lagusta.com - 2 essays written at a crossroads

An Anarchist in the Supermarket

and

Emancipation Proclamation

(2 essays written at a crossroads)

An Anarchist in the Supermarket

Every few months I need to go to the supermarket. It’s always a big deal for me – everything I disagree with laid out so tidily in front of my eyes, so many examples of mainstream hideousness. Sample dialogue of me and any friend in the supermarket:

“Oh my God – what is that? It says ‘Xtreme Gusher Blu Grape Cooler’! Extreme gusher! I think I read about that in Savage Love!”

“Oh – Lunchables! Did you know I read an article saying that Lunchables actually aren’t even classified as FOOD? They are so filled with preservatives that the USDA doesn’t even need to regulate them.”

“Hey, did you know that you can buy lemonade powder?? Because mixing three ingredients – ahh!!!! This lemonade powder is pink!!!”

“Um. I don’t want to scare you, but this entire aisle is filled with crackers. It. Is. Nothing. But. Crackers.”

For someone who makes her own miso, tempeh, sauerkraut, pickles, and kimchi, often grinds her own flour, grows her own herbs, makes absolutely everything from scratch, freezes 50 lbs of tomato sauce a year, washes her clothes in a bicycle-powered washing

machine she built, gets her produce from local farms and eats strictly seasonally – the supermarket is an endless source of hilarity/cause of suicidal urges. I’m usually in there for at least an hour, just walking up and down the huge aisles, looking at labels and ingredients, peeking into people’s carts and judging them based on the contents therein.

Today, while I slowly searched for organic collard greens, taking a detour by way of one of my favorite areas, the bakery (I especially love to marvel at those cakes that they put your picture on – “It’s you! In artificial food colors that are slowly giving you cancer! Happy Birthday!”), a friend and I discussed a recurring theme in my life – whether or not my extreme loathing of the world ultimately does anything to change the world or not. He pointed out something very astute: hatred alone doesn’t change anything. It’s not as if, if I just hate something that I hate extra hard, it will go away. I’ve been trying to do that with a chain coffeehouse opening up right next door to my beloved anarchist collective coffeehouse. So far my hatred of it has not stopped it from existing.

Because I was in the supermarket, I started thinking of the other people there, their lives, and how pretty much everything in their lives disgusts me. Their drapes, their pants, their hairstyles, their cars, their food, the food they feed their cats, the schools their kids go to, the existence of their kids, their wedding bands, their religions, their vacations, the books on their bookshelves. Of course, I don’t wish them any ill will, I want them to be happy and all that – I just wish they would analyze their lives a little more critically and act accordingly. I just want humanity to be better.

Hmm. As I’ve said before on lagusta.com, I really love this hatred, but fear that it prevents me from really making change in the world, because it prevents me from living in the world.

In 2002 I wrote an essay called “Living Underground” about how I try to create and control my own world as much as possible. The idea was that the most political thing one can do is to make their lives the outward exemplification of their internal political beliefs, and that exposure to the mainstream world pollutes ones internal world.

I’ve been living under that assumption for a few years now, and perhaps it’s time to revisit it. I’m getting a little worried that I’m living so far underground that the air is a little hard to breathe, and maybe it’s cutting off circulation to my brain.

I’m extremely lucky in that I practically never need to talk to anyone who lives in “the real world.” 99% of my friends are vegetarian, 80% or so are vegan. I live in this tiny little liberal town that is never going to be liberal enough for me. I work alone. I spent an entire day last month making a lamp from recycled milk jugs. I live this peaceful little life, the best life I know how to live. I’ve been lucky enough to structure my life completely according to my own terms.

But lately I’ve been getting a little afraid that my resistance to compromise even a tiny bit is making my life smaller and smaller. The more I learn, the more deeply I delve into the things I believe in, the less fit I am for the real world.

This would be OK, except for one thing:

I have ambitions.

