I recently read Jonathan Safron Foer's Eating Animals the only book that inspired me to try tofu. Unreal! It deals with the complicatedness and destructiveness of being an omnivore in the 21st Century. Basically factory-farms are pumping their birds, pigs, and cattle with so much estrogen and pharmaceuticals that these poor creatures eek out a living on the equivalent of "Fat Elvis" with an untimely demise to match. These are creatures who live 12 years or so and then get slaughtered for mass consumption. They can't even fuck for babies! They have to be artificially inseminated. Just think: you are what you eat.
"Slaughtered" is putting it sweetly, there is nothing humane about the way in which these creatures are killed, from beatings with lead pipes and other odd cruelties by people (I guess you can call them people) in the slaughterhouse. The problem here is, is that it isn't exactly everyone--at least you can't prove it. These places are locked up tighter than Fort Knox. It is a multi-billion dollar industry built on the fat of the land--literally. It's a dangerous business because if something should go wrong, anything at all, their economies would bust like a birthday balloon.
Needless to say, I spent a week unable to eat a normal diet. I'm still having a hard time swallowing chicken or pork. I think I'm ready to forego bacon for a while. Eggs too. I'm slowly waning into finding alternative sources of protein. What's weird is that this isn't a new problem. I came across a video from 1990 with Lisa Bonet, River Phoenix, and Raul Julia from a daytime talk show, and they were talking about the same sort of problems, with vaccinations and breast feeding added in for good measure. They were talking about a book by John Robbins called Diet for a New America. This is in 1990. I was five years old then. Eating Happy Meals with gusto. Now eating fast food makes me want to hurl. Seriously, try not eating the stuff for a few months--then go stop in for a quick burger and fries combo--tell me your insides don't hate you.
Here's the link. It's in 5 parts so set aside some time and enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6r2wMB6o9w
It's 2012 now, for those of you keeping score at home, that's 22 years ago. That's 22 years of me eating like a blind idiot, ravenous of everything at the same time. Now--no more! I must be conscientious. Perhaps that is part of adulthood--coming to grips with the faults and bad habits instilled in you by parents, teachers, and friends that need to be broken, addressed, shifted, doubted, and reconsidered--at the very least winced at. Plato said Socrates said "The unexamined life is not worth living!" Don't you want to lead a life worth living instead of succumbing to rigor mortis before you're 30? 40? 60? In a tomb--or torched to dust and ash?
The funny thing is, now, after reading Eating Animals I've started to notice more places where what Americans eat--and all the bad habits we have here--have been coming up in all the books I'm reading and articles and news casts. I was reading Eating Animals when the news was breaking about "pink slime" in meat. A week later it was deduced that the stuff was neither good nor bad. I wonder how much it cost to run that ad for cheap meat. I was reading Tom Robbins novel Still Life with Woodpecker and he talked about shitting eating habits in there. I was reading Kurt Vonnegut's Fates Worse Than Death and he was talking about America's fascination with bombs and how we'd killed Muammar Gaddafi's adopted baby daughter in an air raid back in the 80s. No wonder the dude was such a mental case. His newly adopted daughter was bombed to death by the free world. If that happened to me I'd start to wonder what kind of free world this was anyways--and what business it had killing innocent people.
In looking at my reading choices recently I can see how someone could look at me and immediately think, "Fucking Hipster." And yes, I own the Garden State soundtrack, sandals, flannel, more than my fair share of Vonnegut on my shelf, Converse, and the Tao Te Ching under my Bible with Buddha near by, most likely to order a PBR, shaggy hair, and now possible vegan tendencies. To all of it, I shrug. I am only searching for the way.
I like to read and write and I gravitate to what is comfortable.
Not really sure what the purpose of this blog was--possibly something to do with guilt for eating so many cows and wasting so much. Choose wisely and remember your three "R"'s: reduce, reuse, recycle.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Thursday, February 16, 2012
One Too Many Mournings
Like so many folks before me I went in search of my heroes, who happen to be dead. I have not yet been back to my grandfather's graves though I intend to fully before making any wild and unchangeable life choices like moving west and starting new if that is what I choose to do. Rather than dig up those old thoughts, I, instead went to see about the grave of another hero of mine. Mr. Jack Kerouac. The long dead poet-preacher of American prose who lies entombed at Edson Cemetery in Lowell, MA. Perhaps it was curiosity or boredom or what seemed like a good idea at the time, in fact, I struggled, the same ways I struggle now, later that night when I mentioned that I'd gone to a friend over dinner. She looked at me strange like maybe I had 9 heads full of mouths and ears and eyes, like a freak and I realized that it was no use and that I was doomed to be misunderstood.
