Meatmachine.info

During the last few days I spent in Chico, betwixt final exams and the official start of summer, I went to a Thai restaurant for dinner with some friends of mine. Facing a menu that generously accommodated vegetarian and vegan preferences, and with our little dinner party split 50/50 vegetarian/omnivore, it was unavoidable that the topic of diets arose.

A parallel was drawn between the impetus placed on an individual to defend and explain their vegetarianism/veganism when outed, and that felt by someone coming out as being gay or bisexual. Obviously there some significant differences between these two situations. For example, it’s rare to hear of anti-vegan hate crimes, and churches don’t preach of the sin that is a meal without meat. However, both situations involve an individual identifying with a group that is outside the norm. This identification implies disparities in tastes, practices, and values.

“Are they going to preach to me?” “Are they going to try to change my values?” “Gosh they’re different.” “Gosh I hope they don’t challenge my values.”

I’ve been a vegetarian for over a year, specifically I’ve been a lacto-ovo vegetarian for 14 months. I remember the day I started, senior year of high school. The animal rights club had organized an entire day with a heavy focus on the cruelty of factory farming. I remember watching a video about the conditions in which pigs were slaughtered and processed, I remember it was very graphic. Some students were disgusted and left, some students were amused by the way the animals struggled and violently kicked as they were slaughtered. In all honesty, seeing the suffering of meat didn’t do much for me. I wasn’t horrified, I didn’t feel vindicated, I wasn’t grossed out, and I didn’t feel moved to take radical action.

But I did stop eating meat that day. It was high school after all, and you can’t be a real punx rocker unless you stick it to the man in some way. The principal reason behind my going vegetarian was to challenge norms. “This is how it’s commonly done, so let’s try something contrary.” Around the same time I found myself smitten by Whitman and Wordsworth, and this lead me tumbling down through the Romantics, Emerson, Thoreau, Leopold, stewardship, Gary Snyder, sustainability, Sharman Apt Russell, environmental ethics, and eventually to where I sit now, at the temporary bottom of a reasoned hole.

Today, the reasons why I don’t eat meat still have as little to do with animal rights as they ever have. I’m much more concerned with conservation of energy and the depletion of sources/over-filling of sinks on this our finite planet. A basic rule of thumb (brought to us by thermodynamics) is that transduction of energy from one form of matter to another (sunlight>grass, or grass>cow, or cow>human) about 90% of the original energy is consumed in the process of finding/eating/digesting/metabolizing/growing/reproducing. In practical terms, this means that a serving of beef cost roughly ten times as much to produce as an equivalent portion of tofu, or asparagus, or tomatoes, or corn, or anything else that grows in sunlight. This cost can be measured in calories, the fuel required to transport and process corn for feedlots, the amount of water consumed, or waste produced, or in the petroleum required to produce synthetic nitrates used to grow the soy/corn/etc. Not to mention the health benefits; so I won’t mention them.

I’ve often given the example “well, if I went out in to the woods and caught a rabbit, or shot a deer, yeah I’d be fine eating it.” But I probably wouldn’t. Let me be the conservative eater, privileged omnivore I am.

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Kurt, Joe, Joey, Sid, arise!

If dead musicians hawking leather boots from some boring archetypal judaeo-christian concept of an after-life isn’t punk rock, then I don’t know what is.

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Inspired by a few conversations on the topics of bike safety, wearing helmets, and investing in one’s own health, I’ve been thinking about cars a lot lately.

What we have now, at least in these United States, is a culture dominated by cars. And I worry, have we made grave miscalculations? Certainly automotive transport fills a vital role in the infrastructure of our society; the benefits are countless. But perhaps the consequences outweigh them? 1987, Heathcote Williams publishes his epic poem Autogeddon in the Whole Earth Catalog.

…This is half-way house.
Half the world’s paychecks are auto-related,
Half the world’s resources are auto-devoted,
And half the world will be involved in an auto-accident
At some time during their life.
Interconnecting roads, laid out like lattice-work,
Might sometimes strike a moderately subtle viewer
As a predatory web…

Accidental death is the third biggest killer of men in the United States, and the seventh biggest of women. Of these accidental deaths, 44.3% are classifies as Motor Vehicle Accidents (MVA), according to a National Vital Statistics report.

Are these acceptable losses? Of our personal daily trips, nearly 90% are made by car, while their average distance is only 10 miles. Considering also the abundant anecdotal evidence, it’s obvious that there is a lot of unnecessary driving going on. The desire to drive, the right to drive, the need to drive is so deeply ingrained in us, so heavily thrown upon us through advertising, so encouraged that it may be hard to imagine how little and how rarely it’s actually necessary that we do drive.

If people chose to drive less, instead opting for other means of transport that didn’t involve 3 ton of steel hurling through residential areas, would this have an impact the number of MVA deaths every year? Of course it would, but I don’t presume to be able to predict by how much. Our brains time and time again fail to accurately model large statistical systems; we’re just not good at fitting big numbers in there. Sure, we can make inferences about the tendencies of large data sets, and I assume that less driving would result in fewer deaths, but to what degree I couldn’t say. For accurate statistical modeling real data is needed, and it just doesn’t exist for this hypothetical model.

