Resistance is futile, but so is non-resistance

April 21, 008
Black Rockalypse

Ain’t no kale in armageddon.

So we’ve officially survived our first winter out here in the Black Rock Desert, and I’m here to tell you, ladies and gentlemen: I’m not sure what to tell you. About the way to feed yourself in this lifetime, anyway.

Back in San Francisco, I used to eat granola with kefir, soy lecithin granules, flaxseed meal, and goji berries for breakfast. Followed by a dropper-full of chlor-oxygen with a handful of raisins. And pills, the good kind: antioxidanty stuff like like kelp, N-Acetyl Cysteine, CoQ10, Acetyl L-Carnitine, Silymarin, and vitamin C. Mid-morning there would be kombucha, and lunch and dinner would involve mostly items grown on farms. Raised as I was on Hostess products and Jell-O and canned everything else, I moved to California in my 20s, took advantage of the bounty there, and slowly found my way to hippie-food nirvana.

On kitchen crew during Burning Man cleanup this past fall, 13 and Arwen and I squirreled away secret stashes: Julienned raw kale “cooked” overnight in a solution of sesame oil, live apple cider vinegar, and raw garlic. Beets grated together with the same solution, and ginger added as well. Smoothies with green supplements. Fancy nuts and berries.

Those delicacies are all long gone. Hopefully our crops will come in this summer, but that’s a potentially non-occurring then, and this is a very hungry now.

food porn

Question: How come the hard-core meatheads, the potato-and-pop-tart eaters, the fourth-helping bacon bitches out here have survived multiple chem trail poisonings and monkeypoxes without so much as a sneeze or a whimper? Why can they eat nothing but pancakes and instant oatmeal and still be chomping at the bit to pound T-stakes?

And why have I been the one to go down? I mean Every. Time. There’s. A. Flu. Me and the vegans and the candida people, we go down.

Is it because I ran out of turmeric, of which I used to take half a teaspoon every morning in hot water, in the hopes it would protect me from staph and MRSA? Well, I did survive almost cutting off my finger this past winter, without antibiotics or infection, in a makeshift triage unit in the desert in wintertime …

Is it because there’s no more apple cider vinegar, of which I had six bottles hidden away in my trailer? Back in the hyperworld, I’d follow up my turmeric with a bracing swig of Bragg’s live mothery goodness. Why? Hippocrates drank it; says so on the bottle.

(PS it’s hilarious when a certain someone out here would make fun of me during cleanup for drinking “apple splooge” … right before taking a pull from a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 “Banana Red” flavor, or some other abomination of naturally-occuring substances. How long til the children in the backwoods and suburbs and ghettos of America think “red” is a fruit?)

Sure, where others needed coffee injections, a PBR, and a cigarette merely to throw back the covers, I used to spring out of bed like a used-car salesman. Fueled by kale and beets and kombucha and and yerba mate, I maintained the party alongside hardcore acidheads and white-powder freaks, and stayed up til sunrise with the best of them.

Indeed, even now that we abandoned fools under the Not-Dome are eating rice and beans on endless repeat (and sometimes only rice), we’re all weakened. Those who do the most complaining are the ones who used to make fun of us for eating rice and beans, back when we didn’t have to… but they’re also the powerhouse workers who can build greenhouses from sunup to sundown.

Whereas 13 and Arwen and I are barely able to lift our heads some days. Back shivers and psychic flashes and all-around ectoplasmic weird-outs abound for us three, even more so than before. Some of the hardier members of our tribe can’t fathom our physical weakness, and it tires us out to constantly assure them we’re not faking to get out of work. But we’ve started to keep our witchy assessments to ourselves. We joke that if this was the movie Minority Report, we’d be the three empaths in the pool. And Arwen’s the lead singer.

Those clouds are still up there, and we’re pretty sure there are two sets. The Not-Us and someone who doesn’t like them… or us. Still no sign of them on the ground. We’ve taken to doing “rain dances” to get them to appear, and DaveX even let us have a 5-gallon can of gasoline to pour on the playa floor and light on fire in the shape of a broken circle.

Nothing.

For now, we will keep furtively convening in my trailer to do yoga or qi gong videos before the batteries run out on my laptop and I have to re-charge it with the pedal-powered generator at the Black Rock Saloon. We will try to hold our heads up, to wish and pray for more shipments of fresh vegetables and turmeric and apple cider vinegar and vitamins from Rainbow Grocery. But honestly, I’m not sure I’m doing it right.

In the hyperworld, I left my old chemical-additive life, kitchen-wise, for a highly efficient diet with few carbs, all fresh veggies, fruits, nuts, probiotics, and lean protein. I made myself resistant to infection, maybe bird flu and stuff like that … but it’s worth pointing out that I turned my body into a race car, so to speak. And now I am literally a 98-pound weakling who has run out of fuel and must be trailered around.

And I could take my 20-foot-long, 2 1/2-ton, American-steel shitkicking 1979 Delta ‘88 Royale and crash it into a brick building and probably still drive away.

What if carbs and dairy buffer us against an industrial life? What if the preservatives and aberrant petroleum products and rendering-plant “natural flavors” in our food actually toxify us to the point where we can take the pain? What if, like the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride, we as a society have “spent the past few years building up a resistance to iocaine powder”?

I’m just saying. I mean I’d personally rather eat kale but … please, enjoy the filth modern society crams down our uneducated throats. Have some white bread, pizza, sugary cereal, Sunny D, genetically-modified corn chips, hormone-injected beef, Little Debbie snack products, fish sticks, sodium-rich canned chili, French fries with mayonnaise, corn dogs, American cheese, and delicious, delicious Cheetos for me. It might save your life when the shit hits the fan.