Presidental Thinking

Today, Nicole, (you’ll remember her of the Sponge Bob episode) was blowing up helium balloons in her cube. You can buy helium in tanks now at Costco. I mean, tanks you keep. You don’t have to return them. I never thought of that: --personal helium, in large quantities. Where was that when I was 13? Instead of taping Coke cans cannons together and shooting tennis balls across the school soccer field, we could have breathed in helium and talked funny all day. Hey, it wouldn’t have come down to stealing balloons from a party every six months. With a five-gallon tank of compressed helium could have kept us talking silly till we were 15. But your probably wondering what this is got to do with the President. I’ll get there.

First there is the whole issue about Bay Area vegans. I made the mistake of hanging out with one recently. “Hanging” being the operative word. “Hanging” because I have an apprehension to vegans. Much like right wing fundamentalists. I allow only casual acquaintance to minimize trouble between us. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking vegetarians, I mean vegans. You the know people who don’t eat “anything animal”, even if was just excreted by an animal. This philosophy relegates them to a lot of soy based dishes and stuff that tastes like its been seasoned with a slight hint of dirt. Now there are two reasons to be a vegan. First, you could have advanced heart disease and are trying to get your cholesterol down and unclog your arteries. Second, you could have lost sense of reality. This vegan had a cholesterol level of 135, which was great, but this vegan had disconnected a few neurons in the process. Okay, that was a little harsh. Let’s put it this way, vegans are sort of a fringe element in society. They are like a political minority. Like the Green Party, Libertarians or people that think worlds only six thousand years old, they don’t have a lot of people who will listen to them very long, so the seek out others who will: other vegans. I had met this vegan several times over the last few years. We frequent similar places of Sunday afternoon entertainment. (Places the play 70 music and serve fair beer.) In passing we had struck up conversation. For some reason in a moment of neural disconnection (read a few beers) this summer, I got the idea it might be interesting to date this vegan. Okay, maybe five beers. After all, I was a vegetarian once for a few months (okay weeks). I mean I don’t eat that much meat and my doctor did say I should lower my cholesterol. (It was 202, doctors don’t really yell at you till it gets to 250 or so. But what the heck.) This vegan and I could sauté soy together and lick the dirt off raw turnips or something. So we went on a date.

Dates are where you discover the difference between vegans that chew on dirty vegetables because they want to live to be a hundred and ones that do it for political reasons. Political vegans tend to do socially challenging things, like forgo deodorant. You tend to discover this at the most inopportune of times. Like when you have gotten too close without five beers to dull the senses and you have to avoid turning up your nose whilst the vegan is looking longingly into your eyes. They also let loose with some really naïve opinions about how the world works. For instance this vegan told me, “Wearing wool was cruel to sheep.” While I avoided the turn up of my nose because of body odor, I could not avoid the furrowing of the skin between my eyebrows at the sheep oppression statement.

Sorry, I’m open minded, but I spent enough time around sheep in England to know, they pretty much just chew on grass and figure out which direction the dog wants them to go. Then once a year, they get a haircut.

“Where did you get that from?” I blurted.

“I read it in a magazine.” Was the retort.

“Was this magazine published by animal activists or something?” I said.

“No, it was an article in a vegan publication I was reading.”

I voiced my opinion to the contrary, telling stories of my youth, of creeks and apple trees in Oxford, and hiding in cedar wardrobes full of wool clothes. Oh yeah, and the fact that sheep from the pasture behind the house didn’t seem the worse for being flipped over and given a haircut. I mean they just went back to grazing afterwards. They didn’t need to discuss it with an analyst or anything. Their hair grew back too.

But the point to all this is, I was talking to Nicole yesterday about this vegan hang out. She’s a wool wear’n vegetarian, not a vegan. We kind of joked about the whole sheep thing. Then, today as she was blowing up the balloons and she reference vegans. The reference and the balloons just set off a whole series of what I could best call “vegan thoughts” in my head. I mean, I looked at Nicole and said, “You know I’m not sure I’m comfortable with your use of helium in an office setting. After all, helium is the product of nuclear fusion. And fusion on earth has only netted us one thing: oppressed people. People suffering under the tyranny and threat of total Nuclear Annihilation.” Yeah I capitalized “Nuclear Annihilation” when I spoke it too. My employees laughed.

What’s helium and vegans got to do with the President? Well not much on the surface.
But vegan thinking comes from hanging around too many vegans. They all think the same. Sometimes I think George Bush thinks like he does cause, he hangs around a bunch of people that all think the same. No, I’m not talking about his cabinet. I’d take any of them over him any day. (Well, probably not John Ashcroft. The guy who's attorney general cause he got beat by a dead guy in an election. Course, the president got beat by a live guy. So I guess its about the same. you get into government nowdays by being beat in an election.) No, I talking about the nuts Geroge Bush hangs out with who think the world is only six thousand years old.