There’s an old mafia-coded steak house off the Las Vegas strip that everyone told me I had to try: the Golden Steer. It’s been open since 1958, and it feels as if every swanky restaurant movie scene you’ve ever watched and every dream of meat you ever dreamt and every episode of Mad Men on DVD and every Rat Pack album your folks had on vinyl got seared in a pan and finished in the oven and was served to you rare. I had to visit.

A friend of mine was doing a writing residency in Vegas; the one run by The Writer’s Block, a fantastic bookstore. I told him we were having dinner, my treat, and then going to the Meow Wolf immersive exhibit/art experience/acid trip across town. He accepted.

Steakhouses aren’t like casinos, and they don’t get a carve-out about indoor smoking. Nevertheless, this place retains the soul of a cigarette you never have to light for yourself. Walking in, we were initiated by a haze of red booths and gold walls and signed photos of Sinatra and Marilyn and I think I saw one of John Gotti. We found our table and began to drink.

The service is excellent: old-school white-shirted dark-haired men who behave as though they were born to a subclass of humanity that lives only to please. We knocked out martinis and oysters, we tore and buttered their sublime bread. When it came time, I ordered the house ribeye, rare.

My waiter crouched down to lock his gaze to mine. My eyes swam with gin.

“Look at me,” he said. “Look at me.” He pointed to his eyeballs with his fingers forked in a V. “You usually order a rare filet, right?”

And how could he have known that? Does something about me scream mignon, despite how grande I am? But when you’re known, you’re caught. So I just nodded.

“This is a center-cut thick ribeye. You won’t like it rare. It’ll be chewy and cold in the middle, and the fat cap won’t render at all. You want it medium rare, you understand?”

“I understand,” I said, hypnotized.

“You trust me?”

I did.

He stopped asking questions, even to figure out what sides we wanted. He took our menus. Does everyone without a food allergy secretly long to be dominated by their wait staff? More martinis came, unbidden, and then these gorgeous steaks. What is there to say about potatoes and creamed spinach, what point is there in rehashing the wedge salad for its crisp leaf, its eye-watering bleu? Everyone comes here for the meat.

Delectably fatty, still sizzling when it hit the table, and perfectly medium-rare as promised. It came apart like it had never been working muscle, only tissues raised for consumption, rich with heme carried from the beast’s blood into my own. I housed the whole thing as if I’d run it down in the field and killed it with my own claws. Satisfaction is too refined a word.

That is what we want from steak: the experience of successful predation without the mess of butchery. I watched deer cleaned as a child, and I learned to skin a squirrel. The version where it comes out of the kitchen crusted with pepper on a clean plate is nicer; I can assure you from experience.

My mother used to buy London Broil when we were poor and it was on sale. London Broil isn’t the name of the cut; it’s usually top round or flank steak under the label. But it’s meant to be marinated and then broiled under high heat, a prep method that’s tricky with so little fat on the typical slab. She had bad teeth and consequently so did we, so when she did it wrong the meat came out like rags we could chew on but not through. It often got cooked a second time in the crockpot, becoming post roast or shredded beef for tacos the next day.

But even when the London Broil was a bust, the part I looked forward to most was carefully tilting the cutting board into my mouth, the salty red runoff of having arduously cut the steak into strips to be served, leaving behind a rich mix of liquefied fat, water, myoglobin. Pointless to tell a child that what’s red and comes of carving flesh isn’t blood. I claimed my right to the blood and either sopped bread in it or drank it straight, thinking myself a tidy kitchen Dracula.

The taste of blood is in there somewhere, a savage pleasure even when the steak isn’t good. I’ve made haché in my own kitchen out of cheap cuts and relished the lick of the plate just as much as the good stuff. O, I am positive. The MAHA people crave this base, elemental connection with the natural world, imagining us to be carnivores who can and should live without much interfering vegetable fiber, and their influence on the culinary world worsens it at every turn. They seem to truly believe that a deregulated beef industry will still somehow be incentivized to keep their standards high and our meat safe, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. These cholesterol hounds are making it harder for the true meat lovers of the world to get ours. The guy who orders his well done with ketchup has no opinions worthy of sharing.

The night after the 2016 election, I had tickets to see Fun Home, the musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s harrowing memoir graphic novel of the same name. Aside from the searing “Ring of Keys” the song that healed a thousand latent lesbians, the play dishonors the spirit of the Stonewall-Lambda-Eisner etc honored book, but we badly needed to be entertained. Before the theater, we went to Wayfare Tavern, a top-tier San Francisco restaurant at the time, where a man walked the floor with a basket of hot popovers all through dinner service. The menu boasted a gorgeously-prepared steak tartare, served with a raw egg yolk and house-made potato chips. We reckoned we should probably eat raw eggs and raw beef while we still could. When our cocktails landed, we toasted to his eventual well-done death.

At the end of my dinner at the Golden Steer, I was too drunk to do anything but tip well and slide into a cab that would take us to Meow Wolf; a fitting follow-up experience of being topped by a steakhouse waiter. As we were about to close our taxi doors, our waiter ran out after us as if we’d forgotten something. In his hands was our boxed dessert: a classic slice of cheesecake with whipped cream and a cherry. I can’t think of a time when I needed additional calories less, but steak is a different kind of fullness from sweets.

It struck me as a form of mystical medicine. The animal has died for us, and now we must honor it by whipping art out of its milk. To refuse would have been ungrateful. The cab drove us across Sin City, light smearing in our eyes like the oily shine on a pair of olives. We ate the cheesecake with our hands and the driver (who had seen it all) offered us wet wipes upon arrival.

In the morning, Vegas offered me steak and eggs. Hungover, seeking to cure life with life, I said yes and drank the blood and yolk off the plate.

This year’s newsletter is all odes to things that I love. If you’d like a piece of fiction as dessert, I just published this one. But it’s sour.