Tales of a Wild Life:
Picking up Babes While
on a Raw-foods Diet
Preface
Time for a light tale. I eat a largely
raw foods diet, and specifically, the kind which includes animal products
(raw eggs, fish and meat) as well. This tale vaguely resembles those
tales in Aajnous Vonderplanitz's book We Want to Live (about a raw
foods diet which includes animal foods) wherein he meets women in health
food stores who seem to really, really, really like him, but only my version
of the story has a macabre twist. The tale which follows is totally
true (with the exception of maybe the very last paragraph in the conclusion),
but the story, which happened in October 2000, is rather funny, at least
to my deranged mind. That same mind thought the story was so funny that
it bore telling! The story below was penned later on the same day
in which the encounter happened.
Part I
For those of you who, like me, are single,
you might wish (if you are delusional) to view the story below as a primer
from a seasoned man of the world (well, at least the town; well, would
you believe the village?) on how to pick up women (or, depending upon your
preferences, persons of any of the 8 genders) in health food stores using
raw foodism as handy conversational bait.
First, let me preface, that since I have
a rather low macho/testosterone quotient and am somewhat androgynous in
personality, I usually do not try meeting women in bars. My progressive
friends (male and female) and I agree that the best places for a single
person of either gender to pick up members of the opposite gender (or same,
depending upon your preference!) are enlightened, politically correct places
such as health food stores (or rallies to save endangered earthworms).
The fact that this has never worked for any of us does not deter us from
believing that this must nontheless be true, since it sounds so reasonable
and so politically correct. It also sounds so noble!
Indeed, I have even seen this tactic recommended in the pages of Utne Reader
(and even in “Idiot’s Guide to Dating”), so it must be a good, workable
strategy (this is kind of like the belief: “If the Bible says it, it must
be true!”). My Rolfing/Craniosacral bodyworker also recommends this
method. It's how she met her husband (the one she later divorced
because he kept having affairs with women he met in health food stores.)
Incidentally, I do go to bars in the evening
sometimes, just because I like to be around people and talk to them, but
I have never yet met a woman in a bar who has become a lover. Indeed,
when I infrequently go to local bars here in Frederick, MD, I often am
approached at my table by women who had been sitting at the bar (or were
outside on the sidewalk looking in the window), and, when asked, I will
buy them a drink or a burger and talk for awhile. The last such woman
I met this way (6 months ago) is fairly typical of those whom I have met
in this manner: she had been sitting up at the bar for a half-hour and
finally approached me at my table where I was sitting alone nursing a glass
of white wine. She told me accusingly that my heart had been staring at
her soul. I invited her to sit (she was already sitting at my table
by then, anyway, and staring at me in a pouty way), bought her a drink
and french fries (gross!) at her request, and she told me her life story.
She was sweet, but with a tough veneer. Her life story happened to
include the fact that she had killed two previous boyfriends (tired of
them), burned one of their houses to the ground (while killing him and
destroying evidence), and her current husband was now in prison for life
as a serial killer. She told me that she was an unrecovered alcoholic,
and also a compulsive gambler and owed over $250,000 in gambling debts,
some to mobsters. Her current boyfriend of the moment was in jail
for 3 days, and she was lonely (this tale is entirely true!) She
was also really cute. She was sweet to talk with, but I think you are seeing
why I don’t try to pick up women in bars, and why I did not try to drag
her home.
On to my tale of the health food store
this morning. Any resemblance to stories of health food store encounters
with women as told in Ajanous’s book (We Want to Live) are wholly unintentional,
but surely add to the strangeness of this tale.
I woke up feeling like hell today, with
major cleansing symptoms from drinking a lot of raw egg/liver custards
lately (I knew in advance that they can make you feel rather ill from massive
organ cleansing and tissue repair, but I have been gamely doing that for
the past week.) In other words, I was not feeling particularly attractive
or studly (not that I ever have felt that way at any other time!)
After running some errands this morning in Frederick’s downtown area, primarily
drying my laundry and shooting the breeze with the drug dealers, hookers,
handgun vendors and undercover cops who also hang out in the laundromat
on 5th Street, I headed to our local health food co-op (The Common Market),
still feeling like I was nursing a hangover, with sinus pain, headache,
arthritic pains all over my body, and a general crabby mood, really wanting
nothing more than to crawl home and go to sleep for a while to allow my
body to heal.
Part II
After putting some produce in my cart,
I ended up at the dairy/egg cooler, and, squatting while propping the cooler
door open with my back, I started transferring 8 dozen egg cartons into
my cart. I was aware of a woman (let’s call her woman #1) a bit further
down the aisle giving me occasional glances and smiles which my lonely
syphilitic brain desperately imagined were approving glances. Suddenly,
I sensed someone behind me, and a woman behind me (let’s call her woman
#2) pulled the cooler door further open to hold it for me, smiled down
at me, and, apparently talking to me, cooed brightly : “Wow, thats a lot
of eggs! What do you do with them all?”
Since I felt like a dying puppy dog (e.g.,
really crappy), I ignored her; I was afraid I might tell her the truth.
