My new rallying cry is, “Old lives Matter.” It is, of course, ironic, and, even if it were not, it would be one of those religious truths – something to which you aspire in spite of its not being factually true, like, “All men are created equal.”  Old lives matter less to the fourth reich than George Floyd’s life mattered to Derek Chauvin. But it is becoming clear that the demographic that prompted the Supreme Court to create the protected class of age will become a primary target of the deplorables, as well all other protected classes. In a recent online discussion, I read a MAGA who seemed to think of his demographic as the, “Christian right.” But, of course, the fourth reich has nothing to do with Christian anything; It has to do with their true religion of unfettered free market capitalism and adoration of the stupidity of conservatism. Those of us who worship at the altar of post enlightenment humanism are being pummeled from all sides by this artifact of the origins of life. 

For some time now I’ve been most offended by the idiots who considered themselves members of a collective they call, “Atheists.”

Atheism was once just a collection of assumptions made by people of a scientific bent, but I realized six months before I turned 60, when my director at Blue Shield of California, Michael the psychopath, decided to retire me, that atheism had been coopted into a religion. From the YouTube videos I watched at the time, it was organized primarily by the former evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins, and the late journalist Christopher Hitchens. You could tell it was a religion for them because they sought to eliminate all  its competition and because they abandoned all other contributions they would make to history in favor of advancing the cause of atheism. They would basically become zombies in service to their religion. You can still watch this happen in videos that plague YouTube. The most tragic loss from this zombie apocalypse was the loss of Professor Dawkins, who was a brilliant evolutionary scientist. He had first suggested the idea that the struggle for survival in natural selection occurred at the level of the gene. This was an unprecedented perspective that promised to save us from the ultimate tragedy of non intelligent design. Unfortunately, it occurred at the precise moment in history when intelligent design was displacing natural selection and so the conservative approach to survival could only be taken by organisms  like corona viruses, that could afford to cycle through generations at an unnatural rate. The rest of us would have to hitch our wagons to the intelligence of liberalism. Alas, enter Donald Trump and his legions of conservatives. If they lack the intelligence to see that the message of Christianity is absolute liberalism and inclusion ( ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, …’) what hope is there that they will believe in Global warming or Old Lives Matter?  And so, for the election this week, the Republicans have been warming up the crematoria for those of us dependent on Social Security and Medicare. 

We have one day left before the United States electorate signs a death warrant on a movement to secure  human dignity that began with the Magna Carta over half a millennium ago. The idiocy of conservatism that began with the origins of life will end with its evisceration. If you would like some succor in the midst of this Armageddon, the best I can offer you is that the suffering that led to the plaintive cries for help like George Floyd’s desperate pleas for breath; Black Lives Matter, Me Too, and, now, Old Lives Matter; will be exorcised by it as well.

In December 2016 The Nation published an
editorial that tried to make sense out of the insane decision of the country to elect Donald Trump. It is the most cogent explanation that has been suggested about how a people who are, “Dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” could cede their power to a man whose life has been devoted to using his rank to oppress those less fortunate than he, which, since he inherited an enormous fortune, means everybody. Before he was elected, a tape was even released on which he can be heard bragging about the ease with which he can molest women. Then he proceeded to carry even that demographic in the election.

I began this site about 2 years ago, thinking the name would evoke a crazy old man on a park bench screaming things about diet and lifestyle as people cross the street to avoid him. Perhaps the defining theme of my life has been my father’s death at 54. As I approached that age myself, I searched for a solution to that existential threat and landed upon what is generally called, “Plant Based Whole Food,” these days. It convinced me that my dad had forfeited almost half of his life to lifestyle, primarily smoking and poor eating. His brother, who died a few years ago at age 91, was more fastidious in those lifestyle choices. So my father died from a heart attack without ever seeing one of his grandchildren, without ever having given us the benefit of his wisdom as we needed it most during the turbulent trials of life. And we needed it. So the promise of preventative medicine seemed a good cause to dedicate my energies to.

But over the last few weeks I have become so angry with the state of my life, brought about by conditions beyond my control that I am afraid the site name must evoke a crazy old man on a park bench screaming things about politics as people cross the street to avoid him. I have been working on a softer approach to reestablishing the blog. I titled it The Priviledge of Growing Old, but, as I woke up this morning, I felt an anger that motivated me to compose this screed instead. As I was lying in bed, I began to generate resentment towards all of these deplorables, whom I had been feeling sorry for. After all, most of what Trump tells them is true; they were happier when they were using fossil fuels at a rate several million times the rate at which it can be produced, they were happier when people of color,,women and LGBTQs, “Knew their place,” Of course, Trump didn’t say, “You were happier, …” He said, “Make America great again,” a code everybody understood. It wasn’t lying to them that got him elected; it was appealing to their most base desires, right?

