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There is a large mulberry bush/tree down by the pond. I wandered by there yesterday to pick and eat some of it's fresh fruit. It's very pleasing for me to be able to do that. I thought I'd have to wait for the blueberries or the figs to get ripe before I would have fresh fruit off the tree for breakfast.
I don't know the deal with mulberries. Some of the bushes around here have huge fruit over an inch long, and fat with juices. The tree in question only has more moderate sized berries. Nevertheless, they're very tasty, and there is plenty of them. I got back to the house with purple hands, tongue, and lips.
When the blueberries do get ripe there will be a bunch of them. I thought I could predict a bumper crop just from the blossoms. When the actual berries began developing there were lots more than I figured. One of the pleasing aspects of these bushes is that they came up on their own from bird droppings. I've tried several times to plant blueberry bushes, but they didn't do right.
Once the blueberries start ripening they hang around for a good long time. It's not a one-shot deal with them. They keep developing blossoms for at least a month, and produce some fruit on toward the fall. Simple things like this make me happier in my dotage.
Since there wasn't a late frost this year there is a chance there will be a fair harvest of figs this year. I'm hoping to avoid the catastrophe of last season. A large flock of black starlings swooped down on my ripe figs and stripped the tree practically bare in minutes. They were just beginning to ripen, and BOOM!, they were gone in no time at all.
Yesterday I spent an hour or more reading about probiotics. It was not easy to find information I haven't already perused. Many of the links I get from web searches are copies of the same source material. I reread some of the material on inulin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inulin
There are a couple of interesting facts about inulin that makes me want to learn more about it, but the insight about how it works as a prebiotic is so simple a little knowledge about this product goes a long way. The most useful inulin is derived from chicory roots. On an average, according to what I've been reading, one average teaspoonful has 6 units of soluble dietary fiber. I guess that's why Metamucil packages it separate from the fiber they get from citrus pulp.
Inulin doesn't get digested in the stomach or small intestines. It doesn't get "digested" at all as I understand it, but gets fermented by gut bacteria in the large intestine and colon, and because it doesn't get processed until it reaches the large intestine and colon it helps the gut bacteria keep the GI tract operating smoothly.
It desolves real good in coffee, but not so much so in orange juice. I haven't figured out if it's because the coffee is hot when I put the inulin in it, but if I spill some of the powder on the linoleum countertop it's hard to wipe off because it clumps up and I have to scrape it off with my fingernail.
I've drank my share of coffee with chicory in it. Chicory was added to coffee during World War Two due to a shortage of everything back then, but when the war was over and the coffee supplies went back to normal the Cajuns in Louisiana kept using chicory coffee. It's all they had when I worked the offshore rigs down in the Gulf of Mexico.
Chicory as a word has been in my vocabulary since I was a child because of the way it was used to extend coffee, but I'm not familiar with it's health benefits otherwise. Using it as a method of feeding my gut bacteria in the large intestine and colon, and the fact that it has a huge amount of dietary fiber in it interests me greatly.
When I first became aware of this food stuff I didn't know where to buy it. My original purchase was from a health food store, and they weren't embarrassed at all to jack up their asking price. Around $11 with tax for 8 ounces. Being a miser I kept looking around and found out that Metamucil makes pure chicory insulin, and charges $7 for 11 ounces at Wal-Mart. That simplifies matters for me. It's at least 50 miles to the nearest health food store, and the internet shipping charges are an expensive travesty.
Neither price is all that outrageous in consideration that I only use a level teaspoon of the white powder twice a day. It's crossed my mind that prebiotics may be all I need to buy to work this intestinal mojo. Once I get enough different strains of gut flora (bacteria, probiotics) growing in my intestines, providing them with the nutrients they favor should do the trick.
There is another aspect of gut bacteria that makes them interesting in regard to one's personal health. Gut bacteria, like their hosts, in my case a human being partially fulfilling society's abstract notion of what a man gotta "do" in order "to be" what a man gotta seem like to survive some casual scrutiny merely to let a lotta things pass without being duped.
In a lotta cases, as far as I've been able to discern, the way these individual creatures work together as an integrated whole to inspire the host to provide them with an ideal place to be over-rides any semblance of pure thought. It's not what the gut bacteria is feeding on according to what any particular host physically consumes, that matters as far as individual decisions to do whatever transpires.
The situation I attempt to describe is full of potholes and tears. Gut bacteria are parasites that survive off of what their host consumes. Consuming the putrid crap living entities stuff they face with is not paradisal to some strains of gut bacteria.
As the sayings found in the Gospel of Thomas indicate, "It's not what you put into yo' mouth that condemns you, but what comes out of yo' mouth that condemns you.", or something like that. This saying has to be a universal. It works that way with gut bacteria too. It's what gut bacteria make what they eat into that can become a hard row to hoe.
The excrement of your own gut bacteria can affect the way you think about the external world of the senses. The chemical attributes of germ shit can decide what you reach for and put in your mouth. Germ shit makes you crave things. A better life (for them) through chemistry.
Not only are you what you eat, but you be-co-me what eats what you ate needs to maintain it's survive, co-dependently, but in the gut bacteria's favor. Remember my disclaimer in the header paragraph. I'm not trying to tell any one correct version of anybody's idea of the God's own truth by what I type here. I'm just trying to capture drifting thoughts with words.
The drifting thought I followed originally, or as close as I can remember, had to do with how autoimmune diseases might be caused by gut bacteria excrement's chemical composition. Bacteria don't eat human flesh. That's not how they kill you and themselves. They turn what you eat into the chemicals they excrete and unconsciously control what you crave by alien alchemy from a world without words.
The only-est input the host may have could amount to nothing more than being conscious enough about this involuntary process to purposely intervene for longer than the patterns try to impose. I only attempt to capture drifting thoughts with woids. There is no guarantee my interpretations are anything more than germ excrement is, but poisonously vile and tasty!
If I am is wot it eats to suffer lightly, then it's betrayal of me can be viewed as blasphemy of the spirit. What if the moment-to-moment process of being manipulated by the excrement of your gut flora becomes the conscious bane of your ex-is-tense?
Such that, not only are you consciously aware that the biochemistry of your body's own parasites rule all the appetites you have for the objects of the sensory dimension, but that you are helpless to intervene in your own behalf. Indeed, "Why hast thou forsaken me?"
My life has been littered with alcoholics. Many on their last legs by the time we met. Many people would say that I am is an alcoholic too, and sometimes I'd rather be that than this. Who knew? I've watched my fair share of significant others fade back into the woodwork. The alcoholics I watched went fairly fast once they knew it was too late.
Observing certain people go through this process of deterioration might seem impossible for more squeamish souls. The power of my detachment makes situations like this exist without emotional investment. Maybe my not wanting to save them allowed my company to be borne as an inanity to them.
I get the feeling they think I must be crazy because I can't see they're dying. No, I just don't care if they're dying. Their life or death is beyond the breadth of my so-called compassion. The only lives I've ever possibly saved made me rue the day.
One of my chief careactoristics is dispassion. Another is obsession. I can get obsessively dispassionate. There is no greater victim of my projected dispassion than little ol' me. I get as good as I give. I've lived a very niggardly life emotionally. Emotion is, to me, of-the-body. I am is lives in it's own abstracted mind, well..., except for emergencies.
Besides, my gut flora decide my relationship with the physical/sensory dimension. I am is only shows up as face value for the sake of appearances. Why would it not? That's what avatars do.
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