Still pretending I'm going to write a book: Chapter 3

I worry that I might be losing my "asshole" sense of humor and turning into a legitimately good person. The blame for this falls entirely on veganism. (What a cunt!) 

To get to the beginning of this story, we've gotta back up a year or so ago when I decided to stop eating animal products. I'd read in The Kind Diet and Skinny Bitch and countless issues of Veg News that when a person stops consuming the meat from fear-drenched slaughtered animals, a lightening occurs in his or her body, and the negative adrenaline and chemical dread are replaced with the ability to love and appreciate life. Essentially, compassion is born. As fast as you can Google-search "compassionate vegans" you'll be linked to story after story of how the vegan lifestyle lends itself to generosity, goodwill, peace on Earth and all that good stuff. For me... personally... well, I get it. I've had moments of pure joy and clarity where I've actually wished I could live a thousand lives just to be able to spread the gift of veganism all across the land (ewwwww I sound like a Jesus-enforcer **blech**). I've come to appreciate my family, my friends, and mySELF more than I ever have before, and to genuinely feel capable of more love than at any other time in my life-- even more than when I was pledging my soul to some boyfriend who would rather be playing videogames than pretending to want to watch Goldie Hawn in Housesitter with me for the thirtieth time. So I think they're right, really, when they say that veganism turns you into a sappy lover of all things under the sun. And I think I'd totally be on that train to sainthood with them except for... 

well... 

booze and cigarettes. 

They are the last two things denying me my hippie sunshine bliss... and the last two things connecting me to my former self-indulgent lifestyle. I know what you're thinking. "VEGANS CAN'T SMOKE CIGARETTES!!" Right? Right? Well guess what? Actually I can do whatever the hell I want to do, bitch, it's not like a fucking cult. **sigh** That was rude. I apologize. It's just that... well, you're right. It makes no sense for me to be a big supporter of saving the world when I'm the dumb drunk breezy throwing her used cigarette butt into the bushes outside the local dive bar. NO sense. AT all. It's just that-- I don't know if you knew this but-- cigarettes? Yeah. They're HIGHLY addictive. And as addicted as we are to dairy and meat products, their hold has NOTHING on nicotine, man. I gave up gruyere in a heartbeat. I stopped smoking for a month, and then all of a sudden there I was with a stinky white cancer stick in my mouth again one day in Encinitas. It's definitely a problem. And it doesn't even FEEL good to inhale a lung-ful of carbon monoxide anymore-- when all you eat is quinoa and kale, your body becomes this hypersensitive sponge of sorts, and anything you put in it is so easily absorbed that its effects electrify you like holy water on a witch. So I spend all day pampering my body with orange juice and avocados only to fill it with toxins the second I give in to my fierce nicotine cravings. And because the chemicals have no rotten flesh or curdling lard to cling to in my stomach, they settle straight into MY flesh and lard, and twenty seconds after smoking I feel like I've done five lines of cocaine (I'm pretending to know what that feels like so I sound cool) and taken a baseball bat to the head. "Why?" you wonder. Why do I still poison myself with cancerous chemicals when I appear to get no satisfaction out of it and when it is so incongruous with the rest of my chosen lifestyle? That, my friends, is a very good question. And to be honest, I have no answer, other than "old habits die hard" or some stupid shit like that. So, for now, let's just move on to my other hallelujah-blocking vice: BOOZE!! 

Ohhhhhhh booze. I'll save the five hundred thousand pages necessary to cover this topic for a later date, and I'll just touch the tip of the iceberg for now. Basically, I've been a pretty big drinker since I started tending bar in Isla Vista at age twenty-one. I went forty days last summer sans the poison, and I truly felt the full benefits of a vegan diet for the first time: I was constantly overcome by bouts of delirium at how wonderful and full of possibility I felt. (The best "high" I've ever encountered in my life was being completely sober on a plant-based diet and dancing in a bar of drunkards to Florence and the Machine's "Dog Days Are Over." Other-worldly.) Then, one day, I was at Whole Foods and saw the specific bottle of sulfite-free vegan red wine I'd enjoyed at a restaurant months before, and it all went downhill from there. I spent the evening in my writer friend's basement downing mugs of the wine and incidentally sampling a non-vegan pot brownie which resulted in my waking up in the driveway. After that, I kinda slipped back into my habit of drinking nineteen hundred after-work cocktails and such, and that feeling of absolute euphoria hid itself somewhere in my body amongst the empty calories. 

