"I’m the nice lady who wrote 'Eat, Pray, Love,' and I’m out in the park with fentanyl and morphine and sleeping pills trying to craft a murder."

From "Elizabeth Gilbert Gets Dark/A new memoir finds the self-help icon locked in a destructive romantic relationship with her best friend, who relapsed while fighting terminal cancer" (NYT)(free access link).

That's a free access link, in case you were an "Eat, Pray, Love" fan and had an impression of Elizabeth Gilbert as a nice lady and need to see if it's crushed. Me, I never picked up that book, was never vulnerable to the possibility that the author was a "nice lady" and wouldn't have cared. I just assumed she was a lady who was into herself for reasons that had nothing to do with me. Is praying something to be wedged in between gorging and fucking? I don't know, but I didn't need to know. I have no Elizabeth Gilbert-related illusions to be dispelled and I'm not temptable into the question whether she's got a dark side. I'm just going to guess that the "murder" she was "crafting" was assisting in the suicide of a cancer patient.

"Join us for the Sunday meat raffle."

The Baldwin Street Grille, photographed yesterday. I've never gone in the place, but according to one reviewer at Yelp:

I've driven past this place so many times, disappointed I just now figured out what I was missing. The meat raffle was incredibly entertaining with solid choices. Really wish we could've stayed till the end but it was a little long....

What's a "meat raffle"?!



Actually, Wikipedia has an article on the subject:

A meat raffle is a tradition of raffling off meat, often in pubs and bars, common in Britain, Australia, in the USA, and in Western Canada....

And here's a 2006 NYT article, "The Meat Raffle" by Elizabeth Gilbert (the author of "Eat, Pray, Love"):

My cousins and aunts... drank me under the table.... And so I wasn't at all certain I was hearing things correctly when a man in a plaid flannel shirt approached us and asked, "Would you ladies care to participate in my meat raffle?"

The ladies reached for their purses again -- not for guns, as I would have imagined, given the man's question -- but for wallets. They were each peeling one cool dollar bill off their private stashes as I stammered: "Wait! His what? His what raffle?"

Eat Pray Love... pick 2.

"I am separating from the man whom many of you know as 'Felipe' — the man whom I fell in love with at the end of the EAT PRAY LOVE journey," says Elizabeth Gilbert.

Oh, I'm sure the new story is good for another memoir. There'll probably be new love in it too. If you fell for the first one, I'm sure you'll fall for the next one. Your love affair with bullshit memoirs will go on.