Bragging Contests As Misdirection

A friend wrote and asked me if I'd trying using capsaicin on my arthritis. I had to look it up. It's the stuff that makes hot peppers hot. I went to the grocery store and bought some jalapenos, sliced them up, and started eating them with that soup/stew I've had cooking for five days now (Presently, pease porridge HOT). I started sweating so profusely I practically used a roll of paper towels to get dry.

Why would I do that? Because the research I Googled up said that the two cultures who have the hottest food, Thailand and Mexico) have the lowest intestinal and colon cancer rates in the world. They're testing now to check and see if capsaiscin prevents various kinds of cancer. They're pretty sure capsaicin actually prevents cancer from happening in the intestinal tract for most people.

After I lost about five pounds sweating I remembered that my father had eaten cayenne peppers all his life. Green. He grew them in flower pots. He used to trick us kids into eating them to watch our faces when they burned us up.

I'm now thinking of peppers as a health deal. For the last couple of days i've used this strong nasal spray because my head has been stopped up. That just makes it worse when it wears off. Yesterday and this morning I haven't had any problems with a stuffed head. The jalapenos totally opened my sinuses up. Why am I always the last to know?

I've read something else that impresses me as probably being about right. The guy who promulgates this theory seems about as wacko as me. That's why I sort of trust his judgment. He thinks eating too much salt is what making people overweight. I eat a lotta salt. I used to do it deliberately because i worked a lot. When I worked in construction they hired me as a skilled laborer. I worked a craft and got paid good money to ply my skills, but it was still labor.

I started working in the fields by the time I was ten years old. Like a man. I carried my end of the bargain. I could heft a two-hundred pound bag of fertilizer on my shoulder without stepping outside a circle drawn around a bushel basket on my fourteenth birthday. The fertilizer weighed way more than I did. That's what farm kids did back then. There wasn't much else around to amuse ourselves.

The older I get and the more documentaries I see about the economic downfall of the South after the Civil War during reconstruction, the more I realize my memory of how poor everybody was when I was a boy. Living in the South was just hardscrabble.

Not only was Reconstruction hard, for all the known reasons, but there were two other events that made life hard in the rural South. Cotton boll weevils and the Great Depression. They were like the 1-2 punch for the economic health of the south. Still, the poor people rolled with the punches. What choice?

There were two events that made life better in the South. World War Two and the Civil Rights movement. Part of it had to do with World War One also. I'm thinking of the implications drawn from a popular song from that period. "How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down On The Farm, After They've Seen Paree?"

I inherited a lot about this by osmosis through my father. I adored him. I wanted to be just like him. "I listened to every word..." He moved his family here from Mississippi. It was worse in Mississippi. I didn't grow up there. My father moved us here when I was two years old. I heard him say a many a time that living here was by grace. He really believed the coastal plains of the Carolinas was the closest place to heaven a human could be.

My mother and father talked about their families back in Mississippi. They both came from large families. I had twenty odd aunts and uncles combining all my mother's and father's siblings. I barely knew any of them. They talked about them as if we knew them, but we didn't. I don't ever remember meeting my father's oldest brother. My oldest sister was ten years old when we moved to North Carolina, so she remembered the most. My older sister was six. She was two years older than me. It was like all these people were in cahoots against me because I was too young to remember any of these people.

At least I had the fact that I was actually born in Mississippi to relate to my parents and my older sisters. My two younger brothers were both born in North Carolina. Compared to me and my sisters, they really didn't know much about who was what when the kinfolk down in Mississippi got talked about. As usual, that's the way it is with the middle child. I was caught in the middle with whatever that brings either yea or nay.

The only real event I'm not caught in the middle by is that I was born just after the New Moon. The first sliver of a crescent moon couldn't be seen because it was raining when I was born in mid-April two minutes after the Sun moved from the sign Aries into the sign Taurus. Slap dab in the middle again.

That's the facticity that eventually got me interested in astrology. It wasn't my fault. I wuz tricked. I didn't know wot I wuz becuz one astrology column on the comic strip page in one newspaper would I was say I was an Aries, and the astrology column in another newpaper would claim I was a Taurus. I was thirty years old before I found out what to definitively say when someone would ask me, "What's your sign?"

Finding out that I was born a Zero Degree Two Minutes Taurus carried a heavy price to pay. I had to get mixed up with the wrong kind of people. They weren't the wrong kind of people from my perspective, but what did I know? I had just been reborn following my first Saturn Return. I was lucky. I didn't have to know what a Saturn Return was to have it happen to me. I didn't, and it did.

I haven't been able to figure that out in a way that puts the matter to rest. As it were, I found out about what experiencing one's first Saturn Return after the fact of it doing what it did. Saturn returned to the spot in the heavens it was at the moment I was born. It's kind of a tedious deal. If you don't get reborn on Saturn's first return to where it was when you were born, then you have to wait another thirty years to get another shot.

This was a lot easier to understand because I had read and re-read the Evans-Wentz translation of The Tibetan Book many times before Saturn made it's return. Sometime when the Boogie Man comes to get you, you might oughta let him. Something had happened earlier on to make me realize this letting yo'self get got is the only way to fly. To do that with any self-assurance at all, first, you have to realize you are dead. Then, letting yourself be absorbed by the light is not so scary. Why would it be? You're dead. Why not give it a shot? Whatta you got to lose?

I wasn't kidding when I wrote yesterday that when I found out that hope was the only thing anybody had for sell, that the only activity that interested me anymore was to find out how to become immortal. Maybe it's futile to chase after immortality, but standing around bargaining for the best sounding deal on hope ain't nothing to brag about either.

When it comes to chasing after immortality as a way to conduct one's life, imbibing the sacraments is probably gonna come up on the agenda. I know a lotta psychonauts right also favored toward red wine too. Messing with the sacraments is like exploring the world beyond hope.

Yesterday I spent an hour or so reading about Freud's concept of The Id. I had asked somebody who oughta know to explain something to me about the id, when I realized it would be easier just to run a search on the internet. I typed in two words without any punctuation... id & ego. The results page logged ten zillion hits.

The first thing that caught my eye was that "id" is German. In English id means "it". Freud called it "the it". The it is an urge. An urge to life. This urge to life, which includes, of course, procreation, will screw a snake if it can get somebody to hold it still. It, the urge to life, has no moral or ethical considerations in itself, that's another part of the Freud trip. The Superego. Wouldn't you know it? The Ego sits half way between The Id and The Superego, and is known in Christianity as The Demiurge.

That was a couple of hours well spent. All I wanted to know was whether woe-ids (words) came from The Id, and how that related to id-eas and id-eation. Maybe that's how Freud's Superego tames the savage beast. It uses the Ego for misdirection. No blame.