It probably doesn't seem like a big deal to most of you, but I ate beef tonight.

I hadn't touched the stuff since 1997.

I stopped eating it at first because it seemed like the thing to do at the time, but then got confused and began to believe that I was actually just paranoid about it.

You know - Mad cow, e-coli, etc...

So, I went happily about my life sans beef.

Then, tonight, for whatever reason, I decided to eat it again. So, I took this girl (who's kind of my girlfriend, but to whom I rarely refer as "my girlfriend" because I have a problem with commitment that is deep rooted and probably silly) out for some beef.

She was pumped, 'cause she hadn't eaten beef in a while, either.

There we were, then, not-my-girlfriend-but-who-really-is, and me, with 30 ounce porterhouse steaks sitting in front of us. I think the combined meat on the table accounted for more beef than I had eaten in my entire beef-eating life prior to tonight.

Because there was no chance of our devouring steaks that were clearly large enough to qualify for the "Eat this steak, and it's yours for free" contests that are often held in small restaurants in prominent American mountain ranges, we asked the hired help to remove approximately 2/3 of the steaks in question. We wanted them to look nice and pretty on our plates, making it an easier process for us to stop being freaks and rejoin the rest of society, which has been eating beef normally and without complaint pretty much since humans were invented (or sprang up, or evolved, or whatever - I don't want to get into it right now).

When the steaks came back, they were just cute as the dickens. They were little, tiny bloody things with little bits of bubbly fatty thingies stuck to the side. On account of it having been so long since I had tasted bovine flesh, I decided to eat the gristle first, and just get that out of the way.

Which is exactly what I did. Although "eating" is really a strong word for what happened. The stuff is so thick and rubbery that chewing completely failed to produce the desired effect of reducing a food item into smaller, more manageable pieces. I wound up sucking on it for a while and then just swallowing it whole. This was the best I could do.

I then proceeded to consume most of the rest of my steak, which tasted very much like beef did in 1997, which just goes to show that cows haven't evolved very much in the intervening years. I don't know what I expected, really. It just seems like a natural law of the universe that, given enough time, all things eventually wind up tasting like chicken.

As if it weren't enough to have a really exciting experience such as eating beef, our server, who had also just recently begun eating red meat again, only charged us for one of the steaks. I guess word had gotten around that a couple of meat-fearing pansies were in the restaurant, and that it would be nice to help them get back on their feet by donating half of the meat needed, which was nice considering that the total value of one of these steaks amounted to significantly more money than was given to me for financial-aid purposes in college.

I also feel liberated. Kind of like stripping off all of my clothes and dancing naked in the rain. I'm not going to do that, though, because it's too cold, and I would get too arrested, and then be too in jail. Then there would be the problem of feeling a little stupid in front of the judge and having to explain that I was exposing myself in public because I was excited about the beef in my tummy.

I don't think it would go over very well.

That's pretty much it. Now I'm sitting at home, feeling oddly at peace with the world. It's like my long struggle is over, and the rest of my life can begin again.