I never would’ve believed it myself, but last weekend it finally happened.  After great reluctance and years upon years of relentless refusal, the unthinkable in this content carnivore’s existence has finally taken place.  It happened roughly seven days ago, there were credible witnesses present and everything, and though it all I even lived to tell the tale…

Last weekend I tried sushi, and I think I may have actually even liked it!

*pause for dramatic effect*

**and also to make sure that I’m still alive – you know, just in case**

The thing is, everybody’s always telling me that I should try sushi – because it’s the in thing, and I always laugh in their faces – because it’s made of raw fish, and that’s disgusting! Up until now I’ve made a considerable effort to limit myself to meats that have actually been cooked – it’s a policy that has served me quite well over the years, and that’s not to say that I haven’t tried some more adventurous morsels in my time, either.  Alligator, calamari, chocolate-covered grasshoppers … and even if the grasshoppers weren’t technically “cooked,” there’s still something a little more reassuring about dunking them in boiling chocolate than simply rolling them up in rice fresh out of the ocean and serving them up on a silver platter!

What finally convinced me to let my guard down and give raw fish a try, actually, was a combination of peer pressure and soy sauce. The peer pressure came from the direction of my sister-in-law, who ominously described sushi as “Deliciousness In Your Mouth™” and may have indicated that I needed to broaden my horizons beyond pepperoni pizza and sesame chicken, although ironically enough, the soy sauce-based persuasion actually stemmed from my affliction towards Chinese food in general and the various related sauces to which I’ve become accustomed … statistics have shown that if you slather enough marinated soy sauce on it, I’ll eat just about anything…

And so on that fateful evening barely a week ago today, a plethora of non-fried fish products were splayed out before me, bearing names like volcano roll and tempura roll and miscellaneous uncooked fish roll, not to mention a variety of special dipping sauces like the aforementioned soy sauce that was actually quite familiar, as well as a more intriguing eel sauce that, despite being surprisingly tasty, I had absolutely no desire to learn exactly which part of the eel it was actually extracted from!

I mean, have you ever seen an eel up close and in person?!  I saw one once years ago while I was scuba diving and he did NOT look like the kind of undersea creature that I’d want to gather sauce from, that’s for sure…

So anyways, one by one I nibbled my way through the school of sushi, doing my best to save questions like, “So what’s actually in this one???” until after I had successfully tried each one.  And I don’t know what happened along the way – it’s entirely possible that one of my earlier bites was into some sort of inebriation roll or something, but much to my surprise about 20 minutes later I looked up in my own bewilderment to see that I had, in fact, cleared my plate and actually eaten every single last one of them!

As you can tell, to this day I’m still just as surprised as you are, but as far as I can tell I haven’t really suffered any ­ill-effects since my slippery sushi encounter – no swimming sensations inside that would lead me to believe that somehow the meal had come back to life and was now using my stomach as sort of a makeshift fishbowl or anything.  And to top it all off, I’m even considering going back for seconds … well, not right now, but sometime again in the future, maybe I’ll be out with the wife for a swanky night on the town, and she’ll say, “Hey, you want to grab some raw fish for dinner?” and I’ll reply, “Ummm – sure … why not?”

So yeah, I think I might try sushi again … you know, just for the halibut!

Wow – maybe it did do something to me after all…