any old step will do

I have dreamt of sausages on occasion. It’s not a Freudian thing, but a nostalgic one.

Having grown up in a blue-collar, albeit bohemian (some might say “Bukowskian”), household, I have eaten more than my share of functional, economical meals in my time. The dish that best typifies that style of cuisine for me is instant mac’n’cheese with sliced kielbasa, preferably served with slices of fresh Wonder bread and a cold glass of off-brand fruit drink. It was a stick-to-your-ribs meal where sugar, salt, fats, and starches all worked together in perfect harmony, with only a better than even chance of causing an impacted colon. It could be bolted down quickly, which was great for a child seeking to squeeze the most from the post-suppertime daylight hours.

I haven’t eaten the stuff in years, being older and wiser and saddled with a less forgiving adult digestive tract, yet every so often the cravings hit me. I’ll be walking past the meat aisle in the supermarket and find myself lingering over the loops of kielbasa, pondering whether or not to make the effort to recapture that childhood magic. I never do, mostly because those longings are so perfectly Proustian that I fear that the reality would fall far short of my expectations.

That’s what happened with the Deviled Ham Episode of 1996, where I emerged from beneath the yoke of a virulent flu strain with an irrational craving for a deviled ham sandwich. As soon as I was able to travel to the supermarket, I bought myself a can of the potted meat product and some relish, and made the best damn deviled ham sandwich I could possibly hope to ever make. After eating it, I spent the rest of my day violently retching into the toilet. Thus my cravings for deviled ham were permanently laid to rest.

Plus, it’s hard to enjoy sausage once you’re aware of the place they occupy on the chart of meat-related products. Even the less creatively fashioned ones are a mix of fat, skeletal meat, and bone chips coaxed into edibility with copious amounts of sugar and other spices….and that was my attitude before I read the story, “Captain Marvel and the Famine Foiler” from Captain Marvel Adventures #130 (March 1952):

SWEET PROVIDENCE, WHAT HELLISH VISION IS THIS?
The premise of the story is that Captain Marvel’s eccentric inventor friend attempts to feed a colony of starving hillbillies with sausages created out of stones, which are filling, yet lack nutritional value. The hillbillies are less than happy with their new foodstuffs (but to tell you the truth, I’d rather take my chances with a dinner of ground basalt than with a questionable mix of organ meats and nitrates stuffed into an intestinal casing) and attempt to lynch the inventor with a rope made of sausages in one of the most disturbing sequences in comic book history…

I’ll never look at the breakfast menu in the same way ever again. The Deviled Ham Incident pales in comparison.

Doc Sausage – Sausage Rock (from Hoy Hoy: Rock Before Elvis, 1995) – I wouldn’t go so far as to label this 1950 track “rock.” It’s boogie-woogie/swing blues with elements that would later be incorporated into rock and roll, but it’s a distinction that needs to be made. The ongoing fishing expedition to establish the decisively earliest rock song has led to much overreaching. It’s only a matter of time before Hildegard of Bingen’s works are put forth as the first examples of rock music.

Baldhead Growler – The Sausage (from the Trojan Calypso box set, 2002) – I was thinking just the other day that Armagideon Time was lacking a certain something, and then it hit me: There simply haven’t been enough calypso songs featuring phallic-related double entendres featured on this site. Problem solved!

Steve Gray – The Sausage Machine (from Electronic Toys: A Retrospective of 70’s Synthesizer Music, 1997) – Or as I like to think of it: “What If Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes Recorded Music for a Porn Film?”