Saturday, January 23, 2010

Live And Let Die



It's not complicated. I have everything I need to do it except a couple of porous quart jar lids and I don't actually need them. they would be convenient, but no local store in it's right mind business-wise would stock such an item for fear that it might be considered un-Christian or even a bit pink and the community would stop shopping with them. Shunned.

Sprouts. Drinking wheatgrass juice is not enough. Physically it is. At least, it is according to the nutcases that make that claim. I agree with them so I guess I am is a nutcase too. It's not that I'm against all things wheatgrass, but going raw food across the board is my present aim.

It's not enough to negate eating meat. I never understood that anyway. Just stopping meat is not that difficult to do. It's a matter of will-power. If I can stop smoking tobacco I can do anything. Sorta. The nicotine habit is the mother of all habits to break.

I've heard it's tougher to stop than heroin, but I've never formed a habit of using hero-wine, so I can't say how hard it is to stop. It gets a lotta press. I'm literate. I read stuff, but if I ain't tried it, then I find it hard to knock it. Making claims based on lies is not good statecraft.

Making claims about anything can lead to problems. For me, it is another habit to break. Breaking the habit of making claims I can do or be something I can't may be a tougher habit to break than cigarette smoking. It involves self-importance in a way cigarettes don't.

I got the self-importance rap from Castenada's writings, and the need to not make claims from the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching. The reason I write "the Wilhelm/Baynes translation" rather than just "the I Ching" is that there are several translations of the I Ching around, but I didn't study them for thirty years plus. The other translations might not agree, so I specify where I'm coming from with the I Ching references.

Youtube.com has a lotta videos on how-to projects. The videos are not limited to individual's testimony, but also the manufacturers of the objects how-to projects address. I first used youtube to investigate juicing machines. There are hundreds of testimonials, but there are a lot of videos by the distributors and suppliers of juicing machines. All constrained to the time limit youtube imposes.

The time constraints of youtube and tweeter is a good thing in my opinion. As far as youtube is concerned the time limits allow me to watch dozens of videos on the topics I'm interested in. There's not a lot to know about juicers mechanically because there are basically two types.

Centrifugal juicers chap up the vegetation you put in them and then spin the juice out. Masticating juicers grind the products up pretty much like chewing them in your mouth does. Watching the videos helped me to understand I needed the masticating type because it doesn't introduce as much air into the juice. That's bad for the same reason apples turn brown when you take a bite outta them. Oxidation.

I watched a bunch of videos on how to sprout seeds yesterday, and I'll probably watch some more today. None of the video lasted that long. Ten minutes at the extreme. Many were less than two minutes long. There's not a lot to know about sprouting seeds.

Germinating them by soaking them in water is common for about all sorts of seeds. Washing them each day while waiting for them to sprout is also recommended by practically all the video producers. There is even a technical video on thoroughly cleaning your hands and the equipment used with bleach to kill any bacteria.

A friend of mine who used to grow mushrooms went to extremes with this sterilizing technique, so I'm familiar with the need for this at times, but for the regular beans and vegetable seeds, washing them several times during the process seems to work pretty good. I probably need to wash the wheatgrass I harvest for juicing, but I haven't yet.

I've been taking the magnesium pills I bought recently for nearly a week. I'm already experiencing the results, and they're very positive. Rainey asked me how I knew when enough was enow, and my response was to simply say "Milk of Magnesia" and that did the trick.

He understood immediately that if I got diarrhea I had plenty (if not too much) magnesium in my system, and if I got constipated I didn't have enough. It's as simple as that.

I got another clue about how much magnesium to take from an e-mail post sent out by a new discussion group I subscribed to about alternative life styles. They connect the way magnesium is needed to process calcium along with vitamin D, and suggest that one take about as much by milligram as the calcium.

My family doctor over at the Fayetteville VA Hospital prescribes 600 mg of calcium with 400 IUs of vitamin D, so I started out taking two of the magnesium pills a day. These OTC magnesium pills have a tricky label. They say they're 420 mg tablets, but they also point out that in that tablet there is only 250 mg of magnesium. The rest is sterile filler.

This indicates that I need to take four of the tablets a day to balance out the calcium/vitamin D capsules prescribed by my doctor. I have a better test for how much though. I also have prescribed Tylenol3 tablets for pain, but they cause constipation.

I have avoided taking the pain-killers due to the fact that they induce constipation. Sometimes very painful constipation. Not any more though. I took two of them last night because I was really hurting, but this morning I had no problems with being constipated.

That makes me happy I found a solution to this problem. The swelling associated with the rheumatoid arthritis can produce severe pain and gout, and I haven't yet learned to turn that pain into pleasure like a true masochist does. Unfortunately, I don't appear to be a masochist.

I'm working on it. The problem is that I don't know exactly how to do that. It's not like I need a domineering pervert to induce the pain. I already have plenty of that. It's turning it into pleasure that's the poser.

My ex-wife and two grown children serve as the sadistic motivation that should provide the psychological impetus for me to resort to masochism as a solution to my problems. I'll never see any of them including my grandchildren again for the rest of my life, so I've just stopped trying to communicate with them. Why torment myself over something I don't have any say so about? Live and let die. They left me, not the other way around.