We are the edibles

This is Ben and Billy having a moment of together time and vulnerability. 

We leave Tucson tomorrow morning, by which I mean sometime around noon. On our way out of town, we will visit the homestead of a couple who is living in our future, friends of Leslie's. We have been here for over two weeks, and I am a little bit taken with this town, mostly the food we have eaten. 

Speaking of food, the wok seems jealous of Billy, and has inserted herself into several photos: frying plantains, sweet potato and leek hash, goat chorizo and fried eggs. This bitch is on fire. 

And if you got hung up on "goat chorizo," let me assure you that enough garlic and cumin will make anything delicious if you're into that kind of thing, and by "that kind of thing" I mean flavor. There is a local ranch, Sky Island, that supplies the co-op with pastured meats. The couple who owns it prints their name and phone number on the packaging. I want to call them and tell them that I know they must be good people, because bad people couldn't possibly raise such delicious food. 

On the topic of good people and delicious food, our friends Kevin and Andrew were in town from Seattle by way of two weeks at their other pad in Mexico, where they meditated each morning, swam with dolphins, ate whatever was in season and fresh out of the sea at the market in town two miles away, and got enviable suntans. They spent the night at this hilarious, swanky hotel in the Catalina foothills. The place had a kitchen, so they fed us the way they feed everyone: organic, fresh, local, plentiful, tasty, vegetation-heavy food prepared with love and humor and followed by copious amounts of chocolate. There are no photos. We were too busy talking and eating everything. Andrew got me into pickling a few years ago and he gave me my first kombucha scoby. Not very many people could be as excited as he was that I have a jar of red cabbage fermenting into ruby sauerkraut under the kitchen sink at our rented dollhouse. Everything about the evening was refreshment. They fed us enormous contraband raisins smuggled across the border. You'd think after a month of exile from polite society, the small illegality of smuggled raisins would have lost some of its edge, but the excitement of it only sharpened our senses. Sometimes it's the little things. 

We spent yesterday at the desert museum. It has a hummingbird sanctuary full of greedy, tiny hummingbirds. It also has coyotes that pose on rocks and javelinas that love on each other and take belly naps together under trees. 

Ben went to work with the camera while I mostly just poked him and pointed at things and silently mouthed, "Ooh! Ooh!"

During open hours the giant, mostly outdoor museum is also infested with obnoxious tourists who have no idea that inside voice and outside voice are really more like ideas than hard and fast rules. Sometimes when you are outside, like maybe when you are standing in front of a mountain lion who could maybe kill you, inside voice is perfectly acceptable. Even inside-a-church voice could be just right. I might be turning into an old lady, but I'm fairly certain the mountain lion and bighorn sheep agree with me. 

The big, scary, captive animals track quiet people with their eyes as if to say, "You actually see me." Then again, I have sometimes been accused of anthropomorphism, which is perhaps odd for a ravenous carnivore such as I. I don't think the two ideas are incompatible, empathizing with animals and also eating them. Andrew has been vegetarian for twenty years, and we haven't really talked about it (Kevin eats everything). I'll have to ask him why, and he might ask me the same thing. I mean, we've all seen Buttermilk the baby goat jumping all over his friends, and besides owls, which everyone knows are sort of assholes, who could eat this sweet little buddy?

Without getting too deep into it this time, it matters to both me and Andrew where our food comes from, whether it is plant or animal, and I am grateful both for and to my food. I make no case for or against any particular diet other than what works for one's own holistic well-being, and I do not take my choices lightly. I actually spent some years in my twenties as a semi-neurotic vegan, and am now a semi-neurotic forty-year-old omnivore, although I am convinced that cholesterol soothes a troubled spirit, especially when administered in the form of custard or gelato. None of this comes without a good deal of thought... and overthought. 

Thoughts, I think, should generally lead somewhere, otherwise why waste all that time and energy? And so, while I have not, nor should I, come to any formal conclusions about what anyone but I should be eating, I have decided what should eat me. Not to be terribly morbid, but Ben and I agreed that when we are dead, we want our newly useless bodies to be dumped in the desert to be food for the scavengers and insects and other living things that also like to eat meat. We desire to be in death what we are learning to be now--beings who fully participate, appreciate the cycle of life and feast of this earth, and return what we took. We are not ash. We are not dust. We are meat, and meat is delicious.