meanwhile, in this small wedge of the internet

over the next few days I’ll be knocking some shit out of the Drafts folder, so the HUnter archives will be plumping up a bit. You’ll have to sift, if you’re so inclined. Also, my old bloggy domain is about to expire and instead of dealing with the writing actually worth keeping in a constructive way, I will further defer writerly responsibility for follow-through by importing most of it ovah here, giving it it’s own page prob’ly. So, in honour of this development let’s have some random Mos Def lyrics…

If we doin alright, Hip-Hop is gonna be doin alright
People talk about Hip-Hop like it’s some giant livin in the hillside
comin down to visit the townspeople
We (are) Hip-Hop
Me, you, everybody, we are Hip-Hop
So Hip-Hop is goin where we goin
So the next time you ask yourself where Hip-Hop is goin
ask yourself.. where am I goin? How am I doin?

Ben:

“Man, if I had the money,

I’d be seeing a shrink every damn day.”

No illusions

I am back in Vancouver, oh home sweet real home, after a too-long trip “home” to the boondocks, which sits northerly between sea and mountains like a bone caught in the throat of wilderness. The trees drip with moss and rain like misery in biological form and 7-Eleven, bingo and bars are the biggest draws in town. So what if my lingering existential despair is out of all proportion to the 36 hours I was there? Feelings are facts!

Oh added sweetness to come back to the splendid solitude of my new bachelor pad – broken kitchen tiles, grubby carpet and falling-to-shit fixtures included. This is the first time I’m coming back to the new place after being out of town and it is splendid to re-enter an environment no one’s interefered with since I left on Friday. All my apples, papers and various strewn shit is intact; hand-laundered socks and facecloths dried to a reassuring abandoned stiffness just where I left em hangin’. Now I’m doing laundry and putting away a few useful church social-ish Corningware pots my nan gave me… throwing open the curtains and watering the plants and puttering around domestically in other happy ways. Thank god it is sunny. Let it scorch away the remnants of gloom that I can still feel clinging to me like mist. Hometown is still haunted by the ghost of a sadder, fatter, bitchier Hunter and I don’t like the way I feel there; going home is like stepping into a haunted forest.

My gran herself is awesome, and visiting her is the main reason I ventured up at all. She spends her days more-or-less housebound now, placidly seated in a rose-pink recliner, her apartment bare and cleanswept, the remote control nearby so she can turn on the news precisely at noon and then again at 6. She doesn’t have a thought in her head that she deliberately put there herself — no well-loved philosophy, memories of romance travels books or joy; everything is all worries and gossip and reactive anxiety to anything she sees on the news or anything you might tell her (so you have to be careful with whatever little factoids you dole out in the course of a conversation because she will take these and run with them until they haunt her shallow sleep). She takes pride in never having read a book for pleasure, and never having “needed” a friend, let alone a husband after her own went AWOL before they were even decently settled into stable domesticity.

But oh what clay she has she could have worked with. She is sharp as a knife and wickedly attuned to anyone’s “airs” and pretensions, which forces you to be extra-honest in her presence because she is already on to you. She has no qualms about verbally hamstringing you, even from the vulnerable depths of her La-Z-Boy where she reclines in her tiny 80-pound glory. Ensure, eye drops, peanuts, and various pills at hand. Waterglass that she wraps a napkin around and sips out of. It is one of those true everyday pities of life that she restricted herself to toiling in a hospital kitchen and various boring church volunteer positions. Sharp eyes and sharp tongue – she could have been glorious.

As she gets more frail our visits get more intense and she is beginning to cough up stuff that her love of privacy, or pride, kept her from getting into before. Little sketches about her early days, ranging from the sentimental to the horrible. I know those scrapbookey anthologizing family tree-ing perverts out there suggest the younger generation get out a pad and pen and interrogate their elders for such nuggets lest they be lost to the void; a sort of ruthless/sentimental exit interview. But it is clear a lot of it my granny finds distasteful or ridiculous and it takes her time to speak of it, although of her own volition she proceeds; the last thing that feels natural is to sit there needling her about the 5 Ws and ignoring the subtler subtexts of this woman trying to arrange her life into some semblance of order…she doesn`t have any answers or context; I think this may be the first time she`s aware of her own past as a sort of story, instead of just irrelevant history best forgotten. It is her time for contemplation, not so much mine. So, when I am old and some young relative demands me to serve up my past in condensed quaint formats for their own smarmy self-actualzing purports there will be blood on the floor! Or at least a lot of lavishly embellished sexual stories complete with hand gestures to plague their dreams.

