Batrachomyomachia
an excerpt

I don’t even know where to start when it comes to Liesl. The girl is crazy, and I’m pretty sure she’d agree, except she’d describe it as her consciousness being affected by the negative harmonics created by unresolved spirit reincarnation cycles—or something. But what she’d mean is, Yes, indeedy, I’m a total whack job. To put it briefly, she’s openminded to a fault. Every bizarre theory, every metaphysical gewgaw, every piece of New Age advice some well-meaning hippie gives her is stored up in that plastic, expandable mind of hers and brought out at a later date to be dusted off, spit shined, and presented to me as a cure-all for whatever spiritual, physical, or psychological complaint Liesl thinks is affecting me on any given day. Am I not appearing to her discerning and practiced eye to be feeling centered enough? Well, I should just place these crystals at strategic geometrically determined points in my room. They’ve been purified in sea salt, isn’t that wonderful? Or perhaps I would like to receive a Tarot reading from her, from her special Faerie themed deck kept in its white pine box, in order to understand what events are transpiring, or is that conspiring, to affect me in both the near future and in my life journey? And have I been feeling in any way ill or even slightly under the weather recently? Because someone told her about these amazing bracelets with special magnets in them that will properly align my body’s chakra energies. That sort of thing.

You know, I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’m really not sure whether she totally buys into all that bullshit. She insists that she does. Some part of me thinks that she must see through it, though, that she must understand how it’s all just a series of watercolor splashes across the grim reality of our existence. Boy, I sound pretty negative there. Believe me, I never use phrases like “grim reality,” normally. I don’t, like, think I somehow know what our existence is; I don’t even know what I’m talking about when I say shit like that; I just know that she clings to this nonsensical mishmash of stuff like she’s waiting, just waiting, for some of it to stick. The “Is This Pasta Done?” methodology of spiritual fulfillment.

The whole time I’ve known her, Liesl has been fat. Not fat like you’d see on the Discovery Health Channel, wheeled into a last chance clinic by embarassed relatives, not that fat, but fat like you might see anonymously from the waist down on a 30-second segment about America’s obesity epidemic on the Channel 4 News. Then, last year, she became a vegan, all of a sudden. You could have knocked me down with a feather. Since Liesl does all the cooking, that means all the butter, cheese, pork, chicken, fish, milk, eggs—everything worth eating, basically—got thrown in the trash one day and replaced with hydroponically grown lettuce (“Hey, if it’s good enough for kind bud, it should make some pertty damn good lettuce, right?”), tempeh burgers, peanut butter that separates if you leave it out on the counter, actual whole soybean pods that you’re supposed to squeeze bright green soybeans out of and pop in your mouth like tater tots. Seriously. As an appetizer. I was sure the vegan thing would be a fad, that she’d rationalize it away within a week as being an energetically unbalanced diet with too great an emphasis on the chi elemental, or something, but maybe I was just being stupidly optimistic. Blindly hopeful. Desperately keeping my fingers crossed that this completely bizarre, foreign, embarassing way of eating would be temporary. An attitude I held entirely for my own selfish gratification.

Such hopes have proven to be futile, however. Vegan stuck, though Liesl has by no means given up on all the other soulstone psychic shit. It appears that she can quite easily reconcile the two disciplines. She lost like, 55 pounds in eight months. I, on the other hand, gained 10, since the only tolerable, permissible thing I can have to snack on is bread. But whatever. Vegan roommates are why God invented steakhouses.