Dear fancy food,

Until you can top this sandwich you and I are donezo.

Old Dixie Highway (Taken with instagram)

It’s a bonafide phenomena, it has been since day one. Jersey Shore has captured the hearts and minds of America faster than Barack Obama ever did.

None of this is news anymore, I have scores of friends who are embracing GTL and can be seen in their houses wearing the shirt before the shirt.

Jersey Shore’s meteoric rise and unique lexicon seem like old hat now that they are so pervasive, but the most important question remains:

Why did they become famous and why has God forsaken America?

The latter question is easy, he forsook us because gays did Katrina to the American Flag.

But the former is more interesting, and as I am a doctor. I am going to give my own theory a go.

Theory is as follows:

The boys and girls on the Jersey Shore are popular for the same reason Jane Gooddall’s study of Chimpanzee’s was so engrossing to the world, they are a species very similar to our own, but with enough key differences that they aren’t human.

We watch the Snooki as it smushes and it is no different to us than watching monkeys rutting on youtube.

They speak a primitive english and they spend more time trying to get laid than every character of every American Pie sequel combined.

Through it all, we see ourselves in them, not all of ourselves, but we see our baser impulses.

They imbibe nightly the way we (hazily and only halfway) remember doing on our worst night.

They make decisions that we’ve made once before, decisions that left us crippled with remorse. But they don’t feel remorse, because they’re wired differently than we are, because they aren’t quite the same species, like a modern day australopithecus.

So we watch, we watch and we’re awed, because we’ve heard such people existed, but prior to this we thought it legend. It’s like if we discovered the Loch Ness monster is real and then we got the opportunity to follow it around and find out it’s a total douche.

We’d all watch that show, and that’s why we all watch this one. 

Waste all your time by looking at things, glorious things.

I recently had a conversation with a friend about one of my favorite restaurants in Orlando, The Greek Corner. We were discussing how, without fail, that place had not only provided worthy meals, but outstanding ones and I came to realize that though I have explored there, nothing compares, in my tastes at least, with the Marathon Sandwich.

Exceedingly simple, the Marathon is lamb, cooked in its own juices, unevenly chopped and served on a flatbread. With some rice pilaf to make it a meal.

The meat is perfect, it is juicy and well-seasoned with the perfect amount of fat. Enough that you notice it’s there, but not enough that your girlfriend does.

Au Jus drips from the lamb into the flat bread, from the bread into its tin foil and (if you’re clever, or read this and remember to do it) from the tinfoil onto your pilaf where it will improve the already superb side with little shots of heartiness.

What The Greek Corner understands is the power of meat. Well cooked meat is the trump card. One must pity herbivores because they can’t know the primal glee of a medium-rare sirloin or a rack of pork ribs, smoked over hours.

But for those of us wise to the game, there’s the Greek Corner and the Marathon Sandwich.

So I’ll try again, another blog, another repository of my nonsense.

tumblr has a nice little setup, so maybe this will works. I’ll begin with some…pontification.

My generation has to have the least creepy school girl fetish of all time.

This isn’t even that big of a stretch when explained, because the trappings of school girl motif’s past, innocence and youth, are lost in our iteration of the most American fantasy this side of Betsy Ross playing baseball against an apple pie.

(By the 34th rule of the internet someone, somewhere, is a Rossobasopastrophiliac.)

The reason is summed up very simply. Britney Spears.

See men of a different era were introduced to schoolgirl attraction in one of two ways:

1. Via schoolmates at the uniform-wearing school they attend.

-OR-

2. Via the (way creepier) observation of those same students as an adult.

But my generation was introduced to school girls via “…Baby One More Time” the pop-and-schlock anthem of my early pubescence.

The video (also known as the reason boys cared about this song) heavily featured Ms. Spears prancing about in a school girl uniform of the Halloween-skank variety.

That costume introduced every heterosexual 10-year-old in my class to the school girl as a sex symbol, but it was introduced with the twist that the school girl was 8 years older than we were.

She wasn’t innocent to us, she was exotic. We weren’t the men targeted by her lolitan sexuality. We were kids who were looking at an older woman, so young that 18 was a woman, not a girl.

We were Squigs, she was Wendy Peffercorn. We were an uber-naive Benjamin Braddock, she was a corporate Mrs. Robinson. We didn’t even know we were being seduced.

That’s why its’ so deeply embedded in us, Freud said we are coded from birth to have our first sexual impulses in an oedipal fashion.

For boys my age, that coding was supplanted by a pop-singer from, of all places, Mississippi.

This doesn’t have a practical use except that maybe it can present my extremely creepy generation of men as slightly less creepy than their forebears. We’re victims of pubescence and psychology.