Heal Thyself?

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Deciding to forego eating meat has never been easy for me, but I gotta do it to see if it will help offset this arthritis. Apparently the rheumatologist at the Durham VA Hospital is gonna punish me for my refusal to commit suicide for his amusement, so I gotta do what I can to be a physician to myself where that's possible. My diet is definite one of those areas. To a large part it's that way because I live alone and nobody can know what I'm eating a majority of the time but me.

I made a mistake when I replaced the regular batteries in my mouse and keyboard with rechargeable cells. It was absent-mindedness on my part I guess. After I had changed out the batteries, for some dumb reason I put the regular batteries into the charging station as if they were rechargeable. It wasn't until I needed to change the batteries again that I realized my mistake.

That's why I went by the Wal-Mart yesterday. To pick up some rechargeable batteries. But, as I habitually do, I decided to look through the grocery section to see if they had anything to eat that might appeal to me. I picked up two containers of frozen chipped beef gravy before I remembered I'd decided to not eat meat. It took a moment for me to sigh in regret, and put them back in the shiny, refrigerated display case.

It's not easy being green. Most of the fruits and vegetables on sale were picked early for shelf life and they taste like cardboard, either that or they're just altogether tasteless and physically hard and tough. Maybe sawdust would be a better descriptor.

My sister-in-law has offered to share her wheat grass with me. Her spacious greenhouse is located between their house and mine, and just in case my brother and his wife thought I might hesitate to use any available space in their greenhouse, they told me to my face it would be just fine. I got no excuse not to do something greenish.

The ornamental kale plant I bought and repotted is really thriving. Maybe nature is trying to tell me that I oughta keep my gardening efforts out of the actual soil around my house. The plants I keep in pots seem to do okay, but if I take them out of the pots and put them into the ground they turn brown and die.

Some of the asparagus I planted lived despite my leaving it to root little pig or die. I know it's time to dig the crowns up, separate them into new plugs and replant them as a new crop. I suppose if I had a motorized soil digger-upper I could make that happen. I ain't much into using a shovel manually. In that sense I'm just another old man with bad hands.

What I would like mo' bettah is to live near a reliable farmer's market. I think the closest one is the Farmer's Market at the State Capital up in Raleigh. That's 70 miles (112.65 km) one way. That's not practical either by time or money.

New Orleans had the most plentiful Farmer's Market I've seen in the U.S.. Whether there's anything left of it after the hurricane is a mystery to me. It was located on the Mississippi River on Bay Street in the French Quarter which is one of the higher places in New Orleans. It didn't get flooded like the other parts of the city did.

Many a time I've thought of buying an apartment within walking distance of such a market. Not in New Orleans. What? You think I'm crazy too. New Orleans used to be like a prison that you might only want to visit for the very dearest of friends. It's not a place to become a permanent resident of in my opinion. I've lived there temporarily several times. No mas.

Any of those places in the South that are warm in the winter are collecting points for there being trouble in River City. Many of the cities in southern Florida, California, and Texas are that way. I've been to all of them. Worked in most of them.

Been a homeless bum in all of them. Yet, I was never one of the people you had to be careful with because ending up with yo' stuff would be burden to me. My being that way never had (and still don't have) nothing to do with you. You neither earned or deserved to be left to your own devices by me. It just is the way it is.

It's delightful to me to realize that the #5 saying in the Gospel of Thomas describes the concept of projection. I seem fairly sure that the concept of projection is what Christianity brought to the table to resolve the mysteries wrought by the double-bind of paradox. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, but you gotta do something or anything can happen.

What else is there to do but something. Can one actually call not doing nothing to be a doing at all? Something or nothing? That is the question. What do you do when there is nothing to do, and the world is sitting heavy on you, and the pressure comes down with the force of despair, and the will that you won't kinda stuns?

What do you see when there is no thing to see, and the thangs that you do see are not true, and you look deep inside for the child who has died, and the place it occupied is gone too?

Where do you go when there is no "where" to go, and the place that you're at is kinda blue, and you've been every "where" but the stars up above, and you feel like you've been up there too?

Oh, Lord of mah haid, take my senses away. Take me away from this world of desire. Because_ the feelings I got from frustration and fear_ take me away from loving my Self.
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