She confessed to me that she feels lonely and already forgotten; horrifying to hear anyone articulate such a thought. More horrifying yet to simply acknowledge the essential truth of her statement. That she is lonely is indisputable, and even queens will be forgotten.

That’s the thing too…you can live your life às you like, and while it’s happening it seems so immediate and vital but in the end, if it can’t make sense contextually what does that mean? Are you a failure…your  story vague and unresolved? It’s no one else’s business, but I am sure there is the matter of ‘loose threads’ that would aggravate the more rigid or even artistic-pattern-loving amoung us when we are older and helpless.

Anyhow. How much of this analysis is just my wistful notion that things were more inclined to turn out better for everyone?

Food notes: “Primal Stick” faux jerky

At an early age I turned to vegetarianism out of sheer fright. My mother was a lackadaisical cook, and never managed to transform meat from it’s bulbous, fleshy state into something more pleasant. It was always served up unadorned, like a lukewarm immutable fact.

Eating a grey chicken leg was an insurmountable task. But I would oink down the side dishes of peas and carrots and mashed potatoes like a feral child. From these beginnings my current vegetable-oriented diet gradually evolved.

By necessity, veganism involves a nutritive life less burdened by “fun” food than the average devil-may-care omnivore’s diet, which has plenty of wacky treats available to provide relief from the ennui of basic nourishment. As a vegan, and a glutton, I am constantly on the prowl for new flavors to zazz up my world, as wacky treats can be hard to come by. And whatever way I am now, such dubious eatables as corn dogs, Lipton soup packets, and Cheez Whiz were erstwhile sources of deep satisfaction.

Recently I found a display of “Primal Sticks” in the health food store. I instantly liked the prospect of having a snack called “Primal Stick” in my life. For when I was hungry, but not too hungry. If I was ever hungry but “on the go.”

“Primal Sticks” looked like Slim Jims. They were $2.69 each. That was just right, enough on the sunny side of $3.00 to seem reasonable for a skinny length of Non-GMO Isolated Soybean Protein. I generally enjoy eating unfamiliar manifestations of soy; in general I can tolerate most plant-sourced foodstuffs because to me there is something inherently benevolent about them no matter how strange, or indifferently prepared. Excited, hoping this was the start of a new friendship, I saved my “Primal Stick” for work the next day and my inevitable mid-morning bout of The Hungries.

But when I tore open the wrapper with my teeth, a strange smell clouded my office with the immediacy of a fart. My “Primal Stick” smelled like farts! Also, defoliant. I commenced munching, out of hunger and curiosity and the desire to rid my office of that odour’s source.

The taste was like licking the greasy, trembly-thin hind leg of a newborn musk ox.

I couldn’t finish my “Primal Stick”, and had to furtively dispose of the pungent remains in a wastebasket on another floor. The ignobe end of what could have been a happy pairing…my mouth and smoked soyproduct.

the bone structure of the landscape

Trite as it sounds I think the weather is helping my mood. I absolutely love autumn. I often have inane little self-conversations, as if I’m someone I bumped into in the lunchroom, like “what season do I enjoy most?” and the answer is I like all of them, being a huge fan of circular transitions. But there’s something about the fall.

The quality of the light, and the perfect temperature, and some indefineable inspiration that seems at odds with the fact things are beginning to wind down and become ghosts.