The grass was worn to dirt by footprints and joints lay around it like a wreath. Many people had been there before. Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg for 2 I know for sure. The rest, I'm sure, were some sorry sort like me. It is a simple grave, gray slate in the grass with the epitaph: "He Honored Life" over it. There was gray sky above it and the low rolling sound of traffic going by. The skies were threatening rain or snow or some precipitation per the daily meteorological dealings but nothing seemed to come out of it and I thought of the Dylan song where he goes, "You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows" and I might agree sometimes. I can. It was quiet and empty there and I felt like the only bee with any buzz for ten-thousand miles as a I stood over his grave.
I said a quiet prayer and read a passage from The Subterraneans and spoke a quiet thanks and praise and stood idly by observing the surroundings and the peacefulness of the place. Such an end for such a man. A human being who went all over, restless-souled and so wound-up with wanderlust that he never truly settled anywhere with happiness in his heart, always, it seemed he'd make the final, fatal dash for the depths of Mexico and perhaps on into Bolivia or the lower depths of Chile and beyond, maybe ending in an ancient long forgotten and lost catacomb in the ices of Antarctica. Maybe in another life.
Before I knew it I was turning back to the car and to going on back home. Saturday had been killed. But not before I decided to turn the day into another kind of adventure and I drove back the scenic route through Burlington and Lexington and Arlington, up to Lancaster Rd. and the old blue house where I was tiny and young once and ran wild from sunrise to dusk light and funny to see that the street that once seemed an eternity was like a brief, narrow, corridor for time to pass through and all the years between the last time I'd been there to now seemed a lifetime and the "what-if's" crept into my mind and I pushed them back and drove on to where the old Dallin Elementary School was, where the author Avi came to speak once to our class, and where I was taught and brought up and saw lightning strike a telephone pole from the window of my 4th Grade classroom and how I've never mentioned that moment or thought of it till just now, but I can remember sitting there with the thunder going and the lightning flashing outside and my mind turned away from the lesson and teacher and to nature and then the blast of lighting that lit the telephone line on fire and wondering if I'd caused the whole thing to happen, if I'd willed it with magic or if it just was what was supposed to happen, what would always happen, what had to happen and couldn't happen, wouldn't happen any other way. I drove by, stopping momentarily to look at the great soccer fields and swing sets behind the school that were still there. The old school had been torn down and transformed. It looked like any Elementary school. It wasn't mine anymore. Nothing there was. Not even my grandparent's old house on Martin St. with it's new back deck. Things change and I took Mystic Parkway back to Boston and home.
The grass was worn to dirt by footprints and joints lay around it like a wreath. Many people had been there before. Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg for 2 I know for sure. The rest, I'm sure, were some sorry sort like me. It is a simple grave, gray slate in the grass with the epitaph: "He Honored Life" over it. There was gray sky above it and the low rolling sound of traffic going by. The skies were threatening rain or snow or some precipitation per the daily meteorological dealings but nothing seemed to come out of it and I thought of the Dylan song where he goes, "You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows" and I might agree sometimes. I can. It was quiet and empty there and I felt like the only bee with any buzz for ten-thousand miles as a I stood over his grave.
I said a quiet prayer and read a passage from The Subterraneans and spoke a quiet thanks and praise and stood idly by observing the surroundings and the peacefulness of the place. Such an end for such a man. A human being who went all over, restless-souled and so wound-up with wanderlust that he never truly settled anywhere with happiness in his heart, always, it seemed he'd make the final, fatal dash for the depths of Mexico and perhaps on into Bolivia or the lower depths of Chile and beyond, maybe ending in an ancient long forgotten and lost catacomb in the ices of Antarctica. Maybe in another life.
