Halloween ‘09

Lierre, with candy

All gothed up and nowhere to go. The one day a year I can wear (black) lipstick. Scary to think what I might look like every day if I wasn’t a radical feminist.

Below is my friend Rachel. You can get a shirt just like hers here.

Rachel, the radical moon

Birthday present

My friend Laurel made this for me. It’s a dish towel that she embroidered by hand, and if you’ve seen The Vegetarian Myth you’ll recognize the motif.

I’m stunned.

I’m a William Morris fan, but I don’t know if I can get chocolate smears and bacon grease on something so beautiful.

She likes it

I–yes, I–got fan mail from Alice Walker.

Feel free to read that again. I had to.

This is what she said:

“The Vegetarian Myth is one of the most important books people, masses of them, can read, as we try with all our might, intelligence, skill, hope, dream and memory, to turn the disastrous course the planet is on. Or rather that we are on because of our abuse of the planet. It’s a wonderful book, full of thoughtful, soulful teachings, and appropriate rage. My admiration for Lierre’s sharing of life experience and knowledge is complete. Thank you.”

-Alice Walker

MRI

It was time. It had been ten years since my last MRI, and my disease usually progresses (progresses? who comes up with this terminology?) a disc every five years. There’s not a thing anyone can do about it, but I guess it’s good to know. The paperwork battle when you’re on Medicaid can be bureaucratically brutal.  This time it was mostly a waiting game, which has its own exhaustions, but since it didn’t involve hearings or lawyers (been there, lain on the floor for that–did you ever notice how there’s never anywhere to lie down even in rooms where sick people are expected?),  I can’t complain.

The MRI room was freezing cold, naturally. They made me take off my carefully selected warm outfit (you can’t have anything metal on you or in you as the “M” in “MRI” is “magnetic”) and had me put on hospital pajamas. Does the word “cold” mean anything to these people? I made jokes about being a human reptile, and took as many blankets (let’s put “blankets” in quotes) as could fit around me.

Then it turned out that because I had the IDET in 2001 (the only surgical option for me–they thread a thin filament into the disc, heat to 170, melt the collagen, and hope that when it heals up, the tears in the annular surface heal, too. Nice try, didn’t work.) I had to have contrast dye for the MRI. If I had known that, I could have warned them: an extra 20 minutes to find a vein. One stick, two sticks, red sticks, bruise sticks… tech finally called for a nurse. I shivered and waited, and made jokes about being cleverly disguised plant life. The head of surgery arrived and she meant business. I suddenly heard my acupuncturist in my head: “blood deficient.” My official diagnosis in Chinese medicine is “lack of blood.” What will happen when you don’t eat meat for twenty years. Freezing cold, no pulse, and degenerating. There it all was: the wages of veganism.

She finally got the IV inserted. Enough said: it hurt. Then it was on into the Tunnel of Delights. It’s really not too bad as long as you keep your eyes shut. About half way through, the tech said he was starting the contrast. Seriously unpleasant–I can’t say I’ve ever felt the interior of my arm before, and there’s nothing quite like the feeling of cold liquid invading the inside of your veins, down your arm, into your fingers, and then up your arm and into your torso. The worst was about 30 seconds later–a nasty metallic taste in my mouth. What did it mean? The claustrophobia isn’t awful for me, but the small violations really began to add up at that point. The clothes, the cold, the IV, the dye, and now the taste. I wanted everything and everybody to leave me alone, and there was nothing for it but to keep holding utterly still for another 2o minutes. I hate being a grown up.

When it was all over, I asked the tech about the taste. People apparently get that all the time with real surgery. He’s never had anyone taste the contrast dye before. Some people can feel the magnetic field where the scan is happening, too, but that didn’t happen to me. Something to look forward to for next time.

The best part is that they handed me a CD on the way out! I have all the pictures right here! And MRIs have gotten way better–there’s all these sectional views–pretty cool. That’s my spine you’re looking at.

So as I went to put my clothes on, the tech made another joke about my plant-life pulse. And then he said, “That’s okay, I like plants–I’m a vegan!”

I couldn’t put it in a novel and make it believable.

Hey, Mr. Fed Man!

Real milk!

Northern California is a strange and wondrous place. But not always good. One huge disappointment has been the lack of edible dairy products. My spine really responds well to dairy fat (probably the Wulzen Factor, an anti-stiffness compound found in raw fats). I was horrified to discover that raw milk is illegal in Humboldt County. I got really spoiled living in the Dairy Kingdom that is New England. Raw milk was legal from the farm, and most of the farms selling it understood that grass-based feeding is what educated consumers want. And it was $5-6/gallon, which seems reasonable to me.