This weekend I actually spent the better part of my days just rambling for miles, simply lovin’ life. One of those little interstitial spells where everything seemed extraordinarily beautiful…the leaves were falling, the sunlight slanted keenly off everything, lending this kind of temporal loveliness to all the standard street action, so nice that for a rare instance it seemed like the too-brief allotment of time given to enjoy Earth was a forgiveable oversight.

nosy parker

When I was young, there was a good stretch of time where I was a first-rate snoopy little shit.  I liked rooting around in things that didn’t belong to me. I was an unrepentant drawer-rifler and eavesdropper and prescription-label-reader. I took it as a personal affront if I stumbled across something kept in a way intended to be “private.” How dare they?!

I was utterly without any concept of personal boundaries. Who knows why this was. Maybe it was because of bad examples:

1. The nuns at school thought nothing of tipping over desks and dumping everything on the floor if they thought someone was hiding candy or a comic in there. This was a punishment and humiliation they must have discussed and refined together, because several times in every grade we watched, horrified and silent, as the small Nun in Charge scuttled like an attacking crab to catch some suspected offender unawares; their desk would be toppled pell-mell, and the class would stop whatever they were doing to  watch the guilty party scrambling to clean up the spillage of paper,  duotangs, and contraband Ding Dongs or what have you.

2. My mom was also a first-rate space-invader; barging through closed doors at whim and sifting through pockets and bags with a prison bull’s sense of entitlement.

3. I was deeply absorbed by books like Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series, and Trixie Beldon novels, which starred smart, crafty (smarmy) children who made a good name for themselves listening at doors, intercepting personal correspondence, breaking and entering, and spying on people in general.

My nosiness wasn’t borne out of mere idleness however, nor maliciousness, or for blackmail purposes; not even for the nobler intention of solving crimes, a la the Five and Beldon. It was not even mere curiosity, in the typical sense of the word.  I felt more like an archaeologist living next door to the Angel Mounds. How could I not look?

Because one thing was already clear: I didn’t get people, and it bothered me. The world felt dangerously out of sync, and I could sense that I was not in step. It wasn’t just ignorance — by an early age I was resigned to my own ignorance. It was a deeper conviction that everything I could see on the surface was only part of the story, and I was doomed to continue missing out on vital pieces of the puzzle. The traces people leave out when they believe themselves safe are the most telling. Snooping helped me feel that I was getting to the bottom of something.

Due mostly to proximity, my older brother bore the brunt of my investigations. His bedroom was a treasure trove of intrigue. Unlike the rest of the house, which had an unsatisfying sort of windswept feeling because our mother compulsively threw everything away, his room was dark and comfortingly cave-like. It was an effect created by dust, dark curtains, glossy heavy metal posters, and heaps of clothes that in the gloom resembled the coprolitic mounds of ancient monsters.

Mostly what I liked was going through the things in his dresser and mentally cataloguing contraband, like rolling papers and condoms. Not because I was a squealer. I just liked to know what he was up to, or at least find out enough clues so that I could concentrate my prayers accordingly. I was really into praying for people, at that time.

(I prayed a lot. Not formally. I’d just flap my hands in the general circuit of the Sign of the Cross to make my forthcoming soliloquy “official”, like the way they all put on their headphones for the ‘We Are the World‘ music video. I prayed to Jesus mostly because no one else listened to me, but I also prayed, or maybe better to say mentally conversed, with more apocryphal figures like Indiana Jones and members of the A-Team, who I regarded as lesser but equally sympathetic gods, not so distracted by the cries and pleadings of millions.)

I also liked flipping through his sketch pads. Skulls and guitars, obsessively shaded, and erasered where he wanted white bits to show.

I liked reading the notes girls gave him, then trying to fold them back up along the creases, into their original position. Nosy person’s origami.

