Chapter 11: San Francisco
As a vegetarian who occasionally practices yoga, meditates, reads books by mystics, recycles, purchases organic produce (on occasion), and is a member of the Gandhi Fan Club, the West Coast offered some pleasant surprises. Any random seven-eleven had more organic and vegan food products than all the health food stores in New Hampshire combined. There were newspapers, Twinkies, beef jerky, and seven flavors of dairy-free ice cream, all on the same grubby shelf. And if you weren’t satisfied with the fare at a seven-eleven (though I was in a state of bliss at each Hess filling station) you could close your eyes and walk for a time and run into the automatic doors at some health food store or another. Such wonderful healthy alternatives abound.
What I didn’t like, however, was all the people in these stores — all the people buying organic produce and reading their mystical literature and talking about meditation and carrying their yoga mats on the backs without ever having taken a class. All the people who ate naturally and didn’t visit a doctor and believed in peace and quoted Vivekenanda and Ramakrishna and used non-carcinogenic hand cream made me sick. All those people that believed everything I had once held sacred; everything I had once considered to be unique; everything I thought set myself apart from everyone else. It was all around me and it made me sick. It made me want to get out a gun and shoot an animal and skin it in the parking lot and chew on its raw flesh and sell its organs from back of a Lexus.
When I went to college, after four years of non-schooling and considerable isolation from my peer-group, I arrived with my knowledge of the environment, the Dairy industry and alcohol, and a mantra from the Transcendentalist Movement. I was ready to the change the world. I think many people arrive to college with these aspirations (though not, perhaps, the same toolset that I carried). University is a place of great learning and opportunity, a place where you are presented with knowledge in such a way as to believe that it might actually make a difference somehow. How quickly I learned.
I was initially sickened by the hypocrisy of the general student body population. First and foremost on my mind was the realization that ninety-eight percent of them (by my estimation) where wasting a perfectly good $32,000 a year floating along merrily unaware in a keg. This bothered me greatly. I honestly have no problem with people drinking and carrying on and having “fun”, but to spend so much money and to squander it throwing up in my bathroom because you couldn’t make it to the second floor just seemed asinine. When people asked me why I did not drink, not even occasionally, my response was:
“If I wanted to get drunk and party, I would take my $32,000 and move to Jamaica for a year. There I could savagely incapacitate myself all the while not having to worry about this thing called learning; as it is the case that my $32,000 has been invested in an institute of higher education, I will, for the time at least, spend my hours and brain cells doing just that. But if, at any moment, I change my mind, I will be on the next flight with my $32,000 in tow. I’ll call you.”
I was obnoxious and incorrigible. I didn’t have any friends. The people who were in my class looked at me as someone from Texas looks at a Frenchman with a little cap, a moustache, and baguette. Warily, to say the least. And alcohol was just the beginning of my haughty indignance for my peers. If they so much as mentioned the chicken that was being served in the cafeteria I was compelled to describe the atrocious conditions under which those chickens were held before slaughter. These are not farm chickens, I would say; not happy Disney chickens clucking and prancing about in green fields; but mass-produced cancer-ridden antibiotic-pumped quasi-creatures living in a world of pain and suffering that you will willingly partake in with fork and knife.
When I was politely asked to keep my opinions to myself as that some people at the table wanted to finish their meal in peace, I would cry:
“Don’t you see that you are eating your own hypocrisy? You are consuming your own hatred? You are devouring a lie that, when exposed, you could not bear to witness! You are murdering what you cannot stand to see murdered and when you are faced with the brutal horror of the practices you endorse you close you eyes and plead ignorance. Well you are no longer uninformed. I have freed your mind from the countless years of enslavement from the Meat and Dairy Industries of America; I have empowered you to make the decision that you, before, did not even know existed! I have given you a choice! A choice!”
And usually they chose to leave.
By my senior year I had stopped talking about the principles of vegetarianism; I had stopped referring to the deforestation and the global warming and the farm waste of cattle; I had stopped mentioning the pesticides and growth hormones and the cancer and the heart disease; I had refrained from drawing attention to girls reaching pubescence by the age of nine and giving birth at nine and a half; I withdrew comments about the absurdity of sucking on a cows tit for an entire lifetime; in part and in whole: I withdrew myself from the battle.
Again this is not unusual. Your freshman year of college is filled with dreams of changing the world; when you are a senior you realize you need a job and a way to get health insurance. But, unlike many disillusioned graduates, I didn’t stop being a vegetarian; I didn’t stop reading the collected works of Vivekenanda and practicing yoga before bed. But I did stop talking about it. If someone asked me why I wasn’t drinking milk I said I was lactose intolerant; and if they asked why I didn’t eat meat I said I didn’t want to, thank you. If they pressed me further about the environment or the health concerns I would just say:
“Yea, I’ve heard about that too.”
I don’t consider it a defeat; I have moved passed the stage of talking about it. Talk had left me friendless and miserable (silence removes the misery, at least). I realized that it was me, actually, who did a disservice to everything I believed in by ever opening my mouth to argue my position; and that I did great service by saying nothing and continuing onward.
The West Coast, and California especially, reminded me of myself and I wish it didn’t. In-your-face organic food revolution my ass; I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to hear how great you feel or how good this food for you; I don’t want to know about your bowl movements or the color of your piss. It doesn’t make you any happier and that’s what it’s all about in the end; that’s why there is all this hoopla about all this nonsense and about these life choices; everyone’s trying to get the upper hand on happiness. Lose weight, you’ll be happy; eat broccoli, you’ll be happy; drink beer, you’ll be happy. Well, newsflash: everyone’s still miserable. The drunks and meditating monks alike; they’re all yelling at their kids and crying in the shower. Vegan ice cream only soothes the pain. And, in that way, it’s just like a hit from the old bong.
When you’re really happy you don’t have to tell anyone; when you’ve found peace you don’t have to say it; you don’t need to fill out your save-a-chicken stamp book to feel good; life is about bringing joy to others and you can’t do that while your shoving their face full of tofu turkey at Thanksgiving and telling them how much better their life will be now.
So all you people in California who have positioned yourself just perfectly aligned in stunning profile at the corner of the Organic Juice Bar so that, in case your second ex-husband drives by he’ll see you and realize just how happy you are without him, leave me out of it. It pains me to see you; you are obnoxious, and tedious, and just as bad as the cowhand chewing on rawhide and spitting tobacco. I hate you all and the sooner an earthquake sucks you into the foul burning hands of hell the better. Sodomites and tree huggers, every last one. May you never leave your foul hovel of beautiful landscape and wonderful weather. Damn you all.
DAMON: After mile nine hundred and nine, Ben and I, have been cruising around the most terrific of downhills were slammed with a headwind and then faced with a hill the likes of which we have never seen. Ben, about ten bike lengths in front of me dropped immediately into his lowest front sprocket. When I heard that chain ring against the front sprocket, it was like a bell tolling in my ears and I knew that my time had come. I dropped back immediately, I stood up. Then I stood up on top of my standing up. Then I took off one of my feet to push on my other foot and then I switched back and forth — I hopped from pedal to pedal. I put so much pressure on my front pedals that my tires were spinning in space. And yet, still, I did not move forward. But we made it. At 3.5 miles an hour. Ben and I were looking at each other like: “Good God! What is this?” There was one turn where it was so steep that we had to traverse all the way to the other side of the road and back — much to the chagrin of the cars behind us — and yet we made it and we were happy.
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