Feeding the crew is a big part of greasing the skids on a Black Thursday. Feeding the crew is a big part of any retail operation as you slide towards the oily greasy maw of December 24th.
Over the years - on at least two separate occasions - co-workers complained about the fact that snacks delivered to the break room didn't offer vegan options. At the time I overheard the complaints, I was circling full-flowered vegetarian status (probably with the sticky exception of chicken teriyaki...the one dish running neck-and-neck with cheese pizza and M& M's I miss most).
Not that I stated it, but at the time my mental formulation for the put-upon vegans coalesced into, "You backed yourself into that corner, Jack. Deal with it."
It reminded me of attending the Queer Slam years beforehand, formulated for providing gay, lesbian, bi-, poly-, and transgender folk a welcoming and non-threatening environment to celebrate their wordsmithing and their culture. At one point in the festivity, I overheard someone say, "I don't feel represented." I remember looking at them, but I don't remember which "category" they looked like to my straight white male mind. Which isn't to hamstring my empathy for any group stating displeasure. It simply illustrates the math in pleasing everyone is particularly elusive no matter the genius working the chalkboard.
The retail-employed treat supplier, whether employer or co-worker, operates under zero obligation to take the caloric temperature of every last employee on the schedule and provide vittles appropriate to the wants and desires on tap. Tossing the thin weave of hard earned cash towards the good of the many is applause earning in and of itself. Asking for that extra consideration is arguably the first step upon a slippery slope.
Looking at the man in the mirror, compared to those former vocal co-workers, I'm a lousy vegan.
Since taking the leap, I've eaten frosted Pop Tarts. I've ingested gelatin capsules. For the fact of purchasing food for four-legged carnivores, I would not even label myself vegan, but people love labels. Labelling differentiates at the same time it doubles up and plops you down into an inclusive state. I AM THIS AND THIS I AM. Pages torn from the history book, the evangelical whitewashing of all that has come before. Balderdash. I don't like belonging beyond belonging to my wife and the fuzzy sociopaths running the joint.
When I'd buy snacks for co-workers these last few years, they were vegan-friendly, not that I'd promote the fact and not that I felt like I was slipping a fast one past anyone. My morals decided the sacrificial bent of my cash. I've bought the wife's groceries and doubled-down on the favor by not hectoring, indicating egg and dairy consumption are only adding to suffering. She knows my need for a full-speed acceleration from the land of consuming animal products (at least except for honey; that shit is in everything, chapstick to bourbon).
But if I possess any saving grace, it is acknowledging laziness and a well-honed penchant towards being full of crap.
If a grocery item label indicates the contents might've come into contact with dairy or eggs, I won't buy it. Yet, say the wife has vegetarian sausage and an egg for breakfast, a full 75% of the time I won't even bother to wash the pan before using it to cook a vegan Boca burger.
The last time I attended any kind of Thanksgiving get-together I ate turkey. The year before I'd tried Tofurky. I can't remember the taste. In an act of as yet un-repaid bravery, my brain might've blacked out the atrocity.
Removing myself from Thanksgiving festivities isn't a surprise. Crowds in tight spaces just aren't my gig. Crowds consuming animal flesh and animal products in close proximity even less so.
Arguably, going to the movies is and is not the same as attending a holiday nosh fest. A regular old movie theater experience involves buttered popcorn and all the milk chocolate treats money can buy. Some theaters offer that more mature level experience and you can slosh beer and masticate meat while watching a flick.
Ticket bought, it wasn't until I was in the lobby for a viewing of Logan I realized theater companions both immediate and indirect were going to be putting incisors into all-out exercise while Hugh Jackman performed perforations galore. I didn't act upon the glory of my vegan conviction and walk out of the joint. Me and my little corner sat in our seat for two-plus hours, hardly tending a thought towards the lives of pain and terror experienced by the animals reduced to foodstuffs now sliding their way down multiple surrounding intestinal tracts.