In my heart of hearts, I want it all. I want the freedom to say whatever I want, no matter who it offends. But I also want to be liked and respected, to be a pillar of my community. I want to dismiss the cult of fame that has gripped America today, but I also want to be known as a brilliant thinker and a revolutionary vegan chef. I see other vegans publishing cookbooks and I know I cook better than them, but my desire not to compromise stops me from pitching my own cook book. So right now I am caught in this limbo, where I want to live a bigger life than I’m living but my political views have left me no option but to stay where I am, cycling my laundry and ineffectually railing against the things I can’t stand instead of really working within the system to change them.

I need to decide whether or not to go for it – make a few compromises (toning down the hatred) in order to get my viewpoint out to a wider number of people, which will ultimately benefit society as a while, or to dig in my heels and tell myself that what matters most is that I stay pure, that my life can be an example of the world we could live in if we all just stay stubborn and force the world to adapt to us.

I guess I know the answer, from thinking about it a lot and talking to friends: dip your toes into the sado-society when you can stand it, and ignore it when you can’t. Do what you can. I just need to learn how to do this.

(Without realizing it, I wrote two essays about this phenomenon - here is the other one)

Emancipation Proclamation

The world is mine to be shaped in the image of my highest values, and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or how hard the struggle - Ayn Rand

“The unreasonable man [sic] adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man [sic] expects the world to adapt to him. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man [sic].” – George Bernard Shaw

It is not classy for a liberal to begin an essay with an Ayn Rand quote, but those lines have been a personal beacon for me since high school, and they always make me stand a little straighter. Lately I am in need of a little straightening.

My sweetheart Jacob has been working with some musicians who have stripped their lives down to the bare essentials of their craft: they have built a world-class recording studio in which to make their records, which they work on with a slavish attention to detail that even other obsessive musicians (of which I seem to be acquainted with an unlimited number) marvel at. They spend hours deciding on microphone choices and the most minute decisions – even though they know 99% of listeners won’t be able to tell the difference between a nice-sounding record and a perfectly recorded masterpiece of subtlety and balance. There is something thrilling in his descriptions of their efforts. I’ve always loved stories about obsessive people, especially those who devote lives to esoteric pursuits even when they know the recognition they will get for their work will never equal the care they put into it. They have received lots of recognition for their fine recordings and are notoriously well-respected musicians, but I suspect any accolades they receive drive them to want to practice their craft on ever-higher levels.

As much as I love hearing stories like this, they nag at me uncomfortably lately. I seem to be at a crossroads in my life, and I can’t quote decide where I should be headed. I long to be one of the eccentric artists quietly practicing my craft with an obsessive level of detail, care, and love, but I also worry that devoting my life to just one thing

could be a trap. What if you pour yourself into a pursuit, only to find out in a few years that you don’t love it? Then comes the annoying process of putting it to bed and starting over again, hoping something else will take – or the even worse process of becoming accustomed to doing something you don’t love.

I don’t know the answer, but standing in the middle with my feet poised in all different directions is making my life feel like it’s slowly unraveling. This essay is my attempt to put into words the problem and hopefully work myself through to a solution – an emancipation proclamation for the feelings of paralysis and fear of missteps that have trapped me for months.

The problem: I have this nice, small, successful business. I like it. Four days of the week I work myself to tears, 3 days of the week I work on non-work projects and take baths, read entire books in one sitting, make bicycle-powered washing machines, write bad poetry - I'm well-rounded! I like the biz because I get to buy local produce and work with my rad local farmers, I get all my fancy-pants clients to unwittingly (well, half-wittingly) eat vegan food, I am continually becoming a better chef, I work by myself in my PJs, etc. I dislike it because I'm just cooking for rich people and not really contributing anything to the universe.

It seems I've come to a crossroads. I work with these crazy wonderful women at this crazy wonderful restaurant in CT one day every 2 weeks, and they make no money but have slaved away at this restaurant for 30 years - and it shows. They have customers who have been coming in since before I was born, the walls are covered with their weavings and vintage posters of feminist icons they are friends with, etc etc. They are in their 60s and 70s and work 12 hour days, but they walk outside and pick herbs for the soup from their garden, and they live life on their own terms. My little made up business will never be like that, and part of me longs so much to completely throw my heart into a project like that - a restaurant, a cafe, something that I can make my own, make perfect, something that is the outward manifestation of everything in my heart.