(All his admirers had the same sort of handwriting, a cartoonish cursive that rolled roundly across the page, margin-to-margin, and circles over the i’s instead of dots. Even the girls in my class already wrote this loopy, smiley-sunshine way; I don’t know how they picked it up en masse. It must have been more feminine telepathy I wasn’t attuned to. It wasn’t anything like the prim alphabet – D’Nealian cursive, it turned out – Sister Michaelina had written across the top of the blackboard as a reference for pupils who could spontaneously forget how to make a “Q.”  Not that I could properly mimic that starched little script either. I had handwriting that tended to cramp toward the centre of the page like twigs in a vise. My school assignments looked like signed confessions obtained under duress. )

Most importantly, my brother had books. Fucked up books. Books with swearing and violence and children that kill. I was already a voracious, nerdlike consumer of books but I’d always walked the comparatively tame streets of the children’s library, with it’s Newberry winners and earnest portraits of minor adolescent angst. My brother was not a big reader, but he had plenty of dark literary detritus, as indifferently and wonderfully accumulated  as his millions of t-shirts and peeled-off Budweiser labels.

Mad magazines and Lord of the Flies and Stephen King and various sci-fi pulp paperbacks about the world gone mad and dystopic futures.  I Am Legend. This Perfect Day. It was a literary world unknown to me. All the dangers I’d read about to that point were the scrapes my child-detective heroes were always getting into. Smugglers and kidnapping rings seemed like small potatoes indeed in light of books like “IT.”

It was in the musty recesses of my brother’s bedroom where I found a water-bloated copy of that particular novel, which I read piecemeal over several weeks, taking advantage of his frequent absences to plunge into his room and pick up where I left off. It was horrible and exciting and so, so long! “IT” was like a plate heaped with sickening desserts and no need to share.

It seemed important to the experience not to take these books out of his room. For one thing, that would officially be an offense punishable by a smack-down. It would practically be stealing, if I was caught before I could put something back. Trespassing was a slightly lesser crime.

There also seemed to be something improper about taking anything from the forbidden cave, and into the more prosaic light of day. The treasure could be revealed as a paltry thing after all, instead of a grim codex inextricably bound with gloom and stale air. The magic might be lost if exposed to my own bare, unmysterious bedroom environment, the way vampires reportedly turn to powder in the sun.

Instead I”d keep my ears perked up for an untimely arrival, and with a mix of unease and bratlike entitlement, I’d make myself cozy in the forbidden sanctum. His extravagantly rumpled waterbed hulked along one wall, a softly humming invitation to deep, dreamless oblivion. I’d gingerly hoist myself onto it, leery of punching a leak, then recline carefully, feeling like Tennyson’s lily maid as the mattress undulated grumpily beneath me.

Over the course of time I read several books in that dim, aquarium-like dimension. In particular the novel Drawing of the Three stayed in my head, improperly assimilated; years later when I inevitably came across it again in a nerd’s due time, the opening illustration of the lobstrosities attacking the Gunslinger’s feet threw open a window in my memory to that gloomy, vaguely-recalled time of my first encounter, dust motes floating in the air like stars. I still have a fondness for that novel, which seems to summarize all of the inarticulate, hopeful fascination that discovery of such weird tales provoked.

Bless my brother and his scandalous mode of existence. Bless the mess, and bless weird books. In Mr. T’s name, amen.

*Note: I have utterly lost my penchant for spying after several bouts of TMI in my own angsty adolescence that served only to blow my own wheels and cause undue suffering. As William Davenant said, “Since knowledge is but sorrow’s spy, it is not safe to know.” These days when I use your bathroom, your prescriptions are safe.

the Batcave is broken

Anxiety doesn’t usually come out as anger in me but yesterday I felt extremely edgy and angry. I left work and just set out walking along for miles with no destination in mind, hoping the feeling would burn itself out. But no.

When you have a fever the folk wisdom is to remain still lest it plant roots. That seems to be what happened on my walk. With every mile the anger seemed  to coalesce into something more rigid, a physical weight that settled around my heart making breathing difficult as I outpaced the late afternoon, dusk throwing it’s shadow across the pavement and the city lights sparking into relief against the deepening sky. I sat in a park at the crest of a Arbutus Heights watching the city turn from a grey diorama, limned in twilight, to a storied map of lighted rooms.

