January 4, 2007 - Thursday

January 4, 2007 - Thursday
death by health freak
It's the day after boxing day and after much breathless running and paranoid looks over my shoulder I've finally found a place to hide. I have been scrambling from refuge to refuge for days now and think that I have come to the end of my strained energy. This sanctuary is a meager affair –a cardboard box behind the foul smelling Burger King in downtown Ottawa. Here, with my head between my knees over the glowing screen of my computer, I am aware of rats the size of beavers (maybe they are beavers?) gnawing at the soaked walls. Although the weather has been mild –in a way you might say that the average weight of people here is 'slight'— it's still cold enough that in the early hours of the morning, between the intermittent huffing of wild dogs and howls of drunken revelers, I can hear my testicles whimpering furtively. I am using the last the remaining battery power on my laptop to hammer out these words. I hope I have enough life left in the thing...


I have been chased here like a gazelle pursued by starving hyenas. A duo of doom has been hunting me since a few days before Christmas. They are tireless in their frenzied pursuit…Possibly I could escape the cute babies as they are generally quite slow and do not have the capacity for logical reasoning to anticipate my ducking and weaving. The vegetarians or 'health freaks', on the other hand, are a much more dogged. They are lean and have the hollowed wild looks of people trying desperately to convince you of the chicken holocaust. Seemingly designed for speed these people have endless endurance and are sensitive to the smell of meat whether it be cow, swine, or human. After several days without a shower I smell distinctly human…this will surely be my undoing.


The vegetarians, being vegetarians, will not actually kill me. They will pick at my body, nattering away about soya, ginseng and tofu until I am a blubbering heap. This sort of sadism could take days once they have me cornered. They are not only fueled by their own faultless arguments, but by modern marketing as well.


An example of this is a product known as 'Tofurkey' which is a meant as a substitute for real turkey when all your dinner mates are eating the big bird. Because the stuff doesn't look like a turkey –looking more like a spatially impaired sausage, or Gandhi's most painful turd— or have the remotest taste of turkey I am hard-pressed to come up with the point of naming it 'Tofurkey' other than to relieve the embarrassment of people around them who are eating the true fowl when the occasion arises. I should add here that the package comes with an X-shaped soya stick which serves as a wishbone for the more mystical vegetarians.

In summary: the tofu substitute for turkey is named 'Tofurkey', and the tofu substitute for chicken is 'Toficken'. Which begs the question: what would they call the tofu substitute for duck?