Attend a Pig Roast

“Mental notebook at the ready, I pulled up to a trendy house in Los Feliz and quickly found myself among a crowd of strangers, each of us staring down at a charred animal the size of an eight-year old. The pig, laid out on its grill of cross hatched re-bar, turned a party of stoned hipsters into Lord of the Flies characters with edgier haircuts, everyone vaguely competitive and wondering what to do now. [...] The smell could knock you over, and some guest’s dogs ran around the yard doing a combination whimper and tail wag that I’d never seen before. The folks around me did the human equivalent: checking out the grill from various angles and reciting a litany of off color jokes, all porcine in nature. In an atmosphere of giddy hesitancy, it seemed as if the stretch between seeing the pig and actually eating it could have gone on forever.”

“For our pig roast, digging a hole in the ground wasn’t practical, so we had a huge, industrial-strength grill, large enough to grill a Ford Explorer, if one were in the mood [...]. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what they were for until J.D. put them on, hopped over to the grill, grabbed the pig with both hands and flipped the entire thing over in one disturbingly graceful motion. This was the Greg Louganis of the pig roastin’ world. Once you have all these things in one place, the pig roasting pretty much takes care of itself — all you have to do is stand around with the other guys, drink beer, and every now and then nibble on the steaming hot chunk of flesh your Pig Roastin’ Guy offers you in advance of the formal pig devouring.”