I mentioned my best man speech in my DjangoCon post mortem post today, and I linked the words best man to a post I had made on this blog about the preparations for Hession's wedding.  I realized when I did it that it was a bit of a pump fake.  Not a full up and down traveling violation, which it would have been had I linked the words best man speech, but a pretty heavy pump fake nonetheless.

It made me think about why I haven't written that story down.  The speech story.  The Mongolia story.  The story of Gans and Bhat and the horseman and the tent.

And I'm not sure why the reluctance to write.  Maybe garden variety laziness.  Maybe a commitment to the oral tradition, a desire to keep it liquid, keep it flowing, keep it from coagulating, from stiffenning.  I'm not sure.

But, later this evening, when I checked in on Fluther, a Q&A community and a Django project founded by two of my college classmates, inspiration struck.  I was having a good time, asking more silly questions and going through the silly responses this afternoon's silly questions had collected, when, all of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, over on the right hand sidebar, I saw a question I couldn't resist.

What's the grossest thing you've ever eaten?

Mongolia, I thought.  It's time.

So I wrote.  Part of the story.  Part of the speech.

And here it is:

Our last night in Mongolia, my friend Hesh and I were staying at a Mongolian friend's family's summer homestead, and he and his parents prepared a feast. Course after course of sheep.