Saturn's Day

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There is no question about it. I actually am an idiot, and it's gonna cost me big time. I have wondered whether or not cinnamon acts as a food allergy for me, and is responsible for my sore tongue and swollen lips. I stopped using cinnamon and took some prednisone to hurry it out of my system in order to find out if cinnamon is the culprit or not. That was probably a big mistake. 

The problems with my mouth did not go away with the cessation of using cinnamon. After I eased off the prednisone, and my tongue got even sorer, I decided to look up the side effects of prednisone, and I'm pretty sure this drug is behind my problems. It may have caused me permanent health problems. It kills gut bacteria both friendly and unfriendly, and completely undoes my probiotics regimen. That won't never do. 

I started taking the methotrexate again. At least I know it's not the problem with my mouth. My bones and joints started aching in a serious way. I got enough problems as it is. I'm gonna take the prescribed medicine and hopefully wait it out. 

I'm writing while listening to the meditation software and binary beat videos again. I need to do something positive. Realizing that I might have actually hurt myself by my cavalier attitude is a little depressing. I gotta get a local doctor I can turn to. 

The VA Hospital helps a lot with medical expenses, but it's difficult to get good advice there. Their cavalier attitude is more decadent than even my own. At least it's a go to, and many people don't appear to have even that. They might be better off without knowing it. 

I stopped writing and went for a walk. Movement seems to change my mood. Usually for the better. I walked out to the paved road to check to see if I'd received any mail in my Rural Free Delivery box. Nada. Empty. Nobody loves me. I strolled on down to the private drive named Copperhead Lane. Copperhead snake says "Don't tread on me." 

My youngest brother, who lives further back in the woods than me, installed a steel gate with a lock on the entrance to Copperhead Lane to keep strays out and to indicate they got no business trespassing without his say so. A body can't be too careful when you live out in the wasteland. 

I wrote "wasteland" intentionally. What I'm calling a wasteland is a portal to the wilder side of nature. Our family property literally has 'a river that runs through it". The local people call it a river, but the state maps call it a stream. It's more than a stream. It might be more descriptive to state that there is more than one stream. 

This "stream" changes from one description to another depending on how much rainfall feeds it from it's hinterland. It's located within the Cape Fear River basin. It drains a bunch of swamp land into a real river that eventually joins the two Cape Fear rivers where they conjoin together at downtown Wilmington. 

I call it a "wasteland" in a more rustic sense than I think TSE used the term. Where I live is a perfect description of what a mountaineer might call a flatlander. There are no hills around here. Only inverted hills called pocosins. That's where the water collects at the small end. We get a lotta rainfall some years. It's in the right place geologically for dragons to fly over. 

It's the Oriental version of dragon I am is indicating. Not the Saint George kind of dragon. Oddly enow, the effects of a dragon passing is pretty much identical by description. The Asians in general seem to label electrical storms dragons. They spit fire as lightning, and huff and puff and blow everything bye bye. 

Both the Western culture's idea of a dragon, and the Oriental culture's version of what a dragon is resolves to the adage "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." This place where I live gets a lot of the rainfall it needs to not be a desert comes form tropical storms and hurricanes. Thunder storms. 

Thor's bolts of lightning that are really a magical hammer is neat for exciting mythical eddas and comic books and cartoon careactors, but for everyday life on the coastal plains of the southeastern corner of the continental United States, electrical storms and tropical storms and hurricanes galore; act just like the dragons of Asia for me. 

My outlook probably has a lot to do with my thirty year study of the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching. I used it almost daily as a book of wisdom and as an oracle until in an early morning dream one day an authoritative voice spoke to me and told me enough was enow. "Stop using the I Ching!"

It wasn't a bully's voice. There weren't any scary tone reminiscent of a threat of hell and damnation. No punishment was indicated. I knew when I heard it that I would stop. I didn't know how. Worse, I didn't actually believe I could keep my stopping still. It was easier to quit smoking tobacco, and that's a hard row to hoe. 

Part of my attraction to studying and using this book is that a huge group of people on the other side of the Earth considered the I Ching, and four other Chinese classical books, holy. I'd had it up to here with the mideastern tribal Gods. I needed to know the same secrets the Aramaic world (including Jews) taught, but in other words. I'm a cross-referencing fool. 

I've known less than five people who actually took up the I Ching cross and bore it as just another something to do. I met one person in passing in a busy airport, and another person on a movie set who claimed to have this obsession. It's gotta be an obsession or that path would have had no heart for me. Life ain't worth living if I am is has no thing to obsess about. 

That's the God's own truth for me. Sometime I have conversations with myself about needing some/any obsession to make my life interesting to me. I used to think my true purpose for using some classical system to contemplate my own life was a behavior I should be ashamed of. 