The hopeful indifference of electric light is a state I envied from the dark mooring of depression that’s settled over me. What’s gone wrong? My routine, my partner, everything. The whole structure of my days. In essence, I have created a situation that is far from the light. It seems that given the choice, my inclination is to choose the shadows. And approaching 30, it is an alarm call to look at the major life decisions made so far and detect that I have been choosing retreat over advancement. Case in point, this engineering of a domestic situation that will be intolerable in the longterm, a what-the-hell-was-I-hoping-for partnership doomed to fail from the start.

In part, the anger comes in at the realization of my willful blindness, the growing awareness that I can take the threat of doom not as a warning but a challenge. I am angry at myself for choosing someone because they wanted me and not vice versa. I am angry that the same things that attract people are, later, the things they seem to want to change. I am angry people revoke promises, implied or otherwise. Mostly I am angry that as much as I consider myself an intelligent person or a self-sufficient person, my most impacting decisions have been made on the basis of superstition, weakness, or whim.

The anger carried into this morning; the moment I awoke, before my mind could even catch up with my body I was aware my heart was (is) thudding, and now that I’m using my hands, I can see they’re shaking a bit. I am in a mode where any thought is painful, because it’s a quagmire in there at the moment. So I’m staying on the surface, just metaphorically looking a few inches ahead at a time, and acknowledging only the most superficial stuff. 

There’s a pleasure in free-falling into these weird situations, hearing that clatter of chips falling where they may. Much harder to engineer a way out though. I can hardly dip my toe in the thought of how much this will hurt. This awareness arrives horribly late. Perhaps the hurt won’t be irrevocable though.

keeping chaos out

I recently was at the Vancouver Art Gallery looking at the current exhibit, which is the Golden Age of Dutch art. The Golden Age in this case was the 1600s, when the Netherlands experienced an unprecedented surge in wealth, culture and artistic liberty.

The main driving factor for this was the Dutch East Indies Company, which was kicking ass and taking names. It’s status as the world’s first megacorporation flooded that small kingdom with remarkable levels of wealth, and the new-found freedoms and privileges that wealth brings. For the first time, the merchant class could enjoy the lavish trappings previously the sole domain of aristocracy:  country homes, fancy furniture, elegant clothing, and the pursuit of leisure. Colonies sprung up throughout Asia, and further wealth and creative inspiration was harvested from this new culture. Porcelain, art, spices, textiles and the like.

In general the Dutch were having a good time of it and thinking pretty well of themselves.

I was not hugely engaged by the subject matter but I could see magic nonetheless. For one thing, when people go out of their way to create, and then other people go out of their way creating a space (such as a gallery) to accommodate those creations, then I’m half-way prepped to believing that this is remarkable stuff indeed. And clearly a lot of work and skill and talent went into one and all of the paintings…that was obvious, even though my seduction was incomplete. When I see something that  doesn’t particularly strike my fancy,  I don’t fault the painter as some do (“I could paint that!” oh, fuck off you could) but realize there’s probably more craft at play than I can totally appreciate.

Anyhow! This is why it’s good to go out and do things, instead of sitting around reading and playing video games. You might experience…feelings...that couldn’t be predicted. And when I came home, I was going about my bidniz when it finally percolated to the forefront of my consciousness that I was feeling rather melancholy.  Why? It had been a splendid morning, full of beautiful sights!

But one of the prime areas of focus for the Dutch Masters was everyday life. Not the sordid kind, the ritzy kind. I guess a hallmark of comfort is that we enjoy demonstrating to others how comfortable we are. And the wealthy Dutch were all about family portraits, and “candid” encapsulations of the average life. Lots of women writing, children strumming, and men captured mid-gesture as they indicated vaguely the benevolent world within their scope.  Fine clothing and jewlery was articulated patiently. Nature served as a grand backdrop to the exhalted lives unfolding within. Even the paintings that showed the commonfolk, what with their dancing and street carts and heels of bread, were invariably merry and soft-focused.

I think it was one painting in particular that fucked me up. Like most things that have that affect,  I didn’t realize it til a little bit later.It’s “A Mother’s Duty” by Pieter de Hooch. All it is is a woman inspecting her kid’s hair for lice. It’s a very homey scene.

