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.