Tales of a Wild
Life:
Picking up Babes
While on a Raw-foods Diet
Preface
Time for a light tale. I eat a 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.