lurking and sausages
I am a lurker on the internet. I don’t really engage but I look, and I lurk. Maybe it is creepy. Fine, I am the creep.
I go through stages of becoming obsessed with particular forums or people online. The use of the word obsession is not helping the creep-case but I am using it less in a serious capacity and more in the way we now talk about trauma (sick burn, internet take that). It is not serious so shut up about it.
This is the first in a series of posts detailing a current or past obsession (or passion if you are to be kind).
The obsession mostly started with a man on YouTube who had a handful of followers. I came across his page one day whilst mindlessly scrolling and got hooked, inexplicably. He posted every day, updating his progress of his meals and weight loss journey whilst only consuming meat. He was doing this carnivore diet for a year. A full ass year. He would cycle through months of only eating particular types of meat for every meal. I really cannot stress enough that this man was only eating meat. My favourite month was the one where he only consumed sausage links and ground meat. Mostly because of the way he would document his meals, he never showed himself eating, only footage of the plate. Those shots were so up close and beautifully distasteful, I could feel the sinews on my tongue. For every meal shown he would describe what he had eaten, he would say something like ‘first meal was 2 links of hot sausage, the second meal of the day was 3 links of hot sausage and then the last meal was one pound of ground turkey mince that I didn’t finish’. There was just something about the way he talked of those damn sausage links that I could not get enough of. I don’t eat meat, and his videos didn’t make me want to eat meat but good lord I wanted to know how many of those links he had had, and I wanted to see them lying there on his plate all linked up in their cosy little skin jackets.
I looked for his videos every day. Every day.
He also weighed himself every day and updated his followers with the weigh in at the start of every video with a clear declaration of the weight loss or weight gain and where this was in conjunction with last week’s weigh ins. To be honest, I wasn’t as invested in the weight loss or weight gain or body transformation as he explained, either way I figured good for him, I hope you get everything you have ever wanted but can we please get to the breakdown of your meals? I am only in it for the sausage links. And boy oh boy was I spoiled in November. November was such a good month for me and those sausage links. There was so much sausage. Every single video I was panicked that surely, he must be done with sausages now. I would pull the video up knowing that my banquet is probably over, and we will be back to looking at other slabs of meat or munched up flesh but no, no no no, he knew how to treat me, oh babies I dined OUT in November 2024. I was lavished with links upon links upon links. So many extreme close-up shots of those bulbous foreskinned pig shafts. Sometimes they would be chicken, but my favourite were the hot ones. The little red tinge gave them this dangerous seductive quality and you just knew they were the stars of this plate, I mean they were the only thing on his plate, but if there was anything else those hot sausage links would be Marisa-Tomei-in-My-Cousin-Vinny-ing all over their asses.
As a treat to myself, to prove that there was divinity reigning through the YouTube algorithm and to confirm my suspicions that me and those sausage links were intrinsically, fatefully destined to meet in this glorious place of meaningless doom scrolling, to prove that we were above it all; I would not search his page out. I would scroll and wait for one of his videos to find me, and then when his face blared across my screen, I would get this euphoria that could only be bested by discovering today was a sausage day again. I didn’t know this man’s name. I still don’t. He doesn’t know I exist and yet I know he does and there were weeks where I knew what this man was carrying about in his belly every single day (sometimes 7 sausage links at a time, what full belly). And then one day he just stopped posting. He had chronicled a near-year of eating and then he disappeared. It has been months now since he last posted. His page is still up, but no new videos. I occasionally check just in case he provides an update. He didn’t finish the year and that is concerning. I formed this strange parasocial relationship with this man and I genuinely just hope that he is okay. I thought about finding some way of messaging him to check he is alive and well, because he really was eating a lot of meat. But that would be very strange. So instead, I am writing this.
To the man on the internet who brought me so much joy during a very difficult period in my life, thank you, I hope you are thriving, we will always have the sausage links xoxo
