Though my beloved dreamster showed me the marvels and delights of splendidly prepared vegan dishes, before my life was so enriched, I subjectively and without culinary expertise of any sort derived a bunch of extremely healthy, though bland and monotonous, super-easy-to-prepare meals.
It is almost time to amass them, coalesce the vapors of my vegan experience, and describe them in one long page here for those faced with delightfully similar circumstances: tempeh and tomato sauce, hummous and pretzels, vegan cookies with almond butter, and many more.
It all began with almond milk, or reading about almond milk, in a PETA pamphlet I picked up from a tabler in D.C. in 1995. The idea of having something so luscious, luxurious, and also healthy, made the ruby meadows bounce their eerie glow off the firmament and into tempest, stream, ravine, and garden.
Dalliancing in fields, lolling by the brook with a daisy between my teeth whilst dazzling a dewy maiden, carried unbelievable appeal. Keats and Shelley, Wordsworth and Spenser, Renoir and Monet, more defined my early vegan years than Star Trek or Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons or technology: these geek-pursuits were kind of suspended for several years.
Maybe, antiaging4poets would be more fitting. It might better describe who I actually am. I cannot describe how much Keats, Yeats, Hopkins, Pope, Frost, cummings, Whitman, and, yes, even the second rate Poe (2nd rate poet, 1st rate original mind), have changed my life.
I wanted nothing more for endless months than to wander with Lucy among the untrodden ways. Every time I read Whitman, I am still uplifted with more cerulean bliss than ever a Chai Tea could generate. (Tai Chi...Chai Tea...interesting spoonerism, btw).
But, the minute the ecstasy of poesy subsides (it never fully subsides. once you have been touched by the wings of poesy, you are forever enthralled, but it can subside a little), I realize that it is likely that I am equally shaped by Star Wars and verse romance, by Demogorgon and Cezanne, by Planet of the Apes and Bach.
And, before sleeping again before my Sunday D&D game, I will read highlights from The Eve. of St. Agnes and listen to X-Minus One, Dark Fantasy, and Dimension X, that is, I will flit from edge to edge with but a modicum of integration.
Horror. Vampires. Supernatural. Gothic. Forgot all about these! When the gauze spreads thin and the psyche glows omnipresent, it is easy to see in streams and wakes, nodes and arcs, how all these interests are so closely related: the medieval lovers of St. Agnes Eve, paladins in D&D, trolls in Wagner, ghosts in Shakespeare, monsters in gothic fiction.
At some level, I feel like integrating them in my psyche, allowing them to cross pollinate at unbridled leisure and haste. But, at some other compartmentalizing end of consciousness, I want to keep them separate, to allow some overlap and synthesis, but to maintain the hierarchy which places poesy at the apex.
My most beautiful beloved sleeps so dreamily.
She is so utterly beautiful.
Soon, lethe-ward will I sink.
Enjoy a fine Sunday, all.