But my three days a week off are eggshell-precious, and I can't bear the thought of losing them. I have no illusions about what having a restaurant entails - endless work, irritating employees, idiotic customers. I like cooking part of the week and having days for other projects - writing, reading, doing my little activist bits, working on the house, drinking…I am interested in so much more besides cooking, and I feel I'll get totally burnt out in a few years if I do this restaurant thing.

There's one more part to this dilemma...should I mention it? I have to. The vegetarian world has changed so much since I stopped eating meat 15 or so years ago - now there is this whole vegetarian culture, with veg celebrity chefs and all this shit, and a part of me wants so badly to open some world-class restaurant that would make me one of the "talked about" chefs, and a part of me is completely sickened by this idea. As a proud member of the underground I'm supposed to loathe shit like that. I know that whatever the masses - even the vegetarian masses - love is, by definition, total crap. "Small is beautiful" is my business mantra. I'm supposed to be an artisan who works quietly at my craft, neither seeking nor accepting praise, because work is what matters, not fame or whatnot. But I'm not that good. It irritates me when I see shitty restaurants, shitty truffles, shitty vegan food in general winning awards and shitty chefs writing shitty cookbooks. But I can't complain if I don't enter the whole mishegas and prove that I'm better than them.

Questions like this have been swirling around my head in the past few months incessantly. 2006 was a strange year for me, and I need more focus in 2007. I need to know who I am. I can't keep sitting here in the middle, able to see both sides so clearly that I never go anywhere. Isn't that what The Bell Jar is about? And all of Salinger? Sort of? Do we beat the phonies at their

own game, or do we do our own thing, and if we do our own thing, where do we get the resources to become happy when society says we're losers?

There has to be a space for those of us who choose to live by nothing other than the whims of our hearts, who live our lives with an Ayn Rand-like stubbornness that the way we are living is right and true and deserves no apology. In that small space, in the cracks between the poured concrete of mainstream America, is where I live – I need to remember that. My purpose is to never compromise, to refuse to tone down or market myself, but to continue living the most wholesome life I can live in all facets.

