The Full Monte?

Yes. I actually ate this. THIS. For brunch this afternoon. A flippin' Monte Cristo sammich, which looks and tastes just like something that would be featured in the blog This Is Why You're Fat, while the gang and I were out dining at the kind of place that looks like it would be featured in the blog Stuff White People Like, which is also ironic since it's the place where our black friend Mike chose for us to eat (isn't having a "black friend" something white people like, too?). In case you weren't made aware, a Monte Cristo is a turkey, ham, and cheese sandwich deep fried in pancake batter, sprinkled with powdered sugar, and served with raspberry jam on the side. And it was a thousand times bigger than it looks in the photo, and one bite made me feel as if I had just negated everything healthy that I had done to my body in the last month. But Mike had one, and he had been telling me about them for weeks after going to 37th & Zen the first time, and Dave had one too and since I was sitting directly across from Alvin who eats shoots and leaves I figured I'd make his head spin by plopping one of these artery-bursters down in front of his lean vegetarian frame and be all like BOOM! NOW WHAT, MUTHAFUCKA? But it turns out he may have the last laff in the end when I wasn't able to even finish the whole thing when my heart

slowly started giving out somewhere after that first bite into the second half of the sandwich (a gradual giving-out, as I am sure my ticker will come to a slow and hideous halt at some point around 11:45pm this evening) and had to take the death shroud (napkin) off my lap and place it over the food so that just looking at it wouldn't cause further coronary arrest. But I gotta admit, the three of us eating these things didn't cause the all-out prandial pandemic that I thought would occur when I suspected everyone else at the table were going to be forced to decide which one of their dear friends they wanted to resuscitate first. We ate. We survived. We paid our bill. And now I'm going to spend the rest of the day eating kale salads and doing sit-ups. Sheeee-it... after that sandwich, I'm not even sitting up typing this now.