Before I knew it I was turning back to the car and to going on back home. Saturday had been killed. But not before I decided to turn the day into another kind of adventure and I drove back the scenic route through Burlington and Lexington and Arlington, up to Lancaster Rd. and the old blue house where I was tiny and young once and ran wild from sunrise to dusk light and funny to see that the street that once seemed an eternity was like a brief, narrow, corridor for time to pass through and all the years between the last time I'd been there to now seemed a lifetime and the "what-if's" crept into my mind and I pushed them back and drove on to where the old Dallin Elementary School was, where the author Avi came to speak once to our class, and where I was taught and brought up and saw lightning strike a telephone pole from the window of my 4th Grade classroom and how I've never mentioned that moment or thought of it till just now, but I can remember sitting there with the thunder going and the lightning flashing outside and my mind turned away from the lesson and teacher and to nature and then the blast of lighting that lit the telephone line on fire and wondering if I'd caused the whole thing to happen, if I'd willed it with magic or if it just was what was supposed to happen, what would always happen, what had to happen and couldn't happen, wouldn't happen any other way. I drove by, stopping momentarily to look at the great soccer fields and swing sets behind the school that were still there. The old school had been torn down and transformed. It looked like any Elementary school. It wasn't mine anymore. Nothing there was. Not even my grandparent's old house on Martin St. with it's new back deck. Things change and I took Mystic Parkway back to Boston and home.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Death, Ghosts & Barney the Purple Dinosaur
I finished reading Salinger's Nine Stories today. I laughed. I haven't laughed at a book in a long time. I realized that when I was bent over and couldn't read the words on the page because I was crying I was laughing so hard. When something strikes like that, unexpectedly, in a book, it's nice. It reminded me of what it was that made me want to write in the first place. Making people laugh.
Back when I was around 9 or 10, the new kid in school, feeling awkward and unable to fit in, the only thing I knew to be was weird. So I was. I wrote bizarre stories. I remember I wrote this crazy story about a kid who gets a Barney tape for his birthday and somehow he get's so pissed off and throws a wild tantrum and burns his house down. Then he comes back from the dead, or some madness, and tries to reconcile his behavior. I told it in a funny way. I just remember standing up in front of the class, reading it; in front of teachers, classmates, parents (other people's, not mine) and I remember them laughing, really laughing and I remember thinking, this is good; this is a good feeling, I want to keep doing this.
I was talking to a friend the other day about how I was flipping through a book of e.e. cummings poems and came across one that my college writing professor used to repeat to us whenever we weren't being interesting enough, urging us to write more impassioned and less with our ability to put our commas and semi-colons in the right place. It goes like this: "since feeling is first / who pays attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you;" I'd forgotten it was by cummings. I'm not even sure I ever knew. It was so random to have found it. It was random to have remembered that it came from somewhere. I was reminded of the line in the Phish song "Things are true that I forget. No one taught that to me yet."
So what have I realized in a day or so. I should strive to be funny and write with a purpose. Vonnegut says to find something I care about and that I think other people ought to care about too and to write about it. Salinger definitely is guilty of that. It was actually funny how the last story "Teddy" was so interconnected with Maugham's The Razor's Edge, which I just finished at the start of this month. I've always noticed bizarre links. I think that's God showing up in everything.
I haven't written anything new in a bit. Not since 2012 began. I'm recharging my batteries I think. I haven't traveled anywhere in a few months. That will change soon. Change happens rapidly, all at once, like a firework. One fast move and I'm gone. I think Kerouac said that. He's gone now. So is Salinger and Vonnegut and Hemingway. It sucks when all your heroes are ghosts.
Back when I was around 9 or 10, the new kid in school, feeling awkward and unable to fit in, the only thing I knew to be was weird. So I was. I wrote bizarre stories. I remember I wrote this crazy story about a kid who gets a Barney tape for his birthday and somehow he get's so pissed off and throws a wild tantrum and burns his house down. Then he comes back from the dead, or some madness, and tries to reconcile his behavior. I told it in a funny way. I just remember standing up in front of the class, reading it; in front of teachers, classmates, parents (other people's, not mine) and I remember them laughing, really laughing and I remember thinking, this is good; this is a good feeling, I want to keep doing this.
I was talking to a friend the other day about how I was flipping through a book of e.e. cummings poems and came across one that my college writing professor used to repeat to us whenever we weren't being interesting enough, urging us to write more impassioned and less with our ability to put our commas and semi-colons in the right place. It goes like this: "since feeling is first / who pays attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you;" I'd forgotten it was by cummings. I'm not even sure I ever knew. It was so random to have found it. It was random to have remembered that it came from somewhere. I was reminded of the line in the Phish song "Things are true that I forget. No one taught that to me yet."
So what have I realized in a day or so. I should strive to be funny and write with a purpose. Vonnegut says to find something I care about and that I think other people ought to care about too and to write about it. Salinger definitely is guilty of that. It was actually funny how the last story "Teddy" was so interconnected with Maugham's The Razor's Edge, which I just finished at the start of this month. I've always noticed bizarre links. I think that's God showing up in everything.
I haven't written anything new in a bit. Not since 2012 began. I'm recharging my batteries I think. I haven't traveled anywhere in a few months. That will change soon. Change happens rapidly, all at once, like a firework. One fast move and I'm gone. I think Kerouac said that. He's gone now. So is Salinger and Vonnegut and Hemingway. It sucks when all your heroes are ghosts.
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