No, it WAS lying to them; telling them they could attain happiness at the expense of the earth and their own children’s futures. The global economy did not respect them and, so, it is their right, (some might say duty) to destroy that economy, and that globe. It’s ironic how, for all of the talk about how refreshing it is to hear a blowhard politician avoid political correctness, the most politically incorrect (and, perhaps, most honest) statement made during the 2016 campaign was made by Hilary Clinton when she referred to these neo nazis as deplorables.
In order to compete in the 80s, I took full college course loads while working full time. I staffed two complete weekend test shifts at a Silicon Valley DRAM company while finishing my Statistics degree. That degree provided a 30-year career contributing to the true greatness of America, and the prosperity to raise a child. Every boomer Trump voter had the same opportunity. Instead they cleaved to jobs that provided an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work, thereby avoiding the type of backstabbing and psychpathology that culminated in my last employer retiring me two years ago. They could have taken those jobs, performed them honestly and contributed to creating a great America. Instead they sneered at those of us who took up that challenge and resented whatever small successes we had achieved. Eventually the psychopaths won, and even boomers who cared about the earth, the ideals upon which the nation was founded, and the future of our children succumbed to the thumb-sucking comfort of the total retaliation Trump was peddling. But there is no truth in the pursuit of happiness for its own end. The truth lies in coupling that pursuit with the rights of life and liberty that we all share.

The truth, if anyone cares to hear it anymore, is that we live in a global economy. We are not going to compete with Asia in manufacturing televisions and radios unless we are anxious to work at dangerous sub-minimum-wage jobs without bathroom breaks. That appears to be the direction in which the Don and his deplorables are leading us. Personally, we’ve lost over $25,000 in retirement savings since October due to his nineteenth century trade policies, and we seem to be about one depression away from stoking up the crematoria again. It’s time for those of us who are rational to become mad as hell, and not take it anymore.

I’ve owned this website for two years now. I started it as a Christmas present to myself following Blue Shield’s retiring me, 8 months before I turned 60. At the time I was consumed by preventative medicine; The McDougall Plan, Caldwell Esselstyn, Forks Over Knives and the like, … I was 6 years older than my dad was when he died of a heart attack, so I became enthralled with the idea that I had found a solution for an intractable problem. I am still as committed to preventative medicine as I was two years ago, perhaps more, but as I continued to fail at finding a suitable way forward, my resentment towards Blue Shield grew greater and greater. Now I am returning to this website to begin formulating opinions about the new world I entered after Blue Shield unilaterally and without any input from me, disengaged me from the world in which I lived. My experiences over the last years, when I entered a protected class for the first time in my life, have made me aware of how insidious the plague of ageism is. We were the boomers. Our parents came back after saving the world from the threat of fascism. They ended the holocaust. They built the most robust economy the world has ever known and made the United States of America the country that the world most sought to emulate. We lived up to the mantel of, “Leaders of the free world,” that Churchill set upon us when he toured America after the second world war. And they set about populating that nation with the largest generation (on every scale) the world had hitherto known, and they lived a tidy few summers before time had its way with them until now, when only a handful remain. But they were able to watch their children prosper and try to contribute to the great experiment of this nation in ways that often frustrated and angered them.
We, the children of that, “Greatest generation,” are now facing the great void ourselves. What I’ve discovered from being out of work for the last 3 years is that the path that markets have built for me are not guaranteed. You never know when the time will come when you have to start trailblazing to survive. The time has arrived for me. And I guess the place to begin is with a new Commitment to posting on this blog. It’s been a busy few years in the greater world and there is plenty to write about. So on we go,…

The first half  of the trip was spent in Champagne.  Our son is a server and has begun some of the sommelier testing, so he had connections with and an attraction to many champagne houses.  And our tours of them were fascinating and, at times, glamorous.  Unfortunately, as much as I tried to open the aperture, I was unable to get reasonable exposures as you can see here.

We may never know what some of those are.  I did a little better outdoors

But I was not really prepared for photography on the tours.

