I Need A Vegetarian Dog

I this strange sound relationship with my brother's dogs who live next door without realize they don't own me. They get so jealous they can't bark as good as me. I practice the ol' bel canto exercises, and it drives them nuts. I get tired of them hanging around? I scream at them in C#-6, and they run for their lives. They have since they were puppies.

The only way they can tell they don't own me is that I don't feed them much at all. The left-over grease in my frying pan, maybe, when I'm switching food groups like from fish to chicken. Not often, once every couple of weeks at best. They're not my dogs. Occasionally, I'll give the stuff from my refrigerator that's getting too old to know whether it's too old or not.

It's too bad they won't eat old vegetables. I throw a lot of unused vegetables away. Many times simply because I have to buy in family-sized packaging and I live by myself. Left-overs are left-overs. I think people who live alone try to justify spending their money on more than they need by boring themselves to death with eating the same thing over and over again before it spoils. When I win the lottery I'm moving to some place with a lot of restaurants. What a drag, man.

The figs are beginning to ripen. I went out and found four or five that had turned brown and were drooping on their stems. That's the best way for me to tell they're ripe. The color can fool me. It's only when the fig gets ripe enough for the weight of the developing sugars to make the stem sag a big that I know if I pick it, it's gonna be naturally sweet and tasty. There was never even a threat of frost much this year, and they grew big and fat from non-resistance I guess. One of the other ways to tell if they're ripe is that the outer skin tends to split open when they just perfect, but that's when the birds and the bugs know they're ripe too. The interesting thing about that this year is that the figs got bigger than usual without the outer skin splitting. Big, fat, and juicy.

There was a family doctor who practiced medicine here all during the time I was growing up. He was considered to be eccentric for several reasons, but being a Seventh Day Adventist in a small town full of moderate Protestants and the fact that he planted fruit trees all over his yard at his downtown residence was curious, but the fact that he claimed just about all his patients had malaria topped the list. Of course, none of these odd differences from the norm were all that drastic. The coastal plains are full of swamps and mosquitoes, and he may have been more right than wrong.

I think I'm remembering that old man not only because of the joy of eating tree ripened fruit for a change, but because last week I got prescribed a new medicine for the rheumatoid arthritis that was developed to combat malaria. My new rheumatologist explained this briefly to me, and reminded me that the methotrexate medicine I'm also taking was developed for a certain type of cancer. Both of these designer drugs were "designed" for other symptoms of other human conditions, but the side-effect of seriously reducing inflammation made them useful for combatting RA. It's worrisome that it's also making me notice a new feeling in my kidneys.

I asked a friend who knows a lot about pharmaceuticals what the side-effects of the new drug are, and he said he wasn't familiar with it. Then, he started breaking down the chemical meaning of the name of the drug, while knowing it was used to treat malaria, and the last part of the name is "quine". Of course, quinine. My father used to take quinine from having visited that odd doctor. What goes around comes around. Maybe this doctor knew that quinine reduced inflammation, and prescribed it for any ailment that benefitted from that side-effect. Whatever he did seem to work. He had a lotta patients. He proselytized eating fresh fruits to anybody who would listen, and demonstrated it at his own house.