And a New Year Begins to Unfold

The holidays have come and gone, another year has ticked by and we find ourselves in 2008. The WGA is still on strike, the TV season has turned to dust and we are faced with endless hours of reality programming. Of course there’s always politics to entertain us, the primary races on both sides of the aisle proving themselves unpredictable, which should be exciting but somehow isn’t.

Many folks have made New Year’s resolutions, a practice I normally shun, and yet this year, a change in my life has coincided with the New Year. I have become a vegetarian…

Which is a blatantly incorrect term for me. What I have actually done is ceased being a carnivore. I hate vegetables (with rare exception) and I don’t eat them. What I eat is a lot of pasta. Seafood. Potato. Fruit. Bread. My friend Gus has taken to calling me a carbohydratarian. As good a name as any.

The reason for the change is two fold. The first is health. I’ll be turning forty this year and quite frankly all the stories about people having heart attacks and dying with 50 pounds of undigested read meat clogging their arteries are a little bit alarming. I’m just getting started as a writer and I hope to live long enough to have a decent career.

The other reason? I can’t handle my own hypocrisy anymore. I’m an animal lover. (In general, I’m much fonder of animals than I am of people.) I could never kill an animal. Yet I was always able to rationalize that away with the knowledge that what I was eating had already been slaughtered and was on the shelves in the local super market. That rationalization stopped working for me.

So, no more meat.

It’s been about two weeks now. I appear to have more energy than before. And I’m losing some weight. Healthy, healthy, healthy. And every time I get a craving for bacon, I picture a little pig walking around.

Oink, Oink.