I believe that if I ditched my vices, I would slowly become more and more like the Jesus-ly vegans I read about who say "That big hat is silly!" in voices reeking of innocence and who donate the majority of their time, money, and energy (which is a LOT when you're running on clean plant fuel and unencumbered by hangovers) to making the world a better place. My liver and my lungs are just BEGGING me to do so. However, I'm finding that even as I feel less and less comforted by ridiculously strong Ketel-and-sodas-with-lots-of-lemon and more and more grossed out by the stink of chemical smoke on my hands after a cigarette break, I cling a little to these dirty habits because they connect me to my former "shitty" self. If I let go of them now, there's no TELLING where my free-falling exuberance and desire to do "good" will take me. I'm not ready for that kind of life-altering change!! Right?! I mean, I'm still the person who says the "F" word every thirty seconds, is scared of babies, and whose favorite pastime is shit-talking about strangers. If you take these traits away from me, I'll just be... WHAT? Inherently good?! 

That concept is... terrifying. Is it just another part of Growing Up that (singlewhitefemale)'s try to put off as long as possible and pretend doesn't exist, like Driving or Marriage? (Although really, I'm still not sure that those are necessary either.) I just hope that someone will be gracious enough to slap me in the mouth the INSTANT I start laughing at Good Ol' Boy humor. You know what I mean. The guys who swoop their hair into optimistic gelled shapes and then say, "Boy you sure did kick that ball real high!" and laugh like they've just completed a sketch on Comedy Central? Yeah. The second I start doing that I might need an intervention in the form of three Camel Crushes and five hundred shots of Jameson with Sprite backs. Just be ready, guys. If I'm gonna do this good-person thing, shit might get real. 

I think I have decided...

to attempt... to possibly try... to write a book. I heard my mouth say today that I should write a book... and then I realized that HEY I have nothing better to do with this time in my life, so I might as well try to do something both time-consuming and ridiculous. Essentially I'll just write stupid shit like I do for my blog... but maybe I'll end up with a copy on paper when I'm done. No big deal, guys. Anyway, here's the first random blurb I scribbled out to get the creative process flowing....


I never thought that at age twenty-five I would be living with my mother in the county I grew up in, working part-time as a daytime bartender. Oh... my... GOD. As I wrote that sentence my eyes started filling up with tears. (Note to self: no deep reflective moments while PMSing.) I mean, what the fuck HAPPENED to me??? The other day a girl from my high school class came in to my bar. During lunch, there are never any customers. I stand there cutting limes and reluctantly making painful conversation with the one-maybe-two homeless guys who have scrounged up enough change to sit on a ragged bar stool all day and make my life miserable. Sometimes standing behind that counter and having to be nice to these people makes me think I know something about how prostitutes feel. Except that they make a shit-ton of money, and all I get is the fifty-cent piece from 1952 that the guy rolled across the counter to me as a tip. Oh, and I got spit on by that one ninety-year-old dude who refused to pay for his beer and then tried to kickbox me across the bar. I'm so used to it at this point that I think I was yawning, unfortunately, when the spitting happened, and a drop of decrepit saliva landed on my unimpressed tongue. 

Anyway, so this girl came in whom I recognized from high school. She looked exactly the same. I however, have gained at least forty pounds in the last seven years, have changed my hair color a hundred times and chopped it off, and was standing in a dive bar in the middle of the day arguing with a drunken pirate when she walked in. I could not have been more different from the last time she'd seen me. I watched her and her most-likely boyfriend take a seat at the bar. She smiled at me and ordered a drink. I tried to smile, forcing one side of my mouth to spasm upwards at least for a second. "Marge?? Wow. It's me, (singlewhitefemale)." She stared at me with an expression as blank as a cow passing gas. "(singlewhitefemale... female)." Her ears perked up at my last name. 

