A certain peddler of faux-Italian meal pies from my area of the globe, a merchant whose name rhymes with ‘Vittle Cheivers’, has a commercial in which the final frame asks us, the viewer, to imagine ourselves about to be devoured by a ravenous family of four.
    Forgive the quality of the picture, it was taken by my cell phone directly off the cathode ray tube that occupies the viewing shrine in my home.
    Pictures like this have a universal quality in that an observer is forced to regress to the point of birth and think back on what innocence they have lost in the intervening years.
    This nuclear family, salivating at the prospect of consuming our be-pepperonied and cheese-riddled bodies, is as close to an analogue of your hospital delivery staff as any you’ll encounter in Western culture. Only, in a delivery room you would be looking out from the womb towards a panoply of nurses and obstetric doctors instead of gazing helplessly from a cardboard box next to a landfill-bound jalapeno pepper. …either way there would likely be much drooling and licking of chops from the principals involved in the endeavor.

    So it is that on this, my 36th birthday, I find myself pulling this picture from my collection and, with a single tear running down my scrubby cheeks, I slowly caress my lcd panel. How I long for those simpler days when the youngest child would seek to pick my mushrooms off while his sister burns her chin on my scalding hot mozzarella. I get this way every June 7th.

    Happy birthday to SafeTinspector (that’s me). buon appetito!