I gave it a shot. I tried my dead-level best to feel the burn. To feel the pain. To be-co-me the epitome or essence of shame. That's what shamed men do. Shamed men become shamans. I talked myself right out of feeling bad about being a shaman. Why would I not? It only takes two bowls. 

Some cockamamy, idealistic urge to being is all it takes to give it a try. Being is the opposite of nothingness. To have being one must have a leg to stand on. To stand up, you gotta have a ground for being. The KJV has Jesus stating that to have a ground for being it should have a firm foundation. Stone on stone is the best of all. 

Well, according to some Mediterranean basin tribal characters as described in their holy books. I don't live in no place like that. The metaphors designed for nomadic tribes wandering around looking for a permanent home don't take root here in the coastal plain where there is fresh standing water enough to be a real problem at times. 

For some reason I'm not too willing to explore I like the Moses story of the Exodus and the Ten Commandments above the other nomadic tall tales. In my way of interpreting the me-and-thee-ing of the story is to view it as a Grail tale and an excuse to ramble around the various cultures to see the world in other words. 

The Ten Commandments are Moses' theory of how to be-co-me in the same manner of Gautama Buddha's Eight Noble Truths. Both are systems for thinking about things in order to live a life of no blame. Neither are exclusively vegetation oracles, yet they both contain several each. 

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Youth Is Wasted On The Young

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The temperature is cool for the middle of Spring. When I woke up with my bladder screeching, I realized I had pulled more covers on top of myself than I needed, and I was uncomfortably warm.

When I couldn't wait any longer, I finally got up to relieve myself, and realized how cold it was in my bedroom. I shivered a little as I quickly finished my toilette, and hurried back to my warm bed. After I removed the down comforter that had been a little too much, I quickly crawled back under the covers and lay there for a good long time. I like to sleep under a couple of blankets. Soon, when Summer gets here, that won't be possible. 

They knew me in the dream as they knew me in beta consciousness when we worked together at an electronic repair joint. It was an altogether pleasant affair in the dream, but in the past, there was lots of emotional anger and suspicion. I felt the need to explain to my ex-co-workers what I was doing there in their presence. 

With heightening lucidity, I found some clothes I had left on the job site, and said that I had merely returned to pick them up. The one guy, who seemed to have taken over my job when I left, told me that he had to fill out some forms to indicate where the articles of clothing had disappeared to. 

There some complicity in this odd behavior, because the clothes would never have been catalogued as company property. It was like he attempted to complicate matters as an attempt to find out if I had returned to get my old job back. I had not. It was just a dream. These people appeared in my dreamtime from a job I had in Charlotte in the late 1960s.

The dreamtime appears to exist as a non-attaching situation. I knew these people intimately, and they seemed like they knew me, but there wasn't any emotion attached to our exchanges. Displays of emotion in my dreams is "of the persona" or seems that way. 

Sometime my emotions reach into the dreamtime and inflict themselves on situations my consciousness decides should be there. But, it's not the usual deal for me to move around in that world getting all worked up about the events there. Most of the time I feel like I am is moving in a suspended state of being when I know I'm dreaming. 

It's because I am lucid that I have a certain degree of control over what happens next in the sequence. Conscious awareness means anything could happen next, and it's difficult to anticipate the future when I know I'm dreaming. 

The olive oil I prepare for dipping with bread hasn't got as much wiggle room for experimenting as I thought it might. The first dipping oil I experienced was flavored with grated parmesan cheese. I'm used to sopping up pot likker with biscuits from my Southern heritage. I liked this new taste, so I bought several other kinds of cheese to see if they might work as a flavoring in the oil. 

The bleu cheese (sic) I bought was not grated, but crumbled, and when I used it this morning to flavor some fried eggs and hash browns I thought it would melt and blend in. It didn't. So, I got eggs and hash browns with clumps of blue cheese on them. Not bad, but hardly what I had imagined. 

The oil I've mixed for dipping, except with grated parmesan cheese, hasn't lived up to my initial expectations. I've tried some feta cheese also. The crumbled cheese doesn't work as well for me as the grated cheese. The bread I've used for dipping hasn't worked out so well either. It's been too soft. I guess this addition to my diet will take a while to figure out. 

One of the more pleasant surprises I've had has been to heat the oil and it's ingredients before I use it. Not on salads though. Heating it, without getting the oil too hot, blends whatever tastes I've put together. Some of the mixtures I've used with fried hash browns has been quite tasty. 

I may have been wrong about being allergic to cinnamon. After I stopped taking the prednisone, which caused the soreness on my tongue to dissipate drastically, and the steroids wore off, the sore spot that has made it so difficult to eat comfortably returned in full force. 

The swelling in my lips is a little better than it was. I plan to keep avoiding using the cinnamon for a while. It may not be the culprit, but who knows what the future will bring (odd, that's the same thing I just wrote about not being able to anticipate the direction of my dream life).