 

I was also anxious to see some of the cathedrals.  Before we left I also thought I’d get a I’d get some shots of Would War I cemeteries and battlefields, but this was not the trip for that either. It would have been a good time to take a look at Cathedrals.  I never fully paid attention during high school history when they  got into the details of flying buttresses and gargoyles, but this was the heart  of cathedrals; Notre Dame de Paris, Chartres, Amiens,…  And I thought I could make up for my puerile phillistinery,  Notre Dame de Reims was both convenient and interesting,

 

having served as the coronation site for 25 of France’s kings, including Charles X, who was led to the cathedral by Joan of Arc.    Her statue can be found on the cathedral grounds.

 

 

I wanted to see the stained glass windows by Marc Chagall as well.  I had read about them and was surprised to find them more stark than I had expected them to be.

 

It would have been an architect’s dream.  There was a lot of information about the construction of the cathedral. And a beautiful model of it.

 

But I’m afraid my limited  plebeian taste and attention span has not improved with age.

I did become entranced with the smiling Angel of Reims.  As I was looking for her I also got some good photos of the outside of the cathedral.

Her story, at least according to wikipedia, was inspiring to someone whose glory was fading.  It seems her head came off following a German shelling in World War I ( September 19, 1914).  Her head broke into several pieces.  But they were collected by the abbot of the cathedral.  Following the war they were reassembled at the National museum of French monuments and she was added to the restored cathedral in 1926.  In some of the pictures I had seen she almost seemed to be giving a fist pump.

Imagine!  After observing the foolishness of mankind for almost 700 years and then suffering the insult of a barbarous assault, she could return triumphant.  Perhaps there is hope for us yet.  I had to get a look at her and take a number of photos to either get comfort from the failure to survive this long dark passage or to share in the glory of being revived for the endgame.

 

Tomorrow it will be a week since we flew out of Charles De Gaulle to return home from our trip to Champagne and Paris.  The day before that, my wife and son had previous engagements in the morning and I used the hours to visit Père Lachaise where I paid my respects to Colette, who shared my birthday (the calendar day, not the year, smarta$$!).

And Jim Morrison.  I am not sure why I chose to visit that grave, but I had heard about it over the years,

and I was at the cemetery, which really felt more like a city of the deceased than a country churchyard.  I was later informed by a friend that Oscar Wilde is entombed there.  And later that day I learned that I was only a few yards from Heloise and Abelard’s grave, which deserved more attention than a heroin addict.  But I waxed nostalgic remembering my late brother’s copy of a Doors album. It had some kind of southwestern motif and references to a Lizard King.  I was 10 years old and it made no sense to me at all, but it had Light My Fire on it so I would sometimes listen to it and try to make sense of the indecipherable iconography.  Between my brother and Jim Morrison, himself, it prompted me to contemplate a time that I had the priveledge of experiencing that would never come again.  I liked thinking about that after a few years of little to celebrate.  And I was in Paris.  Why shouldn’t I indulge a bit?

Later in the day I had another block of time.  I had been reading a Lonely Planet Discover Paris travel guide.  In it there was a self guided Latin Quarter Literary Loop Walk.  The guide did not include any pictures of the 7 Landmarks identified.  So I was happy to have the opportunity to visit and take some photos myself.  All of them had the allure of the caricature of Paris in the 30’s.  The neighborhood was hard to navigate.  There were times when I wondered if the streets themselves had not been renamed during the century they helped to shape.  I did my best.  Here goes:

1. James Joyce’s Flat

The Guide book instructs the reader to, “…, peer down the passageway at Number 71 {r. Cardinal Lemoine}, ”  It states that this is where James Joyce lived and finished editing Ulysses in the courtyard flat at the back marked, “E.”  This seemed to be the passageway the book suggested.  When I saw this gentleman ( who might have been Joyce himself, a century prior) , it seemed a good time to take the picture.  The location had special significance to me.  It marks the very start of the literary movement that would consume the entire twentieth century and is proving to be the last artistic era of the Post Renaissance Enlightenment.  In an introduction to Our Town, Thornton Wilder points out the way that Modernism tries to reconcile the universal and singular experience of life.  he says something to the effect that expressions like, ” I hurt,” “I’m happy,” “I love you,” … have been said millions of times, but never twice the same, because the people and events associated with them are always unique.  The desire to resolve that natural conflict between being a part of and apart from the endless stream of history all began with Ulysses and its equating of one of  the greatest adventures in literature with a single day in the life of a prosaic Leopold Bloom and, perhaps, raises the latter to heroism.  Ironically Bloomsday had occurred just 11 days prior to my taking this photo.  I wonder if the Latin Quarter did any readings.

