by Cormac McCarthy*

Your weber gas barbecue is a portable outdoor cooking appliance. With the weber gas barbecue you can grill and barbecue and roast and bake with results that are difficult to duplicate with indoor kitchen appliances and the foods you eat will include fish or meat or poultry like the tottering mexican gamebirds that scratch and tumble against one another on the baking piebald clay. Scrawny and sunblind they spasm like marionette grotesques borne on strings manipulated by some sclerotic hovering madman.

The closed lid and flavorizer bars produce that outdoor flavor in the food samesuch as if the flame enraged a long dormant gorgon who inched up from the bowels of his warren with simmering breath and molten eyes to belch smoke from caustic nostrils upon tilapia or center-cut ribeyes or portabello mushroom caps for the vegetarian who while not unwelcome is yet apart from the slobbering horde of pop jawed carnivores.

The weber gas barbecue is portable so you can easily change its location in your yard or on your patio or back to your yard again then to return to your patio or deck and then again to the yard. Sometimes once a year you may in a fever that passes like a hellcast mariah roll it to the front and to the driveway because of a forth of july cul de sac party awash with lukewarm lite beer and a dip of spinach and artichokes skulking in a loaf of ill gutted ryebread encircled by drowsing bluebottles. Portability also means you can take your weber gas barbecue with if you move.

LIGHTING

Summary lighting instructions are on the control panel.

DANGER Failure to open the lid while igniting the barbecue's burners or not waiting five minutes to allow the gas to clear if the barbecue does not light may result in an explosion like the innards of some miscreant troll in Gehenna gutshot by Lucifer's own blunderbuss whose daemonic entrails spew and rain a rot of broiled offal.

1) Open the lid to reveal the iron slatted maw that waits only for the punishment of flame, the benediction of meat

2) Make sure all burner control knobs are turned off to the off position. (Push the control knob down and turn clockwise with the slit eyed patience of an aged watchmaker setting the last sapphire into a timepiece commissioned by some doomed commodore bound for unseen quadrants shown on maps long forgotten in the attics of crumbling monasteries.

3) Turn the cylinder on by slowly turning the cylinder valve counterclockwise.

WARNING: Do not lean over the open barbecue. Keep your face and body at least one foot away from the matchlight hole when lighting the barbecue lest the sulfurous vapors carve down the fragile passages of your lungs to rupture the infinite twinkling gossamer chambers that host breath, hold life.

4) Push front burner control knob down and turn to start hi.

5) Push the crossover ignition button several times and so set off with each depression the corresponding click heralding against an indifferent universe that this insignificant coordinate of the cold, reverberating void will soon roil with minor conflagration.

6) Check that the burner is lit by looking through the matchlight hole on the front of the cooking box. You should see a flame, arrogant against the pitiless black, daring to cast shadows and throw shapes that look by all eyes like a host of cavorting hobgoblins celebrating the end of some bloodsoaked contest against another cohort of similar bugbears. This is the first flame and the last flame, defiant within its crucible against the envy of Hephaestus himself who yet mourns man having been granted the power to shape and destroy as would a god.

WARNING: If the burner does not light, turn the Front burner control knob to OFF and wait 5 minutes to let the gas clear before you try again or try to light with a match.

7) After the front burner is lit you can turn on the other burner or burners. Always light the front burner first. The other burner or burners ignite from the front burner, spiriting coils of blue flame along their crenellated flanks to then rear up and lick and snap and chop at the undersides of the grate above, like apocalyptic geysers yearning to free themselves from earths bedrock and realizing too late that for all their upward struggle they are of an instant extinguished and then supplanted by another tongue itself likewise doomed. An endless succession consuming itself in ceaseless blistering sentience.

*Celebrity writer impersonated.

About the Author

Many people think priapism is funny. It's not. I'll admit, it's exciting at first. I mean, it's kind of a preferred state of affairs. But you realize that there can indeed be too much of a good thing. After awhile, it becomes painful - physically and psychologically. Getting dressed is a challenge. Zippers become positively medieval. And forget urinals altogether. Still, I always have a place to hang my hat.

That comes in handy (oh, double e