Vegging Out

It all started a couple of months ago when this guy I knew gave me some green tea . I stopped drinking as much coffee (a feat accomplished only once before after reading a Hubert Selby Jr. novel) and it created an avalanche of clearing out all chemicals.

That made it easier to stop eating meat. I was a vegetarian for about three years back in the day. But for some reason (I still can't remember why but it must have had something to do with living in Texas), I got back on the meat train. I'm not one of your militant meat-is-murder type gals. In fact, if chalk outlines of chickens was all I had to worry about when I feasted on the flesh of non-sapiens, I'd be skipping down gravy lane. But sadly, it's much worse than simple animal carnage these days. It's even worse than Upton Sinclair's horribly, terribly depressing "The Jungle". The exploitation of Polish immigrants is the least of our worries in the ever increasing, animal-shit entropy producing U. S. of hyper industrialized A. My darling girlfriend Terry interviewed Michael Pollan and it wasn't very appetizing. I was rather shocked by what I heard.

I knew that the meat industry was responsible for a fair amount of pollution. I didn't know that the reason for much of the methane gas that cows produce is because cows have a highly specialized (and very interesting from an evolutionary perspective)digestive system that requires them to eat grass only. When they're fed corn (among other things), they bloat, creating infection (hence so many antibiotics in meat), among other, even more yummy side effects. They must often be purged, spewing caustic cow squeezins that then lay in shimmering pools of chemical, nitrogen laden doom around the farm lands, seeping into ground water supplies. Suddenly, tragically, my five minutes of happily devouring another creature doesn't seem to be worth the weeks of torment that a cow has to endure or even the moment of pain that a sweet, tiny, fluffy baby chicken must suffer (I didn't know that they burned the tips of chick's beaks off, which is fucking horrifying), thank you Baraka for that nightmarish, from the bowels of hell image.

So, while I can't logically say that meat is murder, it does carry a higher moral price tag than a trip to Wal-Mart for me and you would sooner catch Pat Robertson nailing Ozzy Osbourne in three different orifices than catch me in Wal-Mart. And now, of course, eating a piece of ex-bloated cow meat.

FeS2

When I asked one of my friends why cats must always plop down on even the tiniest piece of paper instead of sitting on the bare floor, he glanced over at my overfed and deplorably spoiled feline companion and said, “Because they don’t have pants.”

This, in the weirdest way, sums up the week I’ve had.

Going to Hell Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

A few years ago, one of my dear friends committed suicide. She had hooked up with a mean mistreater and he’d pretty much fucked her in the ass and left her bleeding. For her, the solution was to down a bottle of pills and wait to die. The next morning, people came to check on her when she was late for an appointment. They found her nigh lifeless body (which has somehow managed to keep plugging away) and rushed her to the hospital. After some doctor magic, they thought she had a shot. Alas, no. She had destroyed her kidneys. She was awake when they told her she was going to die. So she asked a priest if she was going to go to hell since she’d been the cause of her own demise.

My first thought (after the initial shock, this gal was an amazing woman and I couldn’t imagine her doing such a thing) was that if she knew (in her Catholic mind) that she was certain to burn forever just to dull the temporary pain of rejection from a soulless, gutless twerp, why then would she not wish to take him down with her? I mean, what more does one have to lose when they're convinced that one act of desperation means that they're doomed to dwell in the fiery pits of damnation? And especially when they've decided that it's best to just give up and jump ship since someone else keeps trying to push them overboard.

Asking around, I found a surprising amount of hostility in the answers from women. Psycho has become as feared a word as whore these days. The ladies I questioned said that women who spoke up after being treated badly were psychotic bitches. They should just walk away. In other words, if they didn’t just lay back and take it in silence, their reputations were torn to shreds and their rights to be treated with a modicum of dignity were ignored. Sometimes, sadly, by other women who were no doubt fearing that denying these standards would mean that they too were psychos.

In the end, I figured out that a lot of women are afraid to speak up when they are mistreated because they’re afraid of being branded a psycho. The same method of denying women their voices is just as effective now as it was when Greco-Roman writers invented it. By calling women hysterical, they’re basically saying that any intense emotion that we feel is simply a side effect of being female.

This is where my friend found herself. She knew that speaking up would only cause her more pain. So, she threw her life in the toilet, and all because of one man, who probably breathed a sigh of relief that his life would not change because the woman with whom he’d been messing around on the side had shuffled off this mortal coil.

I say fuck that. I say it’s worth it to speak up, if only to hear your own voice in a cacophony of squealing pigs. There are plenty of people out there who are more than happy to deny all of us our voices. If you allow them to do that, even with the threat of being branded a psycho (or better yet, a psycho whore) it means that you agree that you have no right to exist, because what are we if we meekly allow people to trod upon our existence with no repercussions?

Of course, there is something to be said for diplomacy. But there are times when that just isn’t realistic. Sometimes, and those times are rare as I do think that people deserve to be treated fairly, a person proves him or herself to be a predator and must be thwarted before (and sometimes after) taking a bite. I also think that in cases like my friend, not speaking up about a two-timing rat fuck means that you're accepting at least part of the blame for the pain caused later when his significant other figures out his ruse. What other people call a psycho, I call a woman who isn’t going to submit to the rules laid out for us a few thousand years ago by a bunch of stupid men and perpetuated today by pretty much everyone.

So back then, I vowed never to deny myself a voice, no matter what might happen because of it. And a lot has happened because of it. But, in the blanket of reality, I can find my loud ass, psycho self pretty easily. That’s really all any of us truly has.