But the exhibit was full of homey scenes! It was full of mothers and pets and curtains and meals! It all began to weigh on me, these accumulated homey snippets from centuries past. What they speak of still is relevant: a concern for appearances, for scrupulousness, for comfort and cleanliness (with the undertones of morality that accompanies cleanliness). Mothers are still occupied by keeping their children up to snuff. Family dogs still sit, watching us. The sun still shines in the windows, warming our kitchen floors.

Comfort is the absence of chaos. It requires unflagging diligence to keep chaos at bay. Floors scrubbed, lice in check. Clothes mended, soil turned. Letters mailed, chickens plucked, harvests gathered and finances totted up. Minutiae going on and on down the corridor of civilization. It’s exhausting to think about, the daily efforts to be at one’s best that have been going on forever, but in the end are lost to dust. Unsettling, but ultimately unimportant…except when it’s happening.

judge, jury and executioner

I recently finished the writing course I mentioned in another post and it was beneficial. It achieved the main thing I’d hoped for, which was to learn about the business angle of writing, not to mention to hammer it home into my pudding brain that people can actually write for a living, that others exist who are interested in reading it, and there are people – many, many people – who live productive creative lives instead of stewing interminably in the morass of over analysis and self-doubt.

One of the most valuable bits of advice the instructor had to share was “It’s not up to you to judge your own work.” For some reason this idea was like a revelation to me. I tend to take a Judge Dredd approach to whatever I do, and knowing you’ll be your own judge, jury and executioner tends to doom one from the start. The writer’s only job is to go deep, pull up their best, and then let the chips fall where they may.

So I’ve polished and submitted a few pieces that have been sitting around, and am working on some new things. Getting stuff out there has had a bit of a euphoric effect (I expect this will wear off but for now I enjoy it).  A feeling of pressure and impending doom has always been present for me when I concentrate on writing. I’m always aware of something looming, as if there’s not enough time to say what I want, so I better hurry up and just say anything. Right now a tentative feeling of expansiveness has taken hold in my life and I don’t feel so pnched and nervous. It seems OK to take my time developing an idea properly.  I hope it lasts…

what’s the matter with these people?

It was a long time ago now but some narrative cohesion doesn’t seem too much to ask for (even from a blog):  “In Between Days” was fun. I have rarely experienced such a palpably upbeat club crowd, and the dance floor atmosphere was spirited yet deferential, accommodating to all varieties of gittin’ down, ranging from shoulder-shifting to lumbering break dance.

Certain questions floated like lily-pads on the surface of my consciousness all evening, though. Questions like: What the hell is the matter with these people? Of which it appears I am one? I don’t know of any other generation that is so emphatically, relentlessly nostalgic. It’s weird. It’s narcissistic almost. But the question begs to be asked when you’re in a room full of 20-somethings in lace gloves, neon dress shirts and flounced hems, and when you yourself have orange knee-highs on. Cheering madly when two ’80s-era public television actors take the stage and begin twisting buttons. And when a remix of Walk Like An Egyptian causes people to rush onto the stage in a drunken wave, clutching drinks that slosh dangerously close to expensive DJ equipment, and dancing like the aforesaid Egyptians or as near as we can figure it, based on the hieroglyphs.

Michael Jackson has since died but people were breaking it down for realz when DJs Spike & Caitlin played “Beat It” and oh but did the the yowling commence when the synthesized strains of “Thriller” filled the air. A huge 80s icon is deceased but I wonder if people this age will ever stop thinking we are somehow smarter, cooler, and possibly less mortal, just because we grew up with glitter in our knitwear, eating exploding candy and knowing how to moonwalk.

But my problem is I think too much, so whenever the night threatened to be spoiled by thinking, I just made an effort to…stop. Dancing like an unhinged marionette while an Arctic-tinted fog spews out of smoke machines is a great cure for it. They’ll kick you then they beat you, and they’ll tell you that it’s fair…!

Put on your smartypants glasses and enjoy a slightly-thematically-related feature from New York magazine.

