Pumpkin Pie, Veganized

Around 20 years ago, a confluence of ideas and events led me to the conclusion that I should go vegan. I quietly conveyed this to my younger brother while we were standing in my kitchen, and he paused. He put his hand on my shoulder, gave me a deeply concerned look, and said “Oh, no, dude. You really don’t want to be one of… you know… those people.” But my mind was made up. And thus, my interesting in cooking launched — this was a long time ago, and if you wanted to be vegan in the Midwest, that meant that you were going to have to seriously learn how to make your own food.

A few months later, it was Thanksgiving time. I was still learning how to cook and bake halfway edible meals, and I wanted to approach a big Thanksgiving feast with enthusiasm — if you’re going to do the whole “meat-free” thing, Thanksgiving is the time to really prove to yourself that you can do it. So, I pulled together a bunch of recipes from various cookbooks and corners of the internet, putting together a menu of all the usual faves: garlicky mashed potatoes, a savory stuffing, some depressing, off-the-shelf substitute that is supposed to fill that turkey-leg-shaped void that you know you’re going to miss.

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Onto Something

“The search is what everyone would undertake if he were not stuck in the everydayness of his own life.

To be aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.

Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Simplify

During my 20s, I amassed a huge collection of videogame hardware and software. Multiple rooms were dedicated to housing the collection: hardware from the 70’s and 80’s in one room, 90’s in another, 2000’s in a third. A closet literally overflowing with C64s. A dozen shelves supporting boxes containing esoteric peripherals and accessories: light guns, toy steering wheels, and plastic fishing rods for games that I would never play. A bin of obscure, unlicensed Chinese Gameboy cartridges — mint in box, of course.

The act of collecting blurred the lines between hobby and compulsion, as these things often go. I enjoyed the complexity of both the existing collection and the process of collecting, much in the way that I imagine a spider would take some kind of deep, intrinsic satisfaction in the construction of an especially intricate web. The more it grew, the greater its psychological gravity. It was something to always worry about — what needed to be rearranged to extract as much meaning as possible from it? When traveling out of town, would someone try to steal it?  What was the best way to even try enjoy a collection so large that it would take several lifetimes to play the vast catalogue of titles?

The event horizon was perceptible: what if I just… let it all go? Like a smoker who, deep down, really wants to quit but doesn’t want to just yet — the looming discomfort of withdrawal is a powerful motivator. I needed a reason to shed the mental baggage. Not even a good reason, but just a good enough reason would be fine.

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