things I have learned from living with a vegan raw food chef/holistic healer

This list is not exhaustive, because he hasn’t stopped talking yet. It must be prefaced with the information that I’ve lost 20 pounds since he moved in and he’s a good friend, a lovely fellow, and as delightful a roommate as I’ve ever encountered.

However.

  • milk equals pus. It doesn’t matter if you know the cows from birth and milk them by hand. Milk equals pus. All cows are walking petri dishes of mastitis. This and all tenets of the raw food vegan bible are, like all fundamentalist commandments, neither examined nor reconsidered, ever. They are only repeated from memory. At. Length. For another example, ask any Scientologist about psychiatry and watch the hours fly by!
  • that vegetable that you like? It’s poison!
  • ditto fruit
  • all food needs to come with a lecture. A meal without a lecture is like a day without sunshine!
  • it is the fault of the Bavarian Illuminati that you are unhealthy and eating a crappy diet. They put many resources towards preventing the world from knowing the truth and full health.
  • your colon and 9/11 are interrelated.
  • it is all the fault of white men. It’s particularly amusing to get white vegan men to lecture on this topic, because self-awareness is, apparently, entirely prevented by eating a raw food diet.
  • no matter what’s wrong with you, tweaking your diet can fix it. Missing a leg? Got AIDS? Born a thalidomide baby? A few smoothies will put you right.
  • everyone, even raw food vegan chefs, loves pizza, perhaps the most perfect food ever invented (just don’t ask a raw food vegan chef for his professional opinion. He’ll give it to you and then you’ll think “well that’s three hours of my life I’ll never get back”).
  • If you have problems with your digestion, the way to fix that is to stop digesting. Throw all the foods you were going to eat anyway into a blender and process them until they’re an indistinguishable sludge, then drink it. Keep doing that until your digestion problems stop, which they will, since you’re not actually digesting anything anymore.
  • they may like their food raw, but they prefer their intoxicants smoked. Often. I used to torture the vegan chainsmokers at Greenpeace by yelling “Cigarettes are tested on animals” as they took their smoke breaks.
  • washing salad ingredients prior to eating them is nothing more than discrimination against Microbe-Canadians. This position is not reconsidered, even after a violent round of E.Coli poisoning involving the carrying of large bowls to the bedside and the equipping of the night stand with tp, bottled water, a smoothie, and a book which requires little mental acuity. The solution is (see above) to consume exactly the same foods, in the smoothie form, which is as fundamental to vegans as the solid form is to physicists.
  • meat is not just evil, it’s poisonous. Most foods, in fact, are poisonous, especially the tasty ones. I should take him to Salt just to freak him out; they serve nothing but meat and cheese.
  • vegans eat more salt and sugar than any other group of persons on the planet. I used to refill the salt grinder once every two months. Now it’s once a week, unless we run out of soy sauce, when it’s once every two days. And I’m going through a kilo of sugar a month, easy.
  • they also drink more green tea than any other group of people on Earth. It’s raw, you see, unlike black tea, which has been processed. If only it were also cheap; a $24 box of Formosa Oolong used to last me six months. Now it’s one month. I might as well inquire about wholesale rates.
  • if they leave their fruit smoothie for too long and something starts growing on top of it, they will peel off the fuzz and consume the smoothie, nattering on about the benefits of fermentation. Speaking of which,
  • they love Jack Daniels. Which alone gives me faith in them as a species.

Snowball Seized!

When the jackbooted figures of authority kick in someone’s door and seize their property, you sort of kinda expect or at least hope that, on some level, they had it coming. Maybe they were smuggling dangerous contraband. Maybe they kept slaves. Maybe they had a stash of…

Deer?

Had he been a hunter, and had the mottled white doe that tumbled down a hill into his rural Oregon driveway six years ago been an adult, Jim Filipetti could have ponied up $19, applied for a deer tag and gunned the animal down. He could have butchered the deer the state now knows as “Snowball,” mounted her head on the wall and moved on with his life.

But Filipetti chose to raise the injured fawn as a pet, spending thousands of dollars on veterinarian bills to treat her deformed hooves, installing strips of carpet throughout his house so she wouldn’t slip on the hardwood floors, and feeding her a steady diet of sweetpeas, tomatoes and green beans—”the best that Safeway had to offer,” he says. After 12 months, the house painter moved her to a pen outside his home in Molalla, Ore., but she was still a member of the family. “It was like having a dog around the house,” Filipetti says.

Filipetti uses the past tense because his beloved Snowball has been seized by the state, which was considering euthanizing her…

Six hundred and fifty irate citizens flooded the agency’s phone lines over the next several days, demanding clemency for Snowball and her offspring…”I can legally blow the head off a deer during hunting season,” wrote Hillsboro’s Greg Ebert, in a letter to The Oregonian newspaper in Portland. “But God help me if I commit a humane act on its behalf.” At the outcry, state officials froze like, well, a doe in headlights.

Deer, deer, what are things coming to?

over the viaduct

Yet under the blanket.

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to tolerate the flying vermin which have infested my house for the last three months long enough to blog this, but I’ll try. As I said recently, I don’t look like I’m typing; thanks to the fruit flies which attend every vegan hippie like the pages surrounding Cleopatra, I look like I’m Carol Channing, playing to the back rows on Broadway.

But I’ll try.

—————————————————————

I didn’t really believe it. None of us really believed it. Until the blanket. Until they pulled out the blanket and draped it over him and even then, still, some primal instinct within us was wishing, hoping, truly believing that they’d tuck it under his chin and say, “There you go, Fred,” and he’d say thanks, it’s cold out, but the only one who said it was cold out was the nurse who’d been working on him ever since the car hit him.

And as they pulled the blanket up over his face, it got even colder.

Bored with the Internet?

TELL me about it, newbie.

bored with the internet

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RIP: Pavarotti

I’m late on this, but I’m sure you’ll understand it took me some time to work through my feelings. Pavarotti was a greatly talented man, and perhaps the highest iteration of a particular type, ie the man possessed of immortal talent who doesn’t mind trotting it out at his Mom’s every damn Sunday dinner, or singing at a friend’s birthday party, or showing up for any benefit concert that will have him, provided they lay on the pasta spread.

And I love people like that. To the other, equally talented individuals who hoard their gifts as if they are MRE’s in the face of Katrina, we say: can I buy you an enema, darling?

Luciano Pavarotti, perhaps the greatest opera singer of the 20th Century, and disco diva/supermodel Grace Jones, at a benefit for Angola.

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