“Hey, Steve should show up! We’ll be at the leather bar tonight!”
There was a pause on the other end of the phone. I was talking to dude’s wife. And inviting her to invite him to come see OXBOW play at a leather bar. As in, motorcycle parts suspended from the ceilings and protruding from the walls and special piss nights for all who find themselves in need of a special night to enjoy piss.
“Yeah: no. He’s not going to do that.”
“Why not? It’s music night.” I guess, versus piss night.
“Look at him.” And I visualized Steve with his leather jacket and leather boots and tattoos and shaved head and long beard and wallet on a chain and I got it. “There are just some things some people shouldn’t do.”
I don’t know if she actually said this last part but it felt like she said it and I wondered if anyone had ever said it to me. Specifically in regards to medicine, medical advice or more directly medical applications, since I have a long historical record of badly abusing all three. And this is even before the Internet made it so easy to do so.
“You OK?”
[T]he first time my anus tried to kill me…generated a Eureka moment: chemically created, genetically modified fake meat was seducing my mouth while savaging my colon.
“I’m FINE.” I was a teenage bodybuilder and I wanted, like all teenage bodybuilders, to get big(ger). And with a few biology classes under my belt I had figured out that pituitary glands had had something to do with gaining muscle, and adrenal glands too. So imagine my surprise when I found this at a “health” food store on the Upper West Side.
It said take two pills a piece. With meals. Which was fine. But I was a big kid and figured that two, well, that that number must have been for normal-sized humans. Four made much more sense. So four pituitary gland pills, four adrenal gland pills, and if it was possible to feel both jittery and sluggish I was and did. Enough so that gym buddies in a gym where guys would mix protein powder with orange juice and vodka (g-d’s honest truth) noticed enough to ask if I was OK.
A pattern that would sadly be repeated throughout most of my adult life premised as it was on the curse of this age: “ah, what do they know?”
So one recommended sleeping pill became two, two scoops of protein powder became four, four cc’s of some steroid when I had gotten into such things in my 20s became a number of cc’s that no sane person should entertain. You see, I was a habitual overuser, because I was an exceptionalist and habitually saw myself needing more than the “average” person.
Which is the way it had traditionally been with me and food. Eating eight pounds of red meat? Well, that’s for normal people. For me? On a good day I’d routinely down 10 to 12 per meal. Pounds. And I weighed 265 pounds and was loving every forkful of it. But in 2007 I became a pescatarian on the advice of some MMA fighters I knew and never looked back.
So imagine my joy when right out of the heart of Silicon Valley and environs I got wind of people taking vegetarianism/pescatarianism well beyond veggie burgers and into shit we only dreamed of in the ‘60s: engineered food that was not Soylent Green.
Well, we now had it. And if you had stopped eating meat and started eating what was now called by different proprietary names like Impossible Burgers, Beyond Burgers, and so on, you’d have welcomed the widening of your palate. And in the case of my only fish diet, a lessening of the mercury I was probably consuming massive amounts of.
Not just welcomed it. These were delicious. And you didn’t have to visualize the murder of any dewy-eyed ruminant while enjoying it. Which I did. As aggressively as I used to do with meat. I mean, of course: I needed more than the average person.
Completely unrelated to this I started dying.
I started losing weight because of GI issues, and dropped from somewhere in the low 220s to 192. An almost 30 pound weight loss. I had no idea what was going on but up until April of this year I was down to just eating soup and drinking Ensure meal replacements. Eventually I could work myself up to real meals. And a routine that saw me eat pretty much the same sorts of things every day. Lots of fiber. Lots of fluids.
I gained the weight back, and all of my GI issues shifted into background noise.
This week though. I decided to live a little.
Worked in four Impossible Burgers, and four Beyond Meat italian sausages. And they were as good as I remembered them being. Man, it was good to be able to eat again.
I wrote them under a subject heading that said, “Why is the Impossible Burger killing my anus?”
Yesterday though when it came time to void my bowels the misery and terror that I had written about back the first time my anus tried to kill me, had returned. Which, finally and irrefutably, generated a Eureka moment: chemically created, genetically modified fake meat was seducing my mouth while savaging my colon.
So I told my wife. “Chemically created, genetically modified fake meat was trying to kill my anus.”
“I already TOLD you that,” came the voice of marital sympathy. “You were never supposed to eat that much of that shit. But you didn’t listen and you…”
I had stopped listening. I had started thinking of precisely what the hell Impossible Burger would have to say about my sphincter sleuthing. So I wrote them under a subject heading that said, “Why is the Impossible Burger killing my anus?”
As of press time I have received no reply to my query. I will leave it in the comments when and if it shows up but I am guessing, and I’ll bet that I am guessing correctly, that it’ll be some version of “there are just some things some people shouldn’t do.”
For my part? For my part it’ll be chemically created, genetically modified fake meat. Like one of my steroid dealers once said when I asked him if those pituitary and adrenal gland pills I was taking were doing anything, “nothing works like the real thing baby.”
Then he proceeded to sell me two of everything he had. Because, you know, I’m…exceptional. And special. Like the Olympics.
But the truth of the matter is, I’m just glad to have figured it out and now will live to, comfortably, void another day, putting this whole horrible chapter behind me.
See what I did there?
[For those of you who missed last week’s column because I sent it out to only paid subscribers by accident here it is and here’s the subtext of the substack: jokes about Alec Baldwin killing people accidentally sort of fail to live up to their comedic potential.]
Impossible Burgers? My Ass!
And a response from Impossible Foods: Emmet (Impossible Foods)
Nov 10, 2021, 11:40 PST
Hi there,
Thank you for contacting us, and we hope you’re feeling better.
Symptoms like you described can have many causes, and we want to work with you to see if we can shed any light on your situation. If you're open to it, we'd like to send over additional questions so that we can better understand what you experienced.
In the meantime, in case you’d like to review the ingredient list, it’s available below and also on our website:
Water, Soy Protein Concentrate, Coconut Oil, Sunflower Oil, Natural Flavors, 2% or less of: Potato Protein, Methylcellulose, Yeast Extract, Cultured Dextrose, Food Starch Modified, Soy Leghemoglobin, Salt, Soy Protein Isolate, Mixed Tocopherols (Vitamin E), Zinc Gluconate, Thiamine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B1), Sodium Ascorbate (Vitamin C), Niacin, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B6), Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Vitamin B12.
Contains: Soy
If you have any additional questions, please don’t hesitate to let us know. We look forward to hearing back from you.
Sincerely,
Emmet
Reminds me of Olestra chips which, for the longest time, seemed like a decent tradeoff.