The Pollen Of Spring

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The headaches I've been having are an allergic reaction to the Spring pollen. I cleaned out my nasal and sinus passages with salt water and the headaches went away. I couldn't stand the thought of doing the software-driven meditation with a headache. The very idea of putting headphones on my aching head was more than I could bear to contemplate. Aiiiyyyeeeeee!

After I used the salt water to clear the pollen out of my haidI I decided to do a truncated version of the last 32 minutes of the default sequence. I got to the theta state surprisingly fast, and then to the end of the program more quickly than I expected to. Subsequently, I got up and reset the program to do another thirty minutes which also went by before i expected it to.

The first dreams I had happened just as soon as I lay down to sleep. They came on so quickly I didn't realize I was dreaming for a good long time. I returned to somewhat of an industrial situation. There was a used commercial heater in my living room along with this Virgo guy I haven't seen in a long time telling me that if we could get it working again it would be a very reliable source of heat in the winter. I should have realized I was dreaming from his comments, because I thought it the beginning of Spring.

I dreamed of what I was going to fix for breakfast this morning in the early hours of the morning. Spinach! I remembered that I had a couple of small cans of spinach that I bought fairly recently, and my plan was to put some canola oil in the bottom of a boiler pan, then dump one of the small cans of spinach into it, and after it got hot, to scramble a couple of eggs in the hot, oily spinach.

My concoction turned out to be somewhat tasty, but it would have been more like I dreamed if I had used fresh spinach. I gotta start eating leafy vegetables that have lots of folic acid in them because of the prescription medicines I'm taking. After the rheumatologist at the VA Hospital told me to double up on the folic acid pills I've been taking, and I read on the internet that my sore tongue was due to a deficiency of folic acid, I gotta do what's right.

I've had problems with a sore tongue before, and my regular doctor at the Fayetteville VA Hospital didn't have a diagnosis or a remedy for it. She reassured me, at least, that it wasn't cancer, and let it go at that. Even the doctor at the Durham VA Hospital didn't offer much direct help as a result of my complaints about my poor tongue and the ulcers on my gums and lips. She did recommend I take more folic acid. That led me to do the research on the internet, and some hope, at last, for a cure.

The soreness and rawness of the ulcers on my lips and gums are really painful when I eat anything spicy. They are tender too, and any food that has a crust on it like fried fish can be painful to the point of my not feeling good about eating. I don't know whether my mouth is actually better this morning or it's feeling better is the result of my having some hope the situation might be resolved.

Waking up was quite pleasant this morning. I became fully conscious around four o'clock. It was still dark outside, of course, and it was quite pleasurable to just lay in bed under a single sheet and experience the comfort of the Spring weather. I must had drifted in and out of sleep a few times before I got up to fix the spinach with eggs, and brew up some coffee.

Currently, the sun has risen above the tops of the pine trees and is shining through the open door on the eastern side of my house. It's cooler than yesterday, and that's good, because it got really warm yesterday. The temperature almost reached 90° (32.22 C), and for early Spring, that's hot.

With the temperature so warm I did lay out in the sun for around thirty minutes or more on my new outside chaise lounge. It's for sure that I was out in the sunlight long enough to get lots of vitamin D. I may be fooling myself, but I've never concerned myself with getting skin cancer from exposure to the sun. As a child and most every summer since I go all day (when I wasn't working) with as few clothes as decently possible.

Skin cancer may not be a problem, yet, but my old skin looks the worse for wear. I guess I've lost most of my subcutaneous fat and I am is wrinkled all over my body. I look old because I am is old. In a week from tomorrow my skin will be 72 years old. All in all, I'd say my skin has done pretty good compared to other old people, but it's nothing to brag about.

Everybody knows about getting old. We watch people get old and die from the time we're children. Nothing happens to human beings that we don't already know about. I watched part of a TV program on PBS about Herbert Hoover and what he did before he became President. He ran a food program to help the people of Russia who were experiencing a horrible famine in the early part of the 20th century.

There were lots of film about the troubles the Russians were having. They were starving and the pictures of them looked at least as bad as the pictures of the people in the German concentration camps during World War Two. Talk about your bad skin, even the children looked horrid. It's difficult to believe life got that bad over there.

It happened at the same time as the Communist takeover of Russia, and death in all forms was so common that people had given up hope. It's difficult to imagine that sort of starvation happening here. For one thing, we don't have the sort of cold winters to deal with here as what happens in Russia. Why they don't migrate to a warmer country is hard to understand, in a way, but many humans just can't pick up and leave like other animals do.

Granted, you might have to fight the people who already live where there is warmth and food to eat, but staying in some place like Russia when the crops fail and the winters are lethal is a sure death and a lotta suffering before it comes.

My motivation for traveling when I was young was not based on life or death conditions. Not in a physical sense. I had to go live as a stranger in strange lands to keep from dying of a broken heart.

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