Not so in Humboldt. I can score any strain of MaryJane  on any street corner in Arcata, but not milk. No butter or cheese worth eating, either. It’s all grain-fed, homogenized, and pasteurized. I see cows all around me, but neither they nor their products are getting the respect they deserve.

The basic rundown for those of you who are new to this:

• Cows evolved to eat grass, not grain. Grain destroys the delicate balance of their rumen and ultimately kills them. Grain-feeding alters the balance of fats in their milk and meat. This is the main reason the Omega-3 to Omega-6 ratio is off in most US Americans–in fact, some people have literally no measurable levels of Omega-3s in their bodies. An over-abundance Omega-6s has been implicated in everything from depression to asthma to Alzheimer’s.
• Cows on pasture–given the appropriate climate, soil, and topography–is a food system (ie, a biotic community) that could go on forever. Annual monocrops (grain), in contrast, are inherently destructive to the soil, which is the basis of life itself. Growing grain for people is stupid; feeding grain to animals is stupider still.
• Homogenzing milk turns it (the fats especially) into substances that the human body can not recognize as food. Pasteurizing milk destroys the enzymes that make milk more bio-available. Many people who think they are lactose intolerant can in fact drink raw milk from grass-fed cows just fine.
• Best book on the subject: The Untold Story of Milk by Dr. Ron Schmid.

I’ve pretty well stopped eating any dairy since moving to Humboldt County as a consequence. Once in desperation I bought some mozzarella that’s produced locally. A half-pound and 24 hours later, I had a rash all over my hands and my face. So I’m not making any of this up.

Today, however, I finally managed to get into the Milk Underground and bought a gallon of the good stuff. A gateway drug, clearly, as I intend to get some cheese from the same woman in two weeks.  She’s a wonderful, Weston Price-inspired food warrior, with a history similar to mine: 30 years as a vegetarian and the destroyed health to show for it. Now she has a secret shed with a refrigerator of contraband and a table of WAPF propaganda. You know how when you meet somebody who has the same information and you can almost immediately finish each others’ sentences? We instantly agreed that we need a huge shift in the food culture of the USA–what we think we know about food, what we’re producing, and how it’s being produced. And the hard, sad part is that the people who should be at the forefront (environmentalists) don’t even understand the problems, in large measure because they’ve been led astray by the vegetarian myth.

So: Viva Nutritionistas! Don’t Tread On Ruminants! The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized! Monocrops Are Murder!

And my favorite slogan so far: Eat Fat! (then in little letters below that: Raw and Grass-Fed)

So come and get me, Mr. Fed Man. My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my dairy products.

My Overnight Guest

My friend Diane volunteers at the local wildlife rehab center. She also has 25+ animals at her house at any given moment. She lives in a menagerie of unbearable cuteness. Her newest addition was a baby turkey named Esmee. Diane had to go out of town and Esmee needed some quality time with a human. How could I refuse?

The Sleepover

Ready for bed

Esmee sleeps in Diane’s bed. So I cleared a spot and put down a big towel. The bird was not stupid. She knew what a bed was and what to do when it was sleepy time. Hopped right up and settled down.

Talk Fowl To Me

Settling down

So she snuggled right in and got ready for bed. When I joined her, she curled up against me and laid her little head on my neck. Then about every two minutes she moved down under the covers maybe six inches. By the time I drifted off, she was perching on my ankle.

The Morning After

Still sleeping

Esmee was not a morning person. I got up and started working around 6AM. She buried her head in the comforter. What you see here is her little pear body.

I miss her. The past two days, when I woke up my first thought was “Esmee! Esmee!” Then reality hit: gone.

And we will not discuss why a turkey poult is my best bet for a nightime companion.

The Trip Home

Pasture-raised pigs

On the way home from San Francisco, I stopped and picked up some beef and pork, all raised on pasture at Clark Summit Farm. The farm is perfect. Bacon being my Totem Animal (clinching the diagnosis for the homeopaths in the audience: yes, I am from the tribe of causticum), I am extremely happy. Here’s the link to the farm: http://www.clarksummitfarm.com.

Remember: animals integrated into perennial polycultures are the only hope for sustainable food and a living planet.