Tuesday, August 01, 2006

McDougal in the Raw


"Let's get some of that raw fish that them slants eat."

Whenever I hear those words I know it's time to find a sushi restaurant, and fast. McDougal is extremely susceptible to suggestion, particularly when the suggestion is his own. McDougal is an absolute fiend for sushi, but he steadfastly refuses to say the word. I've never been able to figure out quite why. It may be some sort of weird superstition... That's the best I've been able to come up with because his Japanese is excellent. So much so that he is able to order his favorite delicacies using the accent, no matter how subtle and obscure, of whichever city, town or village a given sushi chef hails from. But when he speaks to me of sushi, he always cloaks it in backwoods racism. Now that I think of it, perhaps it is out of contempt for my complete inability to pick up the Japanese language...

Anyway, McDougal's love of raw seafood knows no bounds. Why, one time while we were snorkeling on the great barrier reef, much to the horror of the tourists on shore. McDougal repeatedly dove down to the bottom and emerged with live sea urchins, which he immediately cracked in half and loudly sucked out the still quivering flesh. Actually, this alone probably wouldn't have been enough to horrify all of the beachgoers. Some were no doubt cosmopolitan enough to appreciate the value of fresh Uni. It was McDougal's attire that really got to everyone. McDougal, you see, favors Speedo swimsuits. He is, as I have mentioned before, a very large man. Comedian Drew Carey once said that if he were to put on a Speedo he would look like "a Bartlett pear with a rubber band wrapped around it." That's not a bad description, but it doesn't take into account one factor. The skin of a pear is rather firm, whereas McDougal's is not. Don't get me wrong, there's a full acre of tightly coiled muscle under there, and woe unto the man who forgets that, but the exterior layer is fairly flabby. McDougal is much like a walrus in that respect.

A few of the tourists might have still been unfazed by this display, particularly any who had been to the beaches of Greece where fat men in Speedos are common, but there was just one more thing... The Japanese believe that Uni, the sea urchin, is a powerful aphrodisiac. Personally, I doubt this very much. It seems to me to be more of an exercise in psychology, specifically the power of suggestion. But as I said earlier, McDougal is extremely susceptible to suggestion. So there he stood, glistening in the Australian sun, loudly slurping on a sea urchin's spiny shell, with a massive erection bulging out of the lycra of his Speedo. An image like that burns itself into your gray matter in a way that now amount of drugs, alcohol or therapy can erase.

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