2. Ernest Hemingway’s apartment

This was, perhaps, the easiest landmark to find.  There is a kitschy travel agency flying its flag next to it called something like Ernest’s Place.  According to the guide he lived here from 1922  to 1923 and a dance club below it (perhaps the travel agency now?) was the model for one used in The Sun Also Rises.

 

3. Paul Verlaine’s Garret

 .      

 

The guide claims that, although Hemingway lived at 74 r. Cardinal Lemoine, he wrote in a top floor at 39 r. Descartes.  It further instructs the user to ignore the incorrect plaque, but the only plaque I found was the one noting that Verlaine had died there in 1896 and that agrees with what the guide book says.

 

4. Rue de la Contrescarpe

According to the guide the Cafe des Amateurs, once called a, “Cesspool,” by Hemingway is now the Cafe Delmas.  La Contrescarpe, across the square from Delmas, looks clean and respectable as well.  The square seems to remain a center for the young.

 

 

5. George Orwell’s Boarding House

According to the guide this apartment at 6 r du Pot de Fer is where Orwwell lived while writing part of Down and Out in Paris and London.  My wife downloaded the audio of it for me and I’ve been listening to it.  It gives a romanticized version of life as a starving artist, tinged with Orwell’s uniquely cynical (La vie en noir) interpretation of mankind.  Of course it’s an interpretation that has been materializing with depressing force, particularly over the last few years.  Sorry about the soft focus on the number 6 through the waving flags.  I think my autofocus thought I was aiming for the flags themselves.

I took a closeup of the window above, perhaps whimsically hoping ut might be one he gazed out of while seeking the right word.

 

6. Place du Pantheon

The guide claims You can follow Hemingway’s instructions in A Moveable Feast to take the same route toward Blvd. St. Michel.  From the sound of Orwell’s book, he may have used a similar rout to escape to the less seedy areas of Paris as well

 

7. Boulevard St-Michel

I didn’t venture too far along this route.  It was starting to get late and as soon as I got to Boulevard St. Germain I headed towards our hotel, but I backpedaled when I read the guide’s mention of Shakespeare & Company.  We were there in 2014, but I was drawn to return.  On the way back to the hotel I stopped to get a photo of Les Deux Magots and also picked up a copy of La Tour du Monde en 80 Jours, a novel that was born of an earlier (and, from what I understand, a less Bohemian) Paris

.

Shakespeare & Company originally published Ulysses, so, in a way, I came full circle.  And it is just across the street from the Seine.  But I’m afraid it is not, “A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, …”   There is no turning back to the time before iPhones and the internet.  But it made for a nice diversion, perhaps just as Colette and Jim Morrison had.

Vegan 8

• Vegan Pecan Pie Cookies
• Vegan Cheesy Mexican Tortilla Bake

EAT PLANT BASED(TerriNC)

• TERRI’S CHEESE SAUCE
• Nachos Supreme

High Carb Hannah

• Plant Meal Planner
• Thai Crunch Salad

FAT FREE VEGAN

• Onion Cream Sauce
• Easy Mac & Cheese
• Spaghetti Squash Pesto Lasagna
• Zuppa Vegana
• Tortilla Soup
• Crispy Fat-Free Spanish Potatoes
• Personal Polenta Pizza
• Scalloped Potatoes
• Creamy Zucchini and Basil Soup
• Creamy Scalloped Potatoes

Straight up Food

• Curry Vegetables & Rice

Brand New Vegan

• Instant Pot Spanish Rice
• Vegan Orange Chicken
• New Mexican Pozole

She Likes Food

• Vegan Jalapeno Ranch Dressing

Minimalist Baker

• MUSHROOM AND LEEK RISOTTO
• Vegan Thanksgiving Wraps
• 1-Pot Pumpkin Yellow Curry

Potato Strong

• Baked, crispy no oil onion rings

Clean Food Dirty Girl

• Classic Plant-Based Potato Salad

Vegetarian Times

• General Tso’s Tofu
• Thai Spicy Eggplant with Sweet Basil

Klunker Kitchen

• Klunker’s crunchy onion rings

Off Plan Links

Mariquita

• Escarole Soup

Fo Reals Life

• Vegan Jalapeno Ranch

Crazy Vegan Kitchen

• Easy Cajun Jambalaya (Vegan)

My Quiet Kitchen

• Oil-Free Vegan Pecan Pie

beyondmeat

• VEGAN POZOLE VERDE

On Saturday we euthanized our dog, Magic.  She had been a trusted companion for 15 1/2 years. And I’ve been completely despondent since she is gone.

