a little envious.

“Larry hit the big time.”

This presupposes that cows can acknowledge billboards and understand that the meat sitting in the middle of the patties is actually made of them.

A stretch I realize but not as much of a stretch as saying that a cow could actually recognize that meat as being, at one time in the past, Larry.

Once you do this you immediately picture a trailer full of cows driving by the sign and suddenly a mournful moo arising as Larry’s sister recognizes her brother.

“That’s why he never writes.”

Yes, you can add writing to the list of things that cows don’t do that I have presupposed that they do. At some point during this dumb story you’re going to have stop with the literal “cows have hooves and can’t hold pencils and even if they did they could never get to the post office and even if they did their tongues are so huge that they would have no choice but to affix all of the stamps at one time because to try and lick just one would be unrealistic” stuff. Just the fact that you would think, even for a second, that a cow could manage to open the little packet of stamps but couldn’t navigate ripping out a single one just shows how literal you are getting.

Stop it.

Your brain must hurt thinking this through to such a degree.

Just imagine yourself driving in Atlanta.

Got it?

Ok. You’re in Atlanta (don’t ask why, it doesn’t matter) and you’re driving and you see a billboard with a big hamburger on it.

A delicious hamburger and just the sight of it makes you hungry. You read which exit you need to take to buy such a hamburger and you pull off on said exit and make your way to the restaurant that sells them.

Good so far?

You buy one and unwrap it.

Now … say hi to Larry for me.