If I continue to not take the methotrexate until next Monday, I will have gone two weeks without it. Methotrexate is like the silver bullet as far as the pain goes with rheumatoid arthritis, but it lowers my immune system rather drastically, and I feel like I have to exercise caution to the extreme when something physical goes awry. 

The pain can be and has been awful at times. I'm taking my life in my hands at times to combat little infections and such. I've reached the conclusion that whatever is causing my tongue to be sensitive and my lips to swell up is not due to an infection, but its probably an allergy to something I'm eating or the side effect of one of the prescription drugs I take. If I get to hurting bad enough from not taking the methotrexate I will start taking it. 

My friends and kinfolk don't know what I'm going through with the arthritis or why what I'm going through may be the reason (or excuse) I'm not as genteel as they've come to expect. It's not their fault I get so grumpy at times, but the family gene pool ain't my fault either. I gotta get a younger body. 

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Kefir

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This morning I've got my earphones on again listening to the Gnaural meditating software and another Playlist of binaural beat videos  from YouTube, and writing at the same time. It's a different way to do things, but I like the idea of it. While my brain waves are entraining themselves to the Gnaural software and the YouTube videos, I'm reaching for descriptions for something to write that somehow makes sense. 

The Gnaural software documentation suggests that the volume of the binaural beats can be turned down to what's barely heard, and it still works to influence my brainwaves. Since the YouTube videos are being fed through the same audio channel the sound from the videos is real low also. 

I did dream last night, but I was not very lucid. After brewing coffee and  preparing a bowl of oatmeal (without cinnamon) this morning, I guess I lost the dreams and what I formerly remembered of them. After I went to bed last night I didn't feel the least bit sleepy, so I took a painkiller tablet to help me relax, and it did help, but I figure it had something to do with me not remembering my dreamtime so readily. 

Yesterday I used the software three times for a total of three and a half hours or so, then I meditated without it for an hour. My reaction to the binaural beats inducing a theta and delta state of meditation without me exerting discipline to bring those states about intrigues me. I seem to be able to concentrate on my seven chakra areas easier. 

Focusing on the various chakra areas is what I practiced for the hour I wasn't using the headphones. I think spending four hours meditating yesterday had a lot to do with my not being very sleepy last night. The act of performing creative writing while the meditating software and videos plays adds another dimension to the practice. 

It's like I'm teaching myself to think in a more lucid manner even though my brain waves are attenuating to states of being that normally induce a state of unconsciousness. That's what I'm thinking, but I could be wrong. Nobody knows, so what does it matter? If I am getting off on it, then it's all good. 

The TV is on and muted. Occasionally I look over to see what's going on. Currently, on the CBS Morning Show, the host is conversing with a pretty young woman about what to eat to get enough dietary fiber. Bowls of what is considered the correct food to eat in order to get enough fiber is amusing to me now. 

The reason it's amusing is that I get more than all those foods with soluble dietary fiber using inulin. Each teaspoon of it provides 6 grams of fiber, and I put it in either my food or in what I drink twice a day. I acquired inulin from two sources. 

The initial inulin was derived from Jerusalem artichokes. I bought it at a health food store. The second purchase was manufactured from chicory roots. Metamucil sells it in a silver-colored container. Neither kind has much taste and it is a tiny bit sweet. I don't have to concern myself about getting enough dietary fiber, and it's easy to use. 

If for no other reason than just the idea of doing it I'm enjoying feeding my friendly gut bacteria as if they were my pets. Because I'm taking such a meticulous approach to making sure they get enough to eat, I pretend they guard my life and protect me from the unfriendly bacteria. Whether this actually happens as advertised or not is anybody's guess. 

Maybe there are some purists who believe that homemade kefir is better for you than the commercial kefir smoothies I bought at Harris-Teeter, but I kind of doubt it is, except for the emotional satisfaction that may be gained from creating it from scratch. 

The most useful ingredients in the kefir, homemade or not, is the friendly gut bacteria added to them. An acquaintance told me of a guy he works with that makes his own kefir. I don't know if he calls what he makes kefir. It's a new word in my lexicon, but kefir has been around in the more ancient civilizations for millennia. 

Around the Mediterranean basin it's made with any kind of mild they can get hold of. Goat and sheep and camel milk in the arid countries. It's closely associated with cheese from these animal's milk too. In Wikipedia the article on kefir states they use honey and other sucrose sources along with the yeast bacteria to make it. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefir

Here is the link to the company who makes the commercial variety I bought at the grocery store:

http://www.lifeway.net/Probiotics/

The reader, if interested, has to copy and paste the links into their browser. I've been reading and searching for a way to make the links active, but I don't know much about HTML coding, and that's what it takes to get it to happen. 

I've found the HTML code that's supposed to do the trick, but I don't know where to put it in the code template in the blogger.com settings. Maybe if I persist in my efforts I'll be able to figure it out one day.

