Vegan, Holier Than Thou, and Proud

I don’t care if non-vegans perceive me as having a holier-than-thou attitude, because they would be correct.  I believe that as a vegan, I am physically, mentally, and spiritually cleaner than those who are still eating corpses, tit milk, and eggs.  

On the physical plane, necrovorism is absolutely the filthiest habit one can engage in.  It is, often quite literally, a coprophilic and necrophilic activity.  The body of a chicken, pig, or cow is often covered and embedded with feces due to the inevitable fact that death is a messy process where one shits oneself.  There is also the matter of the corpse itself — corpses are unclean, which is why humans do not eat their own dead.  Only carnivores such as lions and sharks (big, razorblade teeth, short digestive tract) can handle the nasty bacteria that teems from every bite of quickly-rotting flesh.  You would think that a human would not have to be informed that eating corpses and poop is not a healthy or wise habit, but thousands of years of addiction, conditioning, and entitlement have trained most of the human race otherwise.  

Humans have always prided themselves on their intellectual abilities, and there is actually much to be proud of.  Man’s intellect has given him the gift of reason, logic, and contemplation, all of which are jettisoned the instant a human puts a piece of intestine-wrapped, feces-laden, slaughterhouse floor debris sausage into his mouth.

Humans have chosen to express their superiority to other creatures and their unchallenged dominance of the planet by resorting to necrovorism.  Never mind that man’s actions over the last few hundred years are warming the Earth to the point where the living superorganism is fixing to crush all of our fragile civilizations, who happen to need convenient things like shipping avenues and a stable climate, nah, let’s keep on stuffing our face with sentient beings who wanted to live free lives.  The greatest minds on our planet are capable of the most staggering suspensions of cognitive dissonance.  The same people who consider themselves stewards of the Earth and animal/nature lovers go out into the forest and assassinate the animals they “respect” with high powered rifles.  To add insult to mortal injury, the only reason deer and other animals require a new apex predator is because the self-styled smartest species on the planet destroyed the previous order to put up his mini-malls, highways, and suburban tract homes.    “Stop driving cars and flying in planes!” screech the humans who label themselves as environmentalists as they suffer convenient amnesia and fly to a magical fantasyland where cows ruminate rainbows and unicorn farts instead of huge amounts of plants.  I cannot help but feel mentally superior to a human who cries about plants having feelings yet fails to understand which primeval forests were mowed down so soy could be grown for his hamburger.  Maybe I can placate him in his whirl of seething emotions by letting him take a pet banana out on a walk.

Spiritually, I am the fire and brimstone to the waffling, rotted out dry plastic of necrovore justifications and rationalizations.  If this is a purity contest, I am not the one polluting my chi with the energies of murder victims.  I suppose Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein felt they had the spiritual right to take other’s lives, plus I’m sure they felt a rush of power and dominance that came from victimizing the innocent. Hmmm, can we say mommy issues?  I would not put them on the side of righteous protagonist if I were writing a novel about their exploits.  

Have a good time at your fairy festival, while you dress as a winged elemental and then eat or wear the remnants of another winged elemental who has been stripped of her feathers.  Why did you do it?  Convenience?  Jealousy? Power trip?

So please don’t talk to me about communing with gods and lofty aspirations when you worship every day at the altar of addiction to dead flesh.  If there is anyone to answer to in the end, I hope you have to face the animals you paid to have killed or personally killed.  You live in the age of the internet, where the animals who suffer for your palate, entertainment, and pleasure can be viewed on video dying for no good reason — you have officially run out of excuses.

The Seal

I am having one of those days where I am not sure if I am mentally and physically well enough to work. We all have them, but if you are one of the vast numbers of the lower middle class, you do not get to choose: you’re going to work.

This month (and this whole year) has been a rough ride for me. Summer is always a low time. Despite being incredibly grateful for warm evenings and fresh fruits being in season, I have never liked the hot season. After the June Solstice, my personal fortunes always run low, I find myself out of money, pressed for time, and physically diminished. I mean that literally, as summer decimates my appetite for food.