An Anarchist in the Supermarket and Emancipation Proclamation (2 essays written at a crossroads)	An Anarchist in the Supermarket Every few months I need to go to the supermarket. It’s always a big deal for me – everything I disagree with laid out so tidily in front of my eyes, so many examples of mainstream hideousness. Sample dialogue of me and any friend in the supermarket: “Oh my God – what is that? It says ‘Xtreme Gusher Blu Grape Cooler’! Extreme gusher! I think I read about that in Savage Love!” “Oh – Lunchables! Did you know I read an article saying that Lunchables actually aren’t even classified as FOOD? They are so filled with preservatives that the USDA doesn’t even need to regulate them.” “Hey, did you know that you can buy lemonade powder?? Because mixing three ingredients – ahh!!!! This lemonade powder is pink!!!” “Um. I don’t want to scare you, but this entire aisle is filled with crackers. It. Is. Nothing. But. Crackers.” For someone who makes her own miso, tempeh, sauerkraut, pickles, and kimchi, often grinds her own flour, grows her own herbs, makes absolutely everything from scratch, freezes 50 lbs of tomato sauce a year, washes her clothes in a bicycle-powered washing
l machine she built, gets her produce from local farms and eats strictly seasonally – the supermarket is an endless source of hilarity/cause of suicidal urges. I’m usually in there for at least an hour, just walking up and down the huge aisles, looking at labels and ingredients, peeking into people’s carts and judging them based on the contents therein. Today, while I slowly searched for organic collard greens, taking a detour by way of one of my favorite areas, the bakery (I especially love to marvel at those cakes that they put your picture on – “It’s you! In artificial food colors that are slowly giving you cancer! Happy Birthday!”), a friend and I discussed a recurring theme in my life – whether or not my extreme loathing of the world ultimately does anything to change the world or not. He pointed out something very astute: hatred alone doesn’t change anything. It’s not as if, if I just hate something that I hate extra hard, it will go away. I’ve been trying to do that with a chain coffeehouse opening up right next door to my beloved anarchist collective coffeehouse. So far my hatred of it has not stopped it from existing.	Because I was in the supermarket, I started thinking of the other people there, their lives, and how pretty much everything in their lives disgusts me. Their drapes, their pants, their hairstyles, their cars, their food, the food they feed their cats, the schools their kids go to, the existence of their kids, their wedding bands, their religions, their vacations, the books on their bookshelves. Of course, I don’t wish them any ill will, I want them to be happy and all that – I just wish they would analyze their lives a little more critically and act accordingly. I just want humanity to be better. Hmm. As I’ve said before on lagusta.com, I really love this hatred, but fear that it prevents me from really making change in the world, because it prevents me from living in the world. In 2002 I wrote an essay called “Living Underground” about how I try to create and control my own world as much as possible. The idea was that the most political thing one can do is to make their lives the outward exemplification of their internal political beliefs, and that exposure to the mainstream world pollutes ones internal world.
I’ve been living under that assumption for a few years now, and perhaps it’s time to revisit it. I’m getting a little worried that I’m living so far underground that the air is a little hard to breathe, and maybe it’s cutting off circulation to my brain. I’m extremely lucky in that I practically never need to talk to anyone who lives in “the real world.” 99% of my friends are vegetarian, 80% or so are vegan. I live in this tiny little liberal town that is never going to be liberal enough for me. I work alone. I spent an entire day last month making a lamp from recycled milk jugs. I live this peaceful little life, the best life I know how to live. I’ve been lucky enough to structure my life completely according to my own terms. But lately I’ve been getting a little afraid that my resistance to compromise even a tiny bit is making my life smaller and smaller. The more I learn, the more deeply I delve into the things I believe in, the less fit I am for the real world. This would be OK, except for one thing: I have ambitions.	In my heart of hearts, I want it all. I want the freedom to say whatever I want, no matter who it offends. But I also want to be liked and respected, to be a pillar of my community. I want to dismiss the cult of fame that has gripped America today, but I also want to be known as a brilliant thinker and a revolutionary vegan chef. I see other vegans publishing cookbooks and I know I cook better than them, but my desire not to compromise stops me from pitching my own cook book. So right now I am caught in this limbo, where I want to live a bigger life than I’m living but my political views have left me no option but to stay where I am, cycling my laundry and ineffectually railing against the things I can’t stand instead of really working within the system to change them. I need to decide whether or not to go for it – make a few compromises (toning down the hatred) in order to get my viewpoint out to a wider number of people, which will ultimately benefit society as a while, or to dig in my heels and tell myself that what matters most is that I stay pure, that my life can be an example of the world we could live in if we all just stay stubborn and force the world to adapt to us.