Food Notes: Pop Tarts

Pop Tarts don’t provoke a violent gag reflex in me, not to the extent of many convenience foods. Taste-wise they are analogous, somehow, to the gritty linoleum you`ll find in a gas station restroom, but they are also super-cute looking.

They are certainly the oddest combination of great and gross: the filling so tightly encased by the frosting/pastry lard-meld that I’m not sure how heat is expected to penetrate and warm things up evenly. Pricking your Pop with a fork before putting it in the toaster? But that would surely lead to the filling seeping down to the bottom and setting of the smoke alarm every time you make toast forevermore.

That being said, this item retains some appeal for me, at least in theory, I haven’t had one in ages. The strongly artificial fruit flavour and icing that shattered beneath the teeth bespoke a certain kid-wired exoticness, as portrayed by the ads sprinkled between Saturday morning cartoons. This was along the lines of the sort of treat-food my parents would buy when my mom was getting out of the hospital or things were otherwise returning to “normal” after some particularly sordid spell – happy, tawdry, processed food to celebrate our newfound happiness. (See also: Cap’n Crunch; McCain Superfries; Revelos.) Yes…it was all the scorched oatmeal and rubbery eggs that was driving everyone nuts! What we needed was food from a box, a box with a smiling mascot! My brothers and I would make short work of these goodies, eating with the jittery abandon of POWs granted some make-shift Christmas repast who, despite the thrill, could never quite push aside the knowledge of the lean winter to follow.

Nowadays, I am not a food snob but…well, I kind of am. Not in a foody kind of way, y’know that restless “this better be good! And local!” novelty-seeking everyone cultivates these days.  Just a snob where I don’t consider a lot of things “food” at all, and where it absolutely boggles me all the resources that go towards churning out sub-standard, weirdly tinted, artificial crap-meal products that people acquire a taste for to the rejection of more natural fare, that’s a thriftier buy to boot.

Certain items, like practically anything in the frozen food section, or anything turning on tines at a 7-Eleven, seem like evidence to me that there are a covert species of organism among us who may look human, but require the chemical modifications found in barely-passable foodstuffs, such as Taquitos, for survival. It’s all a rip-off, speaking from both the financial and nutritive angle. Capers and the like are just as terrible as 7-Elevens and Costco, for all their wholesome parading. 85% of all of it is processed, overpriced yuppie crap (are there still yuppies?). To hell with Pop-Tarts, you can get organic “toaster pastries” there (for just $3 more)…

I don’t think most people realize they can’t actually afford to be doing their sole shopping in such places but because the ‘mindful-eating’/organic thing is marketed as a lifestyle people get a little confused as to what sort of investment they’re making. Self-image gets involved. But there’s no need to ever put your basic staples onto a credit card right? Not in the usual order of things.

Maybe I have become a little extreme lately but for a long time I ate shit so it doesn’t seem like this, more healthful extreme could ever be any worse. Also, the trashiness of certain memories I also associate with food bothers me a lot. On the other hand my brothers have become polar opposites, Baron Cheeto von Doritovich and Smokey McBeerington, Esq., happy to stride through life consuming all manner of eatables and semi-eatables, food you spray and food you reconstitute and food that comes in “paks.” They can grocery shop at a Mac’s or eat a semblance of lunch somewhere for $1.49 and they hate coming over to my house and looking in the fridge because there’s nothing “good”; totally understandable, I know vegans are a boring lot when we’re not trying to put on a show and act like life is all bursting at the seams with macadamia-derived cheeses, mid-eastern grains, and rainbows of veggie bling -  “so nyah nyah, you sad, deprived omnivore bastards, you!”

This week I don’t think I ate anything very exciting at all, but it’s just me by myself so I am in a bit of a bare-minimum mode, no flash. Nothing like Pop Tarts, to be sure.

Meanwhile there’s some motherfuck at work who keeps a Costo-sized box of “Chicken-n-Cheese” burritos in the freezer and eats one every couple of hours to sustain him through his grueling office labours; the smell of them cooking makes the whole place reek like a foster home.