Convenience might be what I'm attempting to dissect. The moments where the knight's armor proves too heavy. The inward tilted eye magically bestowed sight once more, we return to the Grail quest as though nothing of demonstrable significance transpired during that segment painted blank or black in memory.
I don't seek accommodation. I don't go out and eat at restaurants almost specifically because people are nice enough to accommodate me, wanting to make sure the group will deal with menu choices appropriate to my rationale. It is one of those times when it gets clear to me I've become like a cat more and more over the years. Not the carnivorous quotient but the inexplicability of my reasoning. For surely, if I can go to the movies where people are willy-nilly eating from the dreaded food options, I should be capable of putting aside my war long enough to enjoy company in a restaurant setting.
Variables at play are quite similar. The entertainment has the most notable substitute - conversation for film - but under the bright lights, eating choices only serve to inflate the holier than thou snoot riding rein over my soul.
Novelist Nelson DeMille's November newsletter message irritated me enough I deleted it from my inbox weeks ago. Wielding old salt of the earth philosophy like a machete, he gleefully hacked away, belittling animal rights advocates bemoaning the massacre of millions of turkeys. Indeed, DeMille looks forward to the annual bloodletting. The October 2017 newsletter excerpt below is indicative of how DeMille's heart swings towards rubber souls of any variety:
October 31 is Halloween...The politically correct crowd is upset about "cultural appropriation," meaning dressing like an American Indian or a Mexican bandito or something - unless you actually are an American Indian or a Mexican bandito. To those well-meaning, but misguided misfits I say, Dress like the Scarecrow; he had no brain and neither do you.
The politics of entertainers endanger love. Stephen King's slant on the President is probably the cause of more lost readers than DeMille's exhibitionistic glee in taunting vegan pansies such as myself.
What wears on exposed nerves is that the current seeming daily revelations of sexual harassment and abuse perpetrated by men in power will certainly take its rightful place as conversation du jour over mashed potatoes and Aunt Claire's sweet potato pie. DeMille's steadfast stance on the slaughter of the being offered up in white and dark portions does not register as an attackable indiscretion.
Only if a DeMille or King or Coates or Connelly or Child were revealed as potent purveyors of the dirty old man mindset would their actions or philosophy suffice for scorn. Meat murdered at a galloping rate per second is not as interesting or as self-relatable as meat placed in uncomfortable situations with older and well-known meat even though each victim is enduring suffering from nothing more than pure circumstance: the purveyor gets away with what they can; the prevailing culture determines said license.
PETA preaches to the choir this season, too, courtesy of a shock effect baby-as-turkey ad. Given their track record, I'm slow to acknowledge common ground, and wholeheartedly rationalize anyone's gut check or ample disgorge exposed to the image below.
Also, I freely admit the disingenuousness of a meatless radicalism when for fairly 89% of my life I bellied up to the holiday feast owning zero thought towards the short, sad lives up for dispatch.
I have fond memories of Thanksgiving, in particular, the pre-meal snack array my mom would prepare. An overflowing selection of meat and cheese and dips and chips. I know if I'd been approached by some odd duck uncle trying to politicize my football snack choices, the other adults in attendance would've softened the hectoring with chuckles and soft-pointed rejoinders indicating the soft-headed freak needed to leave the poor boy alone.
Every year, day, hour, second, I find myself more afield with those Black Thursday outcasts and that mythical plant chomping uncle.
Brothers in arms, a milling mutant strain of introvert, expatriates imitating taffy, slowly pulling themselves apart between needing no one and seeking affirmation from if not the literal company of pseudo-mystical misanthropic kin.
Were this proud breed a Thanksgiving Day dish it would be relegated to untried status. Saran wrap tucked taut over an indistinct mass meat or loaf or dessert but inarguably brown, festooned with color-leached slices (onion? orange?) and an unseemly chunkish glaze (gravy? frosting?), whole cloth warranting distrust and distance from even the most daring of palates.
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