“There’s a slight chance” blurs to “it’d never happen to me.” But it does happen, often. In all likelihood, it will happen to me in my lifetime, and to you in yours. This is why I worry.

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U.S. F-16s unleash “shock and awe” on South Jersey.

As a New Jersey resident once-removed, I demand the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces. Their presence is only feeding fuel to the fire of sectarian violence between the North-Jerseyunnis and the South-Jerseyiites. They say we hate them “for their freedom”, but this is just mindless rhetoric. Those closer to the pulse that beats beneath the garden state would be wise to consider the possibility of “blowback”.

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I’ve got an opportunity. A company that runs fully-supported cross-country group rides is looking to hire an assistant mechanic. If I got this job, I would ride my bike across the continental United States with free meals and lodgings for three months, I’d get paid to fix the bikes of other riders, and I could easily make more money than I would if I was being paid to do something I wouldn’t enjoy nearly as much.

The only problem with this plan is that it will most likely consume my entire summer, save for a few days at the ass-end in August. I wouldn’t be able to do any of the things I’ve been planning on doing, like spending weeks on the East coast with family and friends, or the same thing on the West coast for that matter. I wouldn’t be able to re-record the 20 tracks of the album High-Five Lo-Fi with Jon, I wouldn’t be able to make a movie with Molly, I wouldn’t be able to start a rockabilly fusion band with Goldy, I wouldn’t be able to play with my mom’s new kittens Presta and Schrader, I wouldn’t get to curl up in my bed and sleep for days on end.

But I would get to ride my bike through what promises to be some of the most beautiful parts of this country. I would get to make a living doing something I love, something most people pay over a grand for the chance to do. I would get to keep a travelogue. I would get to improve my talents in many adjacent fields. I would get to tune this body in to the well-oiled machine it ought to be. I would get to tune countless undoubtedly fancy bikes.

All things considered, I can’t think of any reason to not pursue this job with everything in me. I still need to send in an application and resume, so any advice concerning methods for effective coverletter/resume/skill-set writing would be greatly appreciated. I hope all this excitement isn’t for naught.

Update: For naught. I’m just not 21 years old enough for them.

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An affiliation,
of bone muscle and cord,
a heart beats unaware;
for no limb, no love.
The whole communicating
only hunger and debt,
but I’m not
listening anymore.

When you ask me,
for what won’t be the last time today,
“when are you going to come home?”
With your eyes that cut
through me like a ghost in the way,
and your voice as low as a thunder roll.

The summer comes from behind,
like an old friend you’d forgotten
and you can’t trust
anything he says nowadays.
The cottonwood chaff floats down and
it reminds me of snowfall,
but this California,
we’ll have none of that here.

MP3.

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“Just before the music ended, Bush turned to Falletta, who stood on a step below him, kissed the top of her head and left without saying a word.”

Wow, I want presidential kisses.

Underneath the political-elite/skull and bones/warhawkish exterior, there’s a boy who just wants to kiss up on people, and that’s something we can all relate to.

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…so we might as well” -Jon Flores

A couple things.

M*A*S*H and Macaframa; fixie skate videos. Lucas Brunelle is also always good for making me want to ride faster.

also

I’m no good at giving advice to teenage girls. If you’re feeling pitiable because your boyfriend dumped you for someone else, and you’re resigned to mope around because moving on with your life is “too hard”, then being accused of living in bad faith is probably not going to help.

also

The initial flood of “We went to CHS together!11!! Alcohol!” seems to have died down, and I’m finding Facebook a little bit more comfortable now. It’s strange to see how complex social sites have gotten in the past few years. Facebook is a perfect example of function and design working together for a better user experience, m-space being the opposite. I still want something better though, something as ubiquitous and cross-provider as telephony. The few services I’ve seen that try to merge networking sites only seem to combine their separate contact lists, without actually merging the services. C’mon Internet Duece point Oh, get it together.

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At 6:50 on Thursday night there were about 3 of us standing there, nervously pulling pillows from our bags. The downtown farmer’s market was in full swing and there were a lot of people in the plaza without pillows, giving us strange looks. As minutes passed I noticed more people entering the plaza with pillows over their shoulders, or under their shirts, or bulging out of their backpacks. By 6:58 there was a group of maybe 30. “How do we begin?”

At exactly 7:00 I screamed “pillow fight” at the top of my lungs. Personal space was invaded, public space was taken back, (unfortunately) no pillows exploded, good times were had. At 7:07 we fell to the ground en masse and used our pillows as they were intended.

Ryan and I began to advertise this pillow fight flash mob only four days prior, word of mouth, the internets, a couple strategically posted fliers. It seems there were almost as many people with cameras as there were pillow combatants. Next time it will be bigger, next time it will be better, next time it will be more mischievous.

Local paper coverage here, with video.

Photo by stilldavid, more available here.

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Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

NYT Magazine put out this wonderful article about four months ago, I should’ve posted it sooner. It’s a wonderful starting point for anyone concerned with what’s going in to their body.

Michael Pollan covers the ideology of nutritionism, the simplification and homogenizing of the industrialized Western diet, the overwriting of food culture by food science, and the un-sustainability of a capitalist system that pushes less-healthy more profitable foods, and then pays to develop increasingly advanced and expensive medical science to cure its problems.

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