Meat Sweats

Sunday after church we went to lunch at the Olive Garden. Kiel said he was very hungry so he decided to order a side of meatballs with his entree. Kiel is notorious for ordering a lot of food and then not eating hardly any of it. We told Kiel that the side of meatballs was an additional $1.95 and that if he didn’t eat them he would be very sorry. He assured us that it wouldn’t be a problem and he could easily eat them. We all ate our salad and breadsticks and then our meals came. They gave Kiel his meal and side of meatballs. Let me say this before I move on. I honestly believe that my mother (Rose Mary) makes the best meatballs in the world, they are incredible. Because of this I can’t order spaghetti and meatballs when I go out to a restaurant. I’m spoiled. Kiel must have had his grandmother’s meatballs on his mind when he ordered these things. However, what he got was something from another meatball dimension. These were not his grandma’s meatballs.

These ‘things’ were gray and hard and dry and filled with specks similar to sawdust. Did I mention they were gray? They weren’t natural. No one said anything at first. I think we all wanted to see if Kiel had the courage to actually eat one of these things. Kiel smiled as if he knew what we were thinking. He looked at the meatballs and then at us and said “No Problem”. We’ll see. After swallowing several bites of his meatball he stopped and said “These things aren’t meatballs, they're meat wads.” Disgusting I know but he was right, they weren't meatballs. Even though these things were nasty I couldn’t help but remind him that he said that he would eat them and that this wouldn’t be a problem. “I know, I know – I’ll eat them don’t worry” he said. Now it was getting fun. I must say in some demented way, I enjoyed watching him struggle with these gray lumps of mass. He couldn’t quite figure out how to attack them. He tried small bites. He tried taking a drink with them. He tried adding sauce. He tried adding some pasta with them. Nothing worked. That is until he got ill. At first I thought he was faking like he used to do when he was little. When the sweat started to accumulate sweat on his brow and his face went pale, I knew he had enough. He excused himself and went to the rest room ‘to get rid of these awful things’. (I’m not exactly sure you want to know how he did that) After purging himself of this evil, he returned and kind of slumped over in the booth until the rest of us finished eating. Being the sympathetic group we are, we started teasing him.

We told him that he had fallen victim to the ‘Meat Sweats’. You ever have them? It is where you either eat bad meat or you consume way too much meat and you have a reaction. You feel extremely bloated, miserable, uncomfortable and you sweat profusely, hence the name ‘Meat Sweats’. I must confess that I am the one who normally gets the Meat Sweats. I usually eat too much steak or sausage and spend the remainder of the evening recovering from this awful condition. This happened when we went to Chicago this past summer and met our friends Kery and Brenda. We ate dinner with them in Chicago and I got the Meat Sweats. Kery asked what that was and I explained it to him. From that point on he kind of modified the name of this disease. Whenever he looked at me for the rest of the evening Kery would say in a thick Chicago accent “Ronnie’s got the Beef Sweats”. Not exactly the same thing but I got the point. By the way, Katlin does a dead on impression of Kery saying this – it’s incredibly funny.

As is the case with the Meat Sweats, time is you friend. Sooner or later this condition will ‘pass’ if you know what I mean. If you ever find yourself with the Meat Sweats don’t drink a lot of water. You’ll be tempted to but it will only make matters worse. If you do you’ll feel more bloated and sweat worse. Just be patient and let nature takes its course. Getting back to Kiel for a moment, he never did finish his meatballs or his pasta for that matter. He went home, rested and felt better several hours later. I wasn’t too upset though. For a $1.95 it was great entertainment.