I guess I know the answer, from thinking about it a lot and talking to friends: dip your toes into the sado-society when you can stand it, and ignore it when you can’t. Do what you can. I just need to learn how to do this. (Without realizing it, I wrote two essays about this phenomenon - here is the other one) Emancipation Proclamation The world is mine to be shaped in the image of my highest values, and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or how hard the struggle - Ayn Rand “The unreasonable man [sic] adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man [sic] expects the world to adapt to him. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man [sic].” – George Bernard Shaw It is not classy for a liberal to begin an essay with an Ayn Rand quote, but those lines have been a personal beacon for me since high school, and they always make me stand a little straighter. Lately I am in need of a little straightening.	My sweetheart Jacob has been working with some musicians who have stripped their lives down to the bare essentials of their craft: they have built a world-class recording studio in which to make their records, which they work on with a slavish attention to detail that even other obsessive musicians (of which I seem to be acquainted with an unlimited number) marvel at. They spend hours deciding on microphone choices and the most minute decisions – even though they know 99% of listeners won’t be able to tell the difference between a nice-sounding record and a perfectly recorded masterpiece of subtlety and balance. There is something thrilling in his descriptions of their efforts. I’ve always loved stories about obsessive people, especially those who devote lives to esoteric pursuits even when they know the recognition they will get for their work will never equal the care they put into it. They have received lots of recognition for their fine recordings and are notoriously well-respected musicians, but I suspect any accolades they receive drive them to want to practice their craft on ever-higher levels. As much as I love hearing stories like this, they nag at me uncomfortably lately. I seem to be at a crossroads in my life, and I can’t quote decide where I should be headed. I long to be one of the eccentric artists quietly practicing my craft with an obsessive level of detail, care, and love, but I also worry that devoting my life to just one thing
could be a trap. What if you pour yourself into a pursuit, only to find out in a few years that you don’t love it? Then comes the annoying process of putting it to bed and starting over again, hoping something else will take – or the even worse process of becoming accustomed to doing something you don’t love. I don’t know the answer, but standing in the middle with my feet poised in all different directions is making my life feel like it’s slowly unraveling. This essay is my attempt to put into words the problem and hopefully work myself through to a solution – an emancipation proclamation for the feelings of paralysis and fear of missteps that have trapped me for months. The problem: I have this nice, small, successful business. I like it. Four days of the week I work myself to tears, 3 days of the week I work on non-work projects and take baths, read entire books in one sitting, make bicycle-powered washing machines, write bad poetry - I'm well-rounded! I like the biz because I get to buy local produce and work with my rad local farmers, I get all my fancy-pants clients to unwittingly (well, half-wittingly) eat vegan food, I am continually becoming a better chef, I work by myself in my PJs, etc. I dislike it because I'm just cooking for rich people and not really contributing anything to the universe.	It seems I've come to a crossroads. I work with these crazy wonderful women at this crazy wonderful restaurant in CT one day every 2 weeks, and they make no money but have slaved away at this restaurant for 30 years - and it shows. They have customers who have been coming in since before I was born, the walls are covered with their weavings and vintage posters of feminist icons they are friends with, etc etc. They are in their 60s and 70s and work 12 hour days, but they walk outside and pick herbs for the soup from their garden, and they live life on their own terms. My little made up business will never be like that, and part of me longs so much to completely throw my heart into a project like that - a restaurant, a cafe, something that I can make my own, make perfect, something that is the outward manifestation of everything in my heart. But my three days a week off are eggshell-precious, and I can't bear the thought of losing them. I have no illusions about what having a restaurant entails - endless work, irritating employees, idiotic customers. I like cooking part of the week and having days for other projects - writing, reading, doing my little activist bits, working on the house, drinking…I am interested in so much more besides cooking, and I feel I'll get totally burnt out in a few years if I do this restaurant thing.
There's one more part to this dilemma...should I mention it? I have to. The vegetarian world has changed so much since I stopped eating meat 15 or so years ago - now there is this whole vegetarian culture, with veg celebrity chefs and all this shit, and a part of me wants so badly to open some world-class restaurant that would make me one of the "talked about" chefs, and a part of me is completely sickened by this idea. As a proud member of the underground I'm supposed to loathe shit like that. I know that whatever the masses - even the vegetarian masses - love is, by definition, total crap. "Small is beautiful" is my business mantra. I'm supposed to be an artisan who works quietly at my craft, neither seeking nor accepting praise, because work is what matters, not fame or whatnot. But I'm not that good. It irritates me when I see shitty restaurants, shitty truffles, shitty vegan food in general winning awards and shitty chefs writing shitty cookbooks. But I can't complain if I don't enter the whole mishegas and prove that I'm better than them. Questions like this have been swirling around my head in the past few months incessantly. 2006 was a strange year for me, and I need more focus in 2007. I need to know who I am. I can't keep sitting here in the middle, able to see both sides so clearly that I never go anywhere. Isn't that what The Bell Jar is about? And all of Salinger? Sort of? Do we beat the phonies at their	own game, or do we do our own thing, and if we do our own thing, where do we get the resources to become happy when society says we're losers? There has to be a space for those of us who choose to live by nothing other than the whims of our hearts, who live our lives with an Ayn Rand-like stubbornness that the way we are living is right and true and deserves no apology. In that small space, in the cracks between the poured concrete of mainstream America, is where I live – I need to remember that. My purpose is to never compromise, to refuse to tone down or market myself, but to continue living the most wholesome life I can live in all facets.