Gone Are The Days

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The new State museum pisses me off. My complaint is probably my fault. I have cataracts in both eyes. On December 2nd I have an appointment to see the surgeon who will remove the cataracts and replace them with new lens. Maybe by spring of next year, should I live so long, I'll be able to view my old friends in a new light. Literally.

Thomas Cole was one of the Hudson River School of painters. I don't know the history too well. I do know that when I saw four of his paintings in the National Galleries in Washington, D.C., I embarrassed my second wife by suddenly weeping in a state of ecstasy in the middle of a room filled with other museum visitors. That's the only time that's happened.

Contrarily, I'm very pleased it did happen. It was the only way I felt I could have known how art captivates people in a very powerful way. I've caused that same ecstasy in other people with my poems, but I had to experience it myself to know that the emotional outpouring is entirely real.

Thomas Cole's painting in the new museum has such bad lighting that I can barely see the little strokes of red that set off an otherwise ordinary painting. I've been visiting that painting in the State art museum since I was twelve years old. I may have seen in the interim in between now and back then maybe a hundred times. That's easily accomplished in the sixty years that has passed since then.

I drove up to the capital basically just to get out of the house and into a new or different environment. I'm suffering a little relapse and the psoriasis that comes along with the rheumatoid arthritis is showing up on my feet. I've been experiencing some heart palpitations, but I think that comes from a cheap nasal inhaler I bought at Wal-Mart. Probably Chinese stuff. My nose is still bleeding a little two days later.

Another one of the reasons I drove up to the state capital was to sing the vowels along the way. Of all the chanting I've done using mantrums I've been taught from other cultures, and even the nursery rhymes I learned as a child, and the earliest prayers I learned ("Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep... "), singing the vowels work real well for me for calming down and connecting all the stray parts of myself together.

After I left the museum and drove to downtown Raleigh on the streets I knew in my youth I was just about to get on Interstate 40 to drive home when I saw a sign pointing to the State Farmers Market. I'd never been there although I have heard a lot about it. My sister-in-law next door goes there frequently, and has encouraged me to take a look.

There were lots of fresh vegetables all displayed in fine fashion, but not like the fancy fresh food markets I've seen in other places. No need here. Not enough competition to go to the trouble to put all those vegetables in neat pyramid stacks to show them off. I bought a couple of huge one-slice sandwich tomatoes like the ones I've never been able to grow myself.

On the way out of the market area I saw they had a large restaurant with lots of cars parked there. I was hungry, so I decided to go inside to eat. That's not as simple as it has been in the past. Mostly because I stopped eating gluten to see where that leads, but also because I've stopped eating dairy. I'm suspicious I may be lactose intolerant, and my fondness for sour cream on practically all the food I eat may be what leads to outbreaks of psoriasis.

The swollen red spots on my toes that I have previously figured to be a fungus infection ain't no fungus infection, but psoriasis. It comes along with the RA. No salve or medicine I've ever used on it to make it go away, made it go away. But, it does go away eventually. Now, I'm attempting to figure out what makes it bloom in the first place. It may or may not be lactose intolerance.

The real problem, as far as eating out is concerned is the gluten diet I've assumed. It prohibits any wheat products, and that indicates sandwich breads, so I'm stuck with finding something to eat in other than fast food joints where practically everything they offer is served on white bread.

I knew that when I bought those two huge tomatoes that would easily make four one-slice tomato sandwiches apiece. It's a nostalgic binge, and since that's so I would have to make them with slices of white bread and mayonnaise, salt and black pepper. No more and no less. That's how it's done. Well, in the past, that's how it was done. Tonight I just ate a couple of slices of tomato with salt and pepper and pretended it was just as good without the sliced bread. It isn't. '-)

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