"No way. (singlewhitefemale)??!!! You are the LAST person I would EVER have expected to see here." She didn't say it with malice. She said it like an innocent baby would say it: very matter-of-factly, with no filter or concern for my interpretation. My mind started spiraling out of control with possible meanings, foaming at the mouth with insecurity. Clearly she meant that she never thought I would fail so utterly that I would stoop to return to the cow town that I came from once I'd left it years ago... when I was "going places." I remembered Marge in high school. She was the one who started dating at a really young age. I used to tutor her in Spanish during study hall. I helped her conjugate verbs to the imperfect tense while she told me how perfect her boyfriend was. We were sixteen. At that age, I was basically a saint. I'd never smoked, never had a sip of alcohol, and the only time I'd ever been kissed by a boy I had held my tongue away from him in my mouth so that he was essentially licking my stale lunch air until he gave up and decided never to try it again. I was such a goody-two-shoes that Marge's stories about partying and handjobs made me blush and giggle at all the wrong moments because I didn't actually understand anything that she was talking about. One day she informed me that the name "Kevin" was tattooed in Sharpie across her left ass cheek because she'd fallen asleep with him after he made her "so tired," and he'd graffiti'd her. I didn't say anything, but she could see her comment had had the desired effect. I was blushing and erasing pencil marks off my desk with my head down as I put together the puzzle pieces illuminating the situation that hey, they must've had sex and that's why she was a.) TIRED and b.) NAKED. I really hated it. I couldn't beLIEVE people MY age were trying to deal already with GROWN-UP things!! The nerve. 

Because I wasn't busy dealing with penises and beer, I was a very focused student in high school. I graduated with a 4.02 GPA and left immediately in the fall for college life at UCSB. I was bright, optimistic, creative, and relatively thin when I left our high school campus for the last time. Now, staring at Marge and her boyfriend (who I finally recognized as a guy two grades older than us and the ONLY person my brother has EVER gotten into a fight with) I felt a surge of all the teenage insecurities well up within me. Well, shit. Did I really have to be THIS overweight right now?? And did I have to wear my shapeless lesbian flannel shirt and forget to even LOOK at my hair before I left the house???  But then... amazingly... as we attempted to chat about lost time and the few things we could think of to say to each other... I realized that ultimately... it didn't matter. Since there were no other customers, I was forced to stand in their vicinity and make small-talk to the best of my socially awkward abilities... but I knew that neither one of us really cared what the other was saying. I knew that I was thinking, "Wow, I don't care about you. At all." and I bet she was thinking, "Wow, you weigh like a million pounds." But other than that... so what? I no longer feared her sexual prowess, and I couldn't care less if she still didn't know how to count to diez. Yes... seeing ANYONE from high school in this town is definitely my biggest nightmare.... But I felt oddly relieved to realize that even if I am in the middle of a quarter-life crisis and have relatively little to show for the last seven years of my life... well... I think deep-down I am still proud of myself for the things I have learned and experienced and who I have become. I know it is so close-minded and straight-up BITCHY of me to think that somehow I'm better than the people who never left here, the people who stayed and married each other and had babies before we could even legally purchase alcohol. It's awful. But hey, it's not like I came from a fairy-tale family with parents who taught us how to have successful lives or anything. I think the fact that I feel full-on SHAME at being back here, empty-handed, is a GOOD sign, because it's probably the only thing keeping me at least remotely interested in still figuring out a way to do well for myself in this life. So, sorry Marge if I looked down on you in high school and if I looked down on you at my bar because actually I remember now that your new boyfriend was the biggest wuss in the whole world and I wanted to KILL him when he tried to fight my brother. Sorry if I still feel like we are worlds apart and that I hope my future is splitting away from yours in drastic perpendiculars. I have no right to feel superior. But I'll be damned if I'll be serving your beers seven years from now. 

