Finding food while homeless can also get expensive. I'm not into dumpster diving, refrained from shoplifting while in Mankato, and was not in touch with any soup kitchens or food banks. The Budget room had a microwave and a little refrigerator. I didn't get around to buying portable cooking supplies until after I left Minnesota. Part of my reluctance was the vague delusion that I would one day, one day soon, stop living like that and get a more permanent residence.

Most of the food I ate in Mankato were microwavable vegan dinners and take-out vegan food. I desperately wanted animal rights community in Mankato, and never really got any. However, there are places to hang out in Mankato where other vegans are and vegan food is consumed.

It was just a few weeks into my employment at Mettler's that I began my search for vegans and intelligent life, neither of which had an obvious presence in the town. All the while, I knew that Carol Glasser was teaching up at the university and probably knew of some viable vegan people in the area. I didn't want help from Carol Glasser though, so I began my search on internet forums-- avoiding Carol's membership-- and meetup groups-- although every meetup I found was in Minneapolis.

There was a vegan who danced at Mettler's. Her stage name was Lilly. We exchanged phone numbers and I offered to hang out with her. She neglected to respond to any of my invitations. When my text messages to Lilly didn't work, she got real weird in that insufferable Minnesota Nice sort of way. For a while she ignored me completely, and then she would come up to me to say things like,

“I hope your feelings aren't hurt that I didn't reply to your texts!” I told her no no, hah hah, of course not, of course my feelings weren't hurt. She would spasmodically say things to me, like she did most dancers, such as, “Hello beautiful!” and “Hey gorgeous!” She would shout these things at me, but if I ever tried to elaborate on a conversation, she would icily exit the area and not elaborate. She did this with a lot of people who she encountered. I often wondered what kind of sad, desperate lunatic lurked beneath her Minnesota-nice Scandinavian surface, her tundra complexion and soulless blue eyes.

I tried to eat at every vegan-friendly restaurant in Mankato. The guides that I used were happycow.com and a facebook group, Mankato Vegans, but even these were limited to jackasses of Mankato, unable to guide me on where to socialize among other vegans in the area beyond places to eat. India Palace was one of my favorites. Coffee Hag had vegan soup, and was run by lesbians. It was an oddity in faire Mankato, and a little sanctuary, even as it contained assholes and Mettler's customers who didn't know where to loiter during the day time before the strip club opened up. I continued going there even after I trolled Coffee Hag on twitter and threatened to not go there any more because their male cashier was rude to me.

Noodles and Company was a spot I often hit up, until the insane manager became my regular at Mettler's. He would brag about his time in the military, when he murdered people in Iraq. When I went in to get my noodles, he would give me free food and refer to me as my fake-real-name loudly, “Hey Kelly!” Such things happen in small towns.

Wysywyg was a freakish juice place with little pictures of periodic-table-like letters on each bottle, to represent what kind of juice was inside. I had purchased these juices in a Roseville Lund and Byerlys, and was happy to have found the physical location. I drank these juices and thought about how absurdly expensive they were, but drank them anyway. While these juices were vegan and there was no good reason to serve meat at a juice place, several of the salads in their store had meat in them. This made me hate Wysywyg even more than I did for their expensive juice and pretentious aesthetic. Lilly hung out at Wysywyg as well, but never the same time I did.

I often drove around Mankato in circles in the freezing Winter air, meandering about, staring at the various businesses before me and wondering how these people existed year after year in this place, decade after decade. How did they survive it without going completely insane? How did transplants survive it without running back to an urban center or somewhere less Scandinavian? Dork Den. Coffee Hag. Tea House. Wagon Wheel Cafe. Pub 500. Plaza after chain after coffee shop after bar after bar after bar. Oh my god, Carol Glasser, how did she do it, dwelling in tundra Mankato surrounded by Trump supporters, university pseudo-intellectuals and strip club sexual predators.