This picture was taken when she was about 9 years old.  She looked like a puppy right through the last month or so of her life.  She used to run with Greyhounds and all other sorts of dogs.  She generally bested them but in the last year of her life she slowed down, becoming almost aloof when she met other dogs.  It was like life had taken all she had, and she could not muster the enthusiasm to fool herself into thinking that life was great enough to wag her tail about it.  And that was, perhaps, the biggest toll time took on her.  As a puppy you could light up Manhattan if you hooked a generator up to her tail.

 

In August, San Francisco experienced the highest temperature it had ever had on record, ( I think it was like 107.) and we are about the same as the City.  That night she couldn’t seem to regulate her temperature, panting through the night.  We were on vacation the following week and worried about her, because she never seemed to fully get back to normal.  She was hardly moving on our morning walks.  She had been slowing down for some months.  Two months ago she refused to go on our long Sunday morning walk on Old Montarra Mountain Road and the local walk to the strip mall seemed all she was interested in doing.  Even that was pretty slow.  Finally she could barely walk.  She fell off our bed in the middle of the night and I started having to carry her down the stairs so she could go to the back yard.  I had been preparing myself emotionally for quite a while.  At 15, how much longer could I expect to have her?  But it was surprising how quickly her health fell off.  As I watched her over the last few months, I couldn’t help wondering if this was what life would be like if all this McDougall and Esselstyn stuff worked as advertised.  Watching that endless bundle of energy become a tottering senior canine who seemed to require all her energy for each step was too much and we made the decision that has caused me all this grief.

For last  or 5 days she looked very much as she does in this picture. Even to the end.  The joie de vivre had completely left her.  I sensed that there would be no return from this dark chasm.

I’ve never second guessed the decision.  And I don’t now.  I can’t believe she would have wanted to suffer in pain for another 6 months or a year as her condition continued to worsen. There’s no cure for old age.  But I have been feeling inconsolable since she is gone.  I was trying to understand why and I reached a conclusion.  It felt similar to when my dad died.  I was only 16 and it was the first significant loss I would ever experience.  You know how, in the days following,  you’ll be carrying on an internal conversation thinking to yourself, “That’s interesting; I have to tell {} ( in that case, my dad) about that,” and then, in the next millisecond, you realize you’ll never get the chance to do that.  Then your heart  kind of sinks quickly.  That’s the kind of experience I’ve been having with Magic; all the little things that we did together, and each one reminds me of the loss.  Another similarity that came to me last night is that, if I’m being true to myself,  my dad and that dog were the only creatures who really rejoiced in the fact that I existed.  I’ve had a great life, with close friends, a better wife than I probably deserved and a better son than my dad had, but I  can’t say that any of them felt so joyful about the fact that I was here sharing our lifetimes.  I’m sure there are plenty of reasons for that.  I wouldn’t necessarily have thought it about my dad, even, except that one night while my son was in bed I had the sudden realization that he had no idea of how lucky he was because of the life we were providing him.  And it didn’t matter one whit.  I was so incredibly happy that he was a part of my life that it didn’t matter how big a pain in the ass he was.  I was certain my dad felt the same way about me at 11. And I realized at the very same time that everything we love; people, jobs, pets;  are  a pain in the ass too,  but it is that pain that makes life worth living.   And when my relationship with them concludes I always worry about how much I  gave for them.  In the case of my dad I knew it was not enough.  I was a stupid kid.  How could I know what I was losing?  But in the case of Magic I tried my best.  I often got the complaint from those close to me that I treated her too well, and them not well enough.   So I feel I must have given as much as I could to her.

Now I am in this mode of job searching and finishing Coursera MOOCs.  You’d think I’d be too busy to dwell on the horror of it, but it will take quite some time to adapt to the loss of someone who gave so much and demanded so little.  During the frequent times that I find myself in the doghouse, henceforth I will be there alone.

Adieu, my dear friend.

This is a testament to how well I am getting along with my resolutions.  Last day of the week and this is my first post of 2017.  I am doing a few things right, though.  Might as well list them here before they are completely forgotten and I give up and start shoveling
gallons of meat, dairy and oil down my throat.