Meat is Dead

Oh... hey... sorry.... I guess I kind of forgot that I like blogging and that it only works if you actually write stuff in your blog. I remember now!

So it's... November now.... That means that my vegan journey officially began over a year ago. Soooooo much has changed in my thinking in that amount of time. Let's go on a little journey through memory lane, shall we?

So last October my sister called me to tell me about the episode of Oprah she'd seen illuminating the problems with the meat industry and advertising the growing vegan movement. A lightning bolt struck my core of beliefs and I decided before she'd finished her sentence that I was going to join the movement and give up my baked brie cheese fetish once and for all. I started ferociously baking 20-lb cheese-less veggie pizzas daily. (I think I just answered my ever-lingering question of why I gained weight the second I became vegan....) I did this for about a month, bolstering my fierce devotion to the Veg Cause by lapping up the segments of animal cruelty in Alicia Silverstone's book The Kind Diet. At the Italian restaurant I managed in Santa Barbara, I traded in my nightly employee meal of three-cheese-and-jalapeno fusilli for a simple marinara and veggie capellini. I patted myself on the back, feeling the wings of my self-righteousness lift my compassionate feet straight up from the floor and into the wanna-be-Sistine-Chapel-replica that adorned the ceiling of our eatery.

But then... something... happened.

I guess.

I mean, it MUST have.

Because last Thanksgiving, my younger sister and I had one of our "Traditional Sister Thanksgivings" where we only have one day off of work so we stay in Santa Barbara together and get drunk and see a movie. And last year we went to the Holdrens Steakhouse in Goleta. And I got three dirty Ketel martinis with bleu-cheese-stuffed olives. And an appetizer of...

steak.




Okay? I said it, okay?!! Steak. STEAK! STEAK STEAK STEAK STEAK STEAK STEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Huh. Now that doesn't look like a real word. That IS how you spell that, right? Hm.

Anyway, what's weird is I don't remember having any dramatic vegan downfall or anything. All I know is that in October I was eating homemade paprika hummus, on Thanksgiving I was eating stinky cheese and steak, and on Christmas I was the one trying to make chopped salad and roasted vegetables the new holiday meal. I guess I just had a bumpy start, and then in December-ish I started my serious, no-nonsense commitment.

Ish.

For the nine months I lived in Encinitas, I was puuuuuuuumped on veganism. It was so easy! I was managing a veg-friendly cafe with such magic vegan ingredients as Daiya mozzarella cheese, tempeh strips, and Gardein "mock" chicken. While I mostly shoveled down big romaine lettuce salads with rice and veggies and tofu dill dressing, I never had a lack of variety of interesting and comforting foods (*cough*cough* vegan chocolate cupcakes with Tofutti soy cream cheese frosting *cough*cough).

When I decided to come up here to SLO, my same wise sister who inspired me to go veg in the first place said to me, "Be careful, that's like the BBQ capital of California up there."

I laughed. What, am I gonna be walking around downtown and trip and fall open-mouthed onto a rib?? HA. Nonsense.

And really, that's NOT what happened. No.... What happened was that about a month ago I started having gnarly red-meat cravings. And I mean GNARLY. I work at a place that serves hamburgers, tri-tip sandwich rolls, and pastrami sandwiches. Normally these things gross me out. But for about three weeks, they made my stomach grumble with desire. There was an off-putting disjointedness occurring between my watering mouth and the knowledge that the enticing aroma belonged to a dead animal's cooked carcass. Nothing about the REALITY of meat was appetizing to me anymore... but it took all my willpower not to scramble over the bar counter and rip that half-eaten, ketchup-y hamburger from the lunching accountant and smear my quivering lips all over it.

