I have souvenir anxiety. Like 3CUPS, France is closed on Sunday (they're totally copying us) and my week gets all businessy tomorrow morning at 10am. The greatest souvenir of all, cheese, is for no good reason forbidden from making the return voyage to the Old North State with me. What will become of my poor calcium- and mold-deprived friends and family?

Don't talk back to me: for one thing, I'm not there, I'm in France (out in the "real world") and you're stuck at work. And while nominally a pacifist, I will resort to fisticuffs when my fundamental rights as an American are curtailed. I'll put the fist back in pacifist. I mean, really, what Liberty is this? We can own an arsenal of AK-47s and buy battered and fried butter, cooked by a carnie in a trailer that stands in mud just a few hundred feet from North America's largest hormone-addled pig, but our borders must be defended from small-scale Reblochon smuggling? Mc Donalds legally can sell a Big Mac inside of a tortilla, but I cannot place a chunk of Tomme de Savoie in my carry-on en route to JFK. Rule of law and rule of sanity need to be at least tenuously tethered to each other.

It may not be in the Bill of Rights, but isn't that just because Thomas Jefferson and other founding-father Francophiles could not imagine a world so Orwellian that it would at once contain the technology to transport France's greatest (non-sparkling) contribution to global food culture, and simultaneously restrict that product's movement by individual consumers. I'm 99% sure the 2nd amendment would have been the Right to Bear as Many Tasty French Foods as are Physically Bearable, if this threat had been perceiveable in the 18th century. Sometimes the greatest dangers remain hidden from view. I'd posit a nation adequately nourished on Valencay, Saucissons, and Champagne would lose interest in modern weaponry fairly quickly. They may become more interested in long meals together, though. An epidemic of picnics might spread across the landscape, or extended bouts of loitering, talking, and people-watching in open communal spaces. Food forms community and society, good or bad.

I'll ask you to forgive any funny formatting on this post. 3CUPS's least tech-savvy resident is on the road, with a laptop and wireless, and little access to the people who make it look like we know what we are doing. And my excuse for the funny thoughts? Well, sleep is good, and it and I have been strangers thus far on my travels.

Fair warning: there may be more on the wines I drink soon.