Anyone who knows me is aware I’m a man of many passions. I am renowned for my collection of antique Icelandic kabuki masks. I enjoy freezing the blood of my enemies and carving their likeness in ice sculpture form. Which I then melt. By pissing on it. I vigorously perpetrated the first incident of meerkat luge and have facilitated its rise to becoming the national sport of Uzbekistan. Much like chicks and guns and fire trucks, these are all the things that make life worth living.

Add to the top of that list: cooking.

It’s true. And it surprises some. Yet cooking is the ultimate manly skill, key to self-sufficiency and survivalist tenet. And fine dining is the ultimate expression of the ultimate manly skill. Because any asshole with a Bowie knife and either balls of steel or brains of shit can gut a bear and eat it. But it takes the ultimate alpha male to turn that bear into a petite citrus-ginger carpaccio.

So it was no surprise that for my twenty-seventh birthday last weekend my mother treated me to the annual Taste of Rutherford. Over twenty of the county’s finest vendors, most of them out of Murfreesboro, from high-end restaurants to caterers to those who desperately want to be counted among high-end restaurants and caterers (IN HELL, Publix) set up shop under a massive tent and gave away free eats.

The entire shindig went down at the estate of Ronnie Barrett, founder and CEO of Barrett Firearms. I didn’t realize this until we got there, and it presented a brief ethical dilemma for me. I’m not a gun guy. I know how to shoot (I’ve been to gun ranges in Texas, for fuck sake. That’s practically the Muslin pilgrimage to Mecca of firearms), but I’ve always preferred to know how to take a pistol away from someone else rather than be the one brandishing. My thinking is if statistically most people are killed with their own handguns, then the same must be true for criminals.

Probability can’t stop a bullet, but it can confuse it.

Anyway. Then I remembered something. I’m not Jesus. I’m a starving freelance writer with two major fetishes: 1) Lady’s beach volleyball. 2) Free food.

Like I said, it was a brief ethical dilemma.

My mother even scored list status at the patron’s party before the tasting officially kicked off. And so, in the Barrett mansion, among a mounted fifty-caliber machine gun and digital pix of Barrett chilling with Lou Ferrigno (seriously, man, it was like a right wing surrealist painting), I absorbed opulence and appetizers provided by Maple Street Grill so fucking good they could’ve been the whole show by themselves. Popcorn chicken with a wicked wing sauce, beef medallions in gravy, mashed potato cakes. They even rocked a full chocolate fondue bar with everything there for the dipping but a whole live midget.

Oh, and two magical, mystical, orgasmic words: Open bar.

Pretty soon the slop was on in the main tent for the rest of the attendees not as exclusive as I. They had a live lounge band (the front man of whom sounded like Nat King Cole, which means he did not sound like Otis Redding when they cued up “Dock of the Bay” later on), they had another open bar staffed by lip-ringed pixies, and the doors to the garage containing Barrett’s classic car collection were flung open. Because WE WEREN’T FULLY GETTING JUST HOW GODDAMN RICH THIS MAN IS (no, seriously, they were incredibly gracious hosts).

Kids, when I die this is what I envision Heaven’s snack bar approximating. There was Cajun crab dip so good I wanted to stick my dick in it. There were chicken wings slow-smoked for twelve hours so good I wanted them to stick their dick in me. But the high-end trophy for the night had to go to Chef Palace by Julio for their elegant cups of shrimp ceviche (for the uninitiated, ceviche is generally a seafood salad in which the seafood marinates in citrus, and since it is technically cooking without fire I think that makes it from the Devil), and their miniature caviar ice cream cones. That’s right. Tiny little cones filled with “ice cream” that was mostly Asiago and topped with caviar sprinkles. It was clever. It also tasted like a mouthful of cheese.

Aesthetically it made me feel like I was back in NYC. Until I realized they hadn’t cleaned the shrimp. They can call it a “vein” all they want. It’s crap. It’s shit. It is shrimp poopie. You are eating feces. You are eating several black threads of living waste. I should not have to bypass the shrimp’s exoskeletal crap armor in order to enjoy it. Although I can sense the presence of ninjas (that’s right, motherfuckers, I have ninja-dar), I am not a shadow warrior in matters of crustacean boom-boom defense.

In a way that was a metaphor for the evening (I have to finish on a poignant and philosophical note or this becomes just another blog, understand). It was quite literally a taste of the mythic “good life.” Beautiful grounds, beautiful food, beautiful people (mostly). And hey, I am and always have been *all* about living beyond and above one’s means. But instead of tapping on the glass it was a lot like licking it. And yes, the snozberries tasted like snozberries. But you don’t get keys at the end of the day. I think you can take experiences like that and enjoy them for what they are, resent them for what they’re not, or use them as fuel or something to aspire toward.

Personally, I make it my goal to convert all useable matter into energy.

Still and all, it was a fantastic birthday present, rivaling even the autographed Manami Toyota t-shirt Christa Faust sent me.

Maybe next year I’ll host one in my own fucking mansion.