 I have theories about genders and seasons, perhaps to be discussed at another time.

Last night I had a dream about a seal. Some background here: my dreams have always been negative. I remember dreams I had when I was six years old — they were kind of hilarious and mostly terrifying, ominous, and tinged with darkness.

 To make a long story short, my dreams have not improved with age.

 I dream in anxiety.

 The recurring dream I used to have about being trapped in high school tortured me to the point where I attempted to exorcise it like a demon by writing a story about a high school girl forced to live forever — the result was my first novel, Forever Fifteen. Did it work? Sort of. The high school dreams were replaced with dreams about being trapped in college. A horrible, horrible dream I had about being witness to the aftermath of a young woman’s rape ended up in my novel River’s Heart. In River’s Heart, the protagonist goes on a killing spree afterwards and genocides the males responsible for the rape, which was how I would have ended my dream if it were possible. Nightmares (both my nightly ones and the ones in real life) don’t resolve so easily.

Anyway, the seal. I had a dream about interacting with a seal.

Because my dreams are stupid, the seal was swimming through a channel dug in someone’s suburban lawn. The seal was part of a traveling zoo of sorts. Someone found out I was a vegan animal lover and invited me to hang out with the seal, who swum up from her channel and flopped onto a couch where I was sitting.

 Now I’d like to take a moment to make an observation about vegans and non-human animals. I have always had an empathic streak which has been difficult to turn off. Most vegans have this, and it gives us a touch of Dr. Doolittle- like ability to bond and have instant rapport with a great many domesticated and wild non-humans. Once you stop eating animals and cease the presumption they exist for your own use, there is a psychic change that occurs around you. Some non-human animals can sense that and gravitate towards it. Birds will often not notice or care if a vegan is around, whereas they will fly away if a regular egg, milk, or meat-eating human enters the scene. Dogs who are terrified of new people will jump into a vegan’s arms. Most recently, I witnessed a bumblebee who was obsessed with my friend Mike, hovering around him, landing on his shirt, and perhaps desiring an interspecies make out session.

The seal was one of my instant animal friends. She let me hug her and kiss her head. We played for a dream-hour until it came time to go. Neither of us wanted to leave because we were pals, fast friends, compadres. I had to leave and she had to jump back into her channel. In the next scene of the dream, I was trudging away towards whatever list of tedious human to-dos I was obligated to perform. From a distance, I saw the zookeepers hoisting the seal’s sedated body and preparing to shove her in a trunk so she could be taken to “perform” somewhere else.

I woke up in emotional tatters. I am shredded. I don’t know how to get out of this and force myself to function today.

My one thought to the zookeepers, the hunters, the free-range farmers, the SeaWorld spectators, the buyers from kitty and doggy mills, the animal torturers, the human breeders who abandon their “pets” for the new baby, the buyers of animal-tested products, and the meat-eaters of every stripe and walk of life:

WHY CAN’T YOU JUST LEAVE THEM ALONE?

 I don’t want to hate my fellow humans like I do. I admit it. Sometimes, I don’t just hate the sin.

This is every vegan’s cross to bear. This is the real reason people are afraid to become vegan. They are terrified of what their own anger towards their fellow humans will be. They are terrified at how angry they will be at their own hypocrisy and their own past actions. They are terrified of owning their true emotions.

There’s no solution to the way I feel today. I just have to feel it. I have to suck it up. I have to try to think of the seal and all the untold billions of animals like her being exploited, enslaved, murdered, and driven extinct instead of my own miserable self.

I have to try to get over my hatred of a species that feels entitled to enslave and eat beings who wanted to live and to attempt to do the tiny, tiny things that are within my power to reach them. I need to try to find courage when I have none. I have to gather the will to exist when it would be infinitely easier to embrace the void.