1. I gave blood Tuesday.  It’s a good way to start the year, because I’ve been off my game in terms of eating and exercise since the holidays started.  It seems to be that way every year.  Each December I pack on a holiday 10 and then spend most of the next year trying to lose it.  Theoretically, giving blood should take a pound off immediately.  And Blood centers of the Pacific seem anxious to receive it.  I am universal donor ( 0-) and I am CMV negative, otherwise known as a Baby Donor.  Trust me, that moniker has nothing to do with my size.  On a few occasions a blood center attendant has told me that a single donation of mine can be used to help up to 5 babies.  So it feels very good.  I used to get a personalized desk calendar each year with a thank you note on each month and a story about how a blood donation had changed a recipient’s ( or a relative’s) life, but they haven’t sent one for the last two years.  I really loved it, and would proudly set it up at my work cubicle.  Since I got laid off in May I don’t have a cubicle anymore.  I always thought I’d love that, too, but I’m rethinking it.  That’s for a future post.
2. I’ve been looking at a lot of Plant Based Whole Food (PBWF) websites and coming up with heart healthy recipes.  I made Susan Voisin’s  (Fat Free Vegan,) tortilla soup.  It was thinner than I expected,  But it’s given me an idea of using it as a base  for an Albondigas soup using Jeff Novick’s burgers, spiced Mexican.  That will be fun.  As I was perusing the web trying to find videos for prep tips, I saw a carnist, greasy  way to make  huaraches, my current favorite restaurant meal from Flacos in Berkeley.  I will take the grease out and just toast the base in my LodgeLogic griddle and paly with toppings, that are not as bad as the soy toppings Flacos uses.  More fun.  And tonight I am making a Vegan Jambalaya modified for McDougall from Amrita at .  We bought the Field Grain Chipotle Sausage for that.  We’ll see how that goes.
3. While watching some of Terri Edward’s (BLOG.EatPlant-Based.com) videos yesterday I got this crazy idea to try to film some of these crazy experiments.  So that may happen.  Of course at Anginamonologues,net we do not have a dedicated Director of Photography, so I may have to do some creative editing to get it into something that can be viewed without splitting your guts laughing.  If that works out I’ll put up the link in a future post.

The other disappointment is that I weighed myself for the first time since October this morning and I managed to put on 15 pounds (so much for the holiday 10) over that break.  So I’m back to the weekly weigh-ins at the McDougall Forums.  The upside of that is that it should come off pretty quickly as well.  But I’m worried about how the TC will come out when the results of the blood donation are posted.  And it’s hard to have such a long hill to climb to get back to the level I should be at.  The bottom line is 2017 is going to be a lot of work to get back to a level I’ve been used since I started McDougall in 2009.

I set a goal of 5 posts a week for 2017 so I thought I’d give a try to this one before the new year clicks in. The Angina Monologues are sort of an outsider’s view of the plant based whole food movement, particularly as it is expressed by Dr. McDougall, Dr. Esselstyn, Jeff Novick, and others who are enthusiastic about preventative medicine. I don’t speak for any of those people, but I have enormous interest in their message and will try to promote my understanding of that message. One of my favorite ways to do that is to try various recipes of people who cook PBWF. This new year I am trying one such site which I am happy to pass along to you.

Our New Year tradition is to make salads. My mom used to make them. In my very young and foolish days I would have them with cold cuts on Nee Years Eve. I still had a lot of young health to waste. As I enter the last third of my life I no longer have any such illusions. So now I modify the recipes so they are as far from the toxins as I can get them. They are still not as clean as some less processed meals, but they are not too bad. The real issue for me with these salads is the substitute for mayonnaise. Most use some sort of blended tofu concoction. This year though, I ended up at Clean Food Dirty Girl. She has an interesting take on the potato salad dressing here. It is pretty high in fat as it uses a lot of cashews, but we sometimes eat at Gracious Madre which has several offerings with a cashew cream that is probably 95% cashews or more. By that standard Molly Patrick ( the Clean Food Dirty Girl from the website) provides a reasonably non toxic alternative to the canned vegan mayos. We had been using Nayonaise, which seems to be puréed tofu, but it is very expensive and has the high calorie load of tofu. The spices in the salad dressing give it an interesting (as in, “Very good,”) flavor and I’m thinking of swapping out some of the cashews with potato to get lower calorie density at a similar consistency. I do the same thing with TerriNC‘s phenomenal nooch sauce which is a staple in our house. You’ll find that near the top of my healthy vegan food lists which I’ll post here if I ever get off my lazy ass and figure out how to post here on the Monologues. WordPress and I are still in the first date phase of our relationship. I’ll get better as you go along.

In the meantime have a healthy plant based NYE. Let’s achieve the lives to which we aspire  in 2017.