Saturday was the one down day I have over this two-week stretch, and I spent it in a great American way: I went to the Minnesota State Fair. And when you go to the Minnesota State Fair, you get food on a stick.

There are your obvious Stick Food Choices: Corn dogs and your basic grilled chicken and beef. Then there are your less obvious choices.

Like: Bacon on a stick. “Sure, it’s bad for you, but it tastes good,” says the sign on the stand. You look at people cooking fat slabs of bacon and then dunking the finished product into something (turns out it’s thin maple syrup), and you think to yourself: “Hmmmmmm.”

And then you think a little more. And then you think a little more, even though you’ve already eaten far too much pork in your life and it’s starting to really show on your waistline and you already had a Pronto Pup and you definitely think there’s a beer in your future and you’ve never actually eaten bacon and chased it with beer, not even in college.

And then you figure, what the hey, you only go around once in this crazy world, and you fork over the three bucks for bacon on a stick. And it turns out that it tastes a lot like ribs with a maple glaze, which makes sense because bacon comes from the piece of pig right below the ribs (the belly).

So: I give you Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Bacon-On-a-Stick Eater (that’s the bacon on the left):

For more on the State Fair, check out Marco’s adventure, which includes Hotdish on a Stick. He doesn’t appear to know what hotdish is, though. I don’t think he appreciates the peril at which this puts him while he visits Minnesota.