I couldn't contain my sinful thoughts anymore. I exploded one morning in a fit of fiery confession at my poor innocent mother. I told her that I was a siiiiiiiiick fuuuuuuuck and that I'd been thinking about meat every. single. day. and that I didn't know WHAT to DO about it. She recommended that I go online and look up other vegetarian's struggles with meat cravings. I did just that. And all I really learned is that for SOME reason, whenever people in online groups write comments, they try emBARrassingly hard to use big words and look like fucking geniuses. I sorted through all the henceforths, the inasmuches, and the neverthelesses before realizing that these people had nothing to do with me. And also that I hated them.

I called my wise sister and asked her advice. She recommended that I eat a big meaty veggie burger with all the fixin's. I smiled weakly. I was too far gone in my desires to be appeased by a measly Gardenburger. I was seeing red. That Thursday I went to the local farmers' market with my friend Stephen. We moseyed around the crowded street looking for a portable meal. I mumbled something in an off-handed manner about wanting something with steak and then chuckled nervously. Unaware of the internal battles over the matter twisting their way through my guts and my consciousness, he murmured politely in agreement and then bumped into me when I halted suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk, panting feverishly and pointing at a food stand with my tongue hanging crookedly out of the side of my mouth. He took a second to shudder at my demonic expression, then joined me in line for the fattening steak-and-cheese baked pastry pies I'd zoned in on. I struggled to order one as my teeth chattered in guilty anticipation and sheer manic expectation.

We sat on the curb and ate our steak pies. Stephen chatted about school and I heard my mouth say "Uh huh. Yeah. School. Got it." as my hands tried to push away my thick ethics surrounding them and getting in the way of me and my meeeeeat.

One bite. Hm.


Two bites. It tastes... good??


Three bites. But it kind of also tastes like... poop?? I mean actual... poop?


I finished the small-yet-rich dish. I blinked. I looked at my hands. I remembered Stephen. I looked at him. "Ready to go to the movie?" he asked. I nodded. I felt sad.

I sat through the movie 50/50, which was so good I forgot to think about the fact that I had part of a cow in my tummy. Well, I TRIED to forget. Every fifteen minutes, the cow took its angry hoof and jutted me right in the lower intestine. I spent the second half of the film breathing like a breeding woman (deeply in through my nose and out my mouth), willing myself not to insult the cow's memory by upchucking its remains onto the theater floor. I repented.

That was a couple of weeks ago. Since then, I have reverted to my former opinion of meat as food: not for me. I ate a bunch of sauteed mushrooms and roasted kale, and the cravings went away entirely. Just needed some iron, I guess. I really need to pay more attention to meal-planning so that I can get all of my nutrients and not walk around in an anemic haze thinking that I need to go grabbing up innocent animals and putting them in my mouth. **shudder**

It's not that San Luis doesn't offer a vegan-friendly environment. It actually is REALLY veg-friendly. More often than not, restaurants will actually say on their menus to ask servers about "vegan options." The actual word "vegan" is on there, guys! That's huge!!!! I think that what IS different for me is that in Encinitas I was surrounded by fellow vegans, and it was something that I was actively participating in every day of my life. Since I moved here... it's been such a private journey. I quietly eat my char-broiled artichoke at work and order my almond-milk lattes at Linnaea's Cafe. I politely answer coworkers' questions about why I don't eat meat and I not-so-politely roll my eyes when they try to catch me on a million ways I'm "cheating" on veganism. Yes, I'm wearing my mom's leather cowgirl boots. I don't feel bad about it, either. No, I didn't know that beer contains fish brains. I'm still going to finish my pint, thank you. And so on and so forth. I guess it's made me realize that even though veganism IS exciting and IS trendy and super rad and brilliant and all those other amazing things... it's also just a non-glamorous lifestyle that you agree to each and every day, whether there's someone to high-five you about it or not. And you know what? There's something beautiful about that. If veganism is perfection, then I am far from it. But it's nice to at least strive for something, and to so firmly believe in something that could potentially save the world. Also... I really just kinda like the almond-milk lattes at Linnaea's....