Gamely, she tried again seconds later with a bigger, even brighter smile
on her face; she was beaming: “That is a lot of eggs! What do you
do with them? And you look so healthy! You glow! Do you eat them
all yourself?“ I noticed that woman #1 had also sidled closer, and
was now definitely shooting me encouraging glances, much like, “go ahead,
tell us, we both wish to hear!” She, too, was now smiling and making
lots of eye contact. My inner child was now ecstatic: Not only
was a woman talking to me, but two women were actually smiling at me! This
was a first in history! (inner children don't have really good memories!)
My mind, housed as it is in a brain in the last throes of tertiary syphilitic
paresis, was convinced as well that they were also eagerly looking me up
and down, carefully and hungrily admiring my marathon runner's physique
and balding head.
Well, I have a large streak of mischief
in me, and so I decided, in my cleansing-induced haze, to answer truthfully.
I said “I do use them myself. I eat one or two dozen a day.”
My initial questioner emitted sounds of approval and wonder, emitted a
grander and broader smile, and again repeated the fateful question ”You
look really healthy! What do you do with them? How do you eat them?”
Both women were now watching me intently, with big smiles on their faces.
I woulda thought from their smiles that they’d gone to heaven in a big
Cadillac with Elvis as their driver. I was puzzled: this type of
encounter never happens to me on days when I am feeling good and healthy,
and only on days when I feel like death-warmed-over and I can barely think
straight. My inner child was now beyond ecstatic: women were actually
talking to me (us), and they were actually listening to me (us)!
Wow, heaven! My inner child was preparing to write home to wherever
(badly damaged and bratty) inner children write to.
Again, I humbly told the truth. I
said “I make a raw egg custard. I put six raw eggs in a blender,
shells and all. . .” By now my interrogator’s face had dropped;
she muttered something about germs. She was struggling to maintain
her smile, but it was a struggle. The other woman looked worried,
like maybe she had found a snake under a rock, or like her poodle had just
killed all the neighbors, the ones with the noisy kids whom she'd wanted
dead anyway.
I gamely continued: “. . . with a quarter-pound
of raw organic liver, some raw organic butter, 2 raw bananas, raw honey
and raw olive oil, and sometimes one beet, and I blend it and then drink
it. I make these several times a day.”
Somehow, I guess due to my youthful vitality,
incredible impish charisma and my sheer animal magnetism, both women had
now lost their smiles entirely, and instead their faces were awash in scowls
of undisguised revulsion and aversion. Indeed, woman #1 was now backing
away, with fear rapidly replacing the worry and disgust in her eyes; she
was muttering something about "... . . . the surgeon general. . . . germs.
. . horrible!". Woman #2 meanwhile, was frozen, still holding
the cooler door open, and she was no longer looking at me, but rather off
into space, her gaze hardened into trancelike revulsion. Her body
was shaking slightly and she was gagging audibly, as was woman #1, who
was still retreating. As I arose and blundered down the aisle with
my cart, my inner child cringing in shock, woman #1 grimaced and
shot me a disapproving look like I musta been a (dirty, disgusting) lunatic,
and made another attempt at a gagging sound. (My inner child reminded me
that we had never really liked her anyway; that she had looked a little
psycho from the start.) As a parting shot, she pursed her lips and
bared her teeth in an angry scowl of rejection. She shook her sadly
sadly and disapprovingly. I assume she musta looked under a rock
searching for a prince and instead found some maggots eating adead skunk.
Minutes later, I was checking out at one
of the two registers in front of the store. I noticed, in my dazed state,
that the line behind me was the shorter one, and hence, woman #2 had approached
with her cart and joined the line. Suddenly she looked up and saw
me. She lost her smile, put on her game face, and immediately went
into evasive action: she deftly grabbed her cart, and gamely moved it and
herself to the line for the other register, although it was a much longer
line.
Conclusion
At this juncture, my inner child was triumphant.
He crowed to me: “you see! I told you no one likes us! We’re
a creep! We’re losers! I knew it! They hate us!" (Inner
children often get tenses and person a bit jumbled as English is not their
forte; I ignore it.) I hushed my inner chld gently and reassured
it that we are really quite attractive, sensuous, and have lots of animal
magnetism, and that those two women had likely bolted only because of sudden
gastro-intestinal distress (it’s quite rampant in America, according to
the antacid commercials on TV!).
My inner child kept whining, and I finally
had to remind him of how our last psychoanalyst (the one who insisted on
seeing me for four sessions a week for a 7 years at $150 per session so
we could dialogue with same bratty inner child) had died mysteriously of
75 bullet wounds during one of our therapy sessions, and was later found
by his maid (the one he had been sleeping with) with all his internal organs
missing (thank God they didn’t look in my fridge!). Then, with more
bluntness, I told my inner child to shut up unless he wanted to end up
in my blender like Doctor Prosperity-Abundance. I paid the
cashier and left the store. When I got home I made my inner child
go for a 3 mile run on the darkest trail in the woods (I live in the mountains)
and once he was out of sight, I summoned 3 hounds of hell from Hades and
asked them to chase him and scare him a bit. When my inner child
returned, he was very grateful to be back, and kept his mouth shut all
the rest of the day and evening.