It’s like Vegas: the house always wins.

Went out to that Brazilian meat place, Fogo de Chao, in Buckhead tonight to celebrate a friend’s two-year victory over cancer and now I’m the one who needs a doctor. Sure, during dinner we made jokes about how you can’t “let the meat win,” and how we could “beat the dinner at its own game,” or some damn thing. I’m not really sure about the specifics. My memory’s still a little foggy. Everything smells like meat. Everything sounds like meat. Everything appears wrapped in bacon and bloody as hell.

Now I’m afraid to fall asleep, ’cause I think I may have some kind of meat concussion. I’m afraid I’ll wake up in the middle of the night to find that I forgot to flip my little red/green card over again and there’s some gaucho standing next to my bed with a spit of top sirloin and a carving knife the length of my forearm. “Senor?” he says, and what can I possibly say back to him but, “Yes, please!” He came all the way over here, after all, and besides that, he’s got a carving knife the length of my forearm.

Yet, still I’m under the meat’s spell. I wish that my company would pay us in meat, rather than money. Instead of cutting us checks, they’d slice us steaks. A gentlemanly churrasco would come around, cubicle to cubicle, with that pay period’s specialty meat. The slices would go straight into my wallet. It would be good.

Then I remember why it is that my heart feels like its being squeezed by a ham-fisted heavy. Then I think, “Come on! It’s not like I get paid every week…”