Everybody Knows The Competing Identities

I'm A Vegetarian. You're A What? I Don't Eat Meat. How Can You Not Eat Meat? I Just Don't. He Says He Does Not Eat Meat. What? No Meat? No Meat. Steak? No... Chickens! No... And What About The Sausage? No, No Sausage, No Meat! He Says He Does Not Eat Any Meat. Not Even Sausage? I Know! What Is Wrong With Him? What Is Wrong With You? Nothing, I Just Don't Eat Meat!

Why Do I Write? It's Not That I Want People To Think I Am Smart, Or Even That I Am A Good Writer. I Write Because I Want To End My Loneliness.

But When, At The End Of My Sophomore Year, I Became A Philosophy Major And Started Doing My First Seriously Pretentious Thinking, I Became A Vegetarian Again. The Kind Of Willful Forgetting That I Was Sure Meat Eating Required Felt Too Paradoxical To The Intellectual Life I Was Trying To Shape. I Thought Life Could, Should, And Must Conform To The Mold Of Reason. You Can Imagine How Annoying This Made Me.

How Would You Judge An Artist Who Mutilated Animals In A Gallery Because It Was Visually Arresting? How Riveting Would The Sound Of A Tortured Animal Need To Be To Make You Want To Hear It That Badly? Try To Imagine Any End Other Than Taste For Which It Would Be Justifiable To Do What We Do To Farmed Animals.

The Secret Was A Hole In The Middle Of Me That Every Happy Thing Fell Into.