Meat Links

Friends,

For those who don't know, I've been trying to live a vegetable based foodlife. I'm uncomfortable with the term vegetarian because that connotates that I care about slaughter-worthy animals, like chickens, pigs, cows, deer, lambs, buffalo, fish, and any other animal whose flesh that could be rolled in bread crumbs. I don't care about those animals. They are far to delicious for me to form an emotional attachment. When chickens stop tasting good while baked, broiled, basted, blackened, and especially fried (oh, lordy, fried) then maybe I'll be more comfortable with calling myself a vegetarian, but that just won't happen. Fact is, I'm living a vegetable based foodlife because, and this may come as quite the shock to my blind friends, I am a fat man. I checked my BMI one day this past summer, and I was .5 of a BMI rating from qualifying for insurance-covered gastrointenstial bypass surgery...and I had lost weight by then. So you know I'm not talking about this pudgy, irritating kind of overweight, the kind of overweight that makes a swimsuit unflattering, but the kind overweight that makes a swimsuit a spectacle of sideshow horrors. So in order to change that, I'm going all veg. I still love you chicken (especially you, fried), but we need a divorce, because like so many abusive relationships, you'll kill me eventually because I've let you hurt me for so long.

Anyways, for a while, I made that veggie foodlife choice. And I was sticking to it pretty well I think, as well as staying as regular as possible to a workout scheme. But then, as you may not noted, I went home this weekend. I surprised my mom for her birthday, which was great, but when I rolled in the door at 7 in the morning, a pot roast was already percolating in the crock pot.

I could have said no thanks. I could have said any number of things to get out of eating that pot roast for dinner. But, because if I'm anything, I'm my father's son, I cannot waste things like that. It would have been remarkably wasteful (and I think disrespectful of me) to not eat Momma's pot roast for dinner after she made it. Now, she didn't know I was coming, and didn't cook it for me, but it was there. And she cooked it. So I ate it, for dinner by god. The next day, we ate it again. And Sunday before we left, I ate some bacon, because every Sunday for about as long as I can remember, my family has had bacon-n-eggs on Sunday. I was home, it was Sunday, what could I do?

I was able to hang onto my veg foodlife a little, like we stopped a BWs in the StL area, and I ordered a Gardenburger, and on the way back, I learned that Burger King has a Veggie Burger which I ordered (but they covered it in ketchup, and I do wonder how old it was because I can't imagine many people stopping by the Ames, IA Kum & Go near I-35 order a veggie burger at the Home of the Whopper). But now, I'm back home, and meat-free again. And you know, thank god.

I'm not sure if what I'm feeling is guilt about going against my veggie foodlife for so long because I didn't hesitate when I dined on that pot roast (it was a little dry, but when isn't it?) or that bacon (which I could have avoided by the way). Maybe it's regret. Maybe it's some kind of layered guilt, like I'm guilty about betraying myself, my diet, and the shadow of guilt I would have felt if I dodged the meat at my parent's house. Anyways, I don't know...all I know is that I'm writing this as kind of a public testimonial of my transgression to help keep myself on the narrow stalk of my veggie foodlife from now on...or at leat until Thanksgiving because dammit if turkey ain't delicious.


VIVA EL VEGGIES!


ps...notice the link to the right hand side, the "Mankato Graduate Writers, INC." It was a website started by Ande (student formerly known as Pantload) in order to help stir up money to send our poor Mankatoan asses to NYC for AWP. Check it out, and send some money.