Move over 1991 Happy Holidays Barbie and Ken, there’s a new unrealistic and possibly unhealthy ideal in town and its called Vegans In Love.
(To be frank Barbara and Kenneth, with all that green velvet you didn’t not look like a pair of
gay dragons)
You won’t find Vegans in Love roaming the shelves of your local Sticks n’ Stuff or standing in line for a beef sundae at the local fair, you won’t even find their green asses at an apiary. Vegans in Love are truly elusive. If you’re lucky you might catch them during an early morning graze by the old creek or maybe coming out of a reiki massage school. Sometimes if you wait quietly and patiently, you might even see them at the Whole Foods.
I go to the Whole Foods every day. Every single day. They have enough seating that I don’t feel bad sitting in a six person booth all by myself and lets be honest, they have the flyest, most happening salad bar in town (Beet Salad….Whoa!!!) The other day, I’m assembling my lunch and casually shop lifting a USA Today crossword when across the wasteland of tuna salads and hard-boiled eggs, two figures wrapped in a soft eucalyptus scented light emerged.
He looked like an anorexic lumberjack. He was pushing a cart full of squash, and I’m not talking butternut, I’m talking the squash that all non-vegans tend to assume is just for decoration, the squash that only a true vegophile knows how to operate. His partner was a mermaid with legs, plucked straight out of a thousand year old Norse folk tale, dropped into a poncho and released into the grocery store to make every broad in the place little bit cheaper. There was no way she had ever cut her hair and if there is a God, she never ever will.
They were beautiful.
As soon as they walked through the automatic doors the entire place was all like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYvUXp1OwtI
The world stopped. There were people bumping into the muffins.
We all watched envious and twitching, jacked up on our protein bars as they floated through the prepared food aisle organizing their respective boxes of flax and fermented bean curd…so fucking serene. Skinny Paul Bunyan gently scooped a few extra chickpeas onto his wife’s salad while she wasn’t paying attention and she looked up at him as though he’d just slid the Hope Diamond into her spinach. They were positively blissful and they had pretty awesome skin too.
Yes, it must be good to be a Vegan in Love. In the moment, that is all of us organic shoppers wanted.
Its not like we were assholes. Most of us had done right by Barbie and Ken with our fancy (er..decent) cars and our wrist watches and our tasteful plastic breasts but where was our overriding sense of “All You Need Is Love-ness”?
Just as I was really beginning to enjoy ogling the vegans ogling each other they pulled into the cashier’s line and out of my life. I bet they went back to a plot of land in the hardwood forest where they lived and ran their fruit leather business from. They probably had a little vegan baby named after a month or an endangered species of wild flower. It was safe at home with the pack of wolves that were co-parenting it.
They were gone and I became a little bit sad.
I could never be a Vegan in Love and it had little to do with the fact that I would have a Sausage Mc Sausage every morning if Ronald and the Hamburgular had the weird red and yellow circus balls to make it. I just didn’t have it in my heart
When I left the Whole Foods I would be returning to Hulu plus, Cheeto fingers, and arguing with my husband over who got to sleep on the good pillows. We would make coffee pods, design a pizza on the internet, and fall asleep only waking when the iPhone alerted us of a screaming eBay deal. Every time the toxic natural sunlight dared creep through our east facing windows and onto our tired scowls, we’d talk about getting blackout shades but would ultimately, be too lazy to drive our asses to Ashley Home Furnishings on a weekend. A regular fucking Adam and Eve, we were.
Being Vegans in Love just sounded so much better.
When I did make it home after purchasing the one organic thing that didn’t cost more than my shoes, I told Buckley (Husband has a name! And it’s a cool one!) all about the Vegans in Love. I told him if he wanted, we could move to a glen or a valley or a meadow somewhere, he could learn to play banjo and I could make potato wine and sell it on the side of the road…. braless. We could live off the land, we could even have our own sheep and chickens and goats and…
He stopped me right there.
“What the hell are the vegans going to do with the sheep and the chickens and the goats?
Oh right.
Vegans in love don’t make goat cheese frittatas over an open flame after a long hard day of crocheting comfy wool beanies.
They don’t make goat cheese frittatas at all.
They don’t even wear comfy wool anything.
God only knows what they crochet those damn beanies out of.
“Do you still want us to be vegans and move to some damn nature preserve?” he asked smugly.
“Fuck No”
It guess I didn’t want to be a Vegan in Love after all, I just really wanted to go camping.