The audio programs are just powering away as I've been writing. I've been able to figure out how long it's taken me to get this far by the counter on the Gnaural software. 55 minutes. There is about twenty minutes left for the sequence to complete itself. 

I need to wait until it is done before I edit what I've written. I've taken to having the computer read what I've written back to me aloud. I read along with the audio voice to help me find typos and other mistakes. The reason I have to wait is because the headphones need to be unplugged operate the speech program, and I need the stereo for the meditation software to work right. 

In between reading and listening I appear to make fewer mistakes in editing my blog entries. I don't know about other bloggers, but I find it very tedious to edit my own stuff. I seem to waltz right over the errata without the audio read back because "Familiarity breeds contempt."

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Olive Oil And Peppermint Ice Cream

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I am taking a couple dietary additives I feel real good about. It doesn't matter whether they're providing the results promised. I just like the idea of reaching for such results. I ran out of the capsules of this combination of Acetyl L-Carnitine and Alpha Lipoic Acid temporarily, but not intentionally. 

I had gone to the Wal-Mart vitamin counter where I usually get it (it's the closest and best stocked grocery store to my house by a long shot), and they were out. I dreaded the idea of driving all over town to find it because of the price of gas. I went to several other of the large franchise drug stores to find some, and they didn't carry it. I took the last capsule of it I had this morning. I take it twice a day per the instructions on the label. 

Tonight I didn't have a capsule to take, and I wanted some ice cream, so I drove over to the Wal-Mart SuperCenter, and they had restocked what I wanted. I was real pleased about that. I want to keep a regular schedule with this weird additive, but mostly I was happy to sit here and eat some peppermint bark ice cream. 

Eating almost the entire pint container of ice cream made me think of a poem by this woman who proclaimed, "More ice cream and less beans...". I didn't remember it so much. I put in what I remembered of it into Google, and the first ten or twelve links were about this poem, and for the first time I saw that it does have a one-word title:

http://www.luvzbluez.com/purple.html

WARNING
by Jenny Joseph

WHEN I AM AN OLD WOMAN I SHALL WEAR PURPLE
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me....

I didn't eat much ice cream for a long time. I didn't eat wheat products that had gluten in it either. My current dalliance with probiotics has changed that. I have another goal in mind than avoiding gluten and dairy products. My new aim is simply to feed my friendly gut bacteria, and apparently they like sopping bread with olive oil and parmesan, and ice cream of the very best kind. 

What's really new in my diet is the olive oil. I just wasn't raised to it. Never. As much as I traveled around and tasted the foods of various cultures I never encountered the notion of consuming olive oil because it was good for you. My only cognizance of it's use was it's Mediterranean cultural roots. 

My sister-in-law is the driving force behind my present curiosity about olive oil. She introduced me to it by buying me a bottle of it as a present for my birthday gift. Previously, I have been using canola oil to cook with. It's cheaper (I am a self-confessed miser), and I argued that canola oil is good enough for the likes of me. She was born in The Year Of The Dragon according to the Chinese astrology place mats, and I was born in The Year Of The Rabbit. She didn't agree with me using the canola, and demanded that I use the olive oil she bought me for the sake of my health. Now, I'm glad she was so adamant.   

For that reason, especially after I started studying and researching probiotics, I decided to read the default article on olive oil at Wikipedia. What I read was pretty much all positive, and in between this serious info and my sister-in-law's cocksure insistence, I decided to take olive oil more seriously and make it a mainstay in my diet. Now, I'm infrequently drinking it straight out of the bottle. Never in all my life have I imagined doing that. 

I've read that Wikipedia article several more times, and information from other sources to. Some time ago I had read that there is a lot of misinformation going around about olive oil, and unless you are really familiar with what to look for when you buy it, you can get cheated. 

Due to all the reading I've been doing, and after reading lots of labels and what information to look for, I'm not really concerned about getting cheated due to my ignorance about wot's what anymore. The different sorts of commercial olive oil is printed right on the label, the consumer just has to know what to look for. 

Most of the olive oil on the grocery store shelf at least won't kill you. The big difference in the various kinds is usually about how it's processed. At best, one specific brand of it might not be top shelf in taste and acidity, and there is the possibility of it getting rancid because it's past it's shelf life, but it's not a matter of getting cheated nutritiously. It's all good. Other than how it's processed, much of the controversy is about where the olives come from and where and how they're processed. 

As far as the nutritional values are concerned it really don't seem to matter if the olive oil is processed in many different places and then mixed together as a blend. Every label I read at the grocery store stated where the oil originated by country. Even if the label on the front states it's Italian, keep looking and you might discover it was grown in Tunisia, Spain, or Greece.

One interesting factoid is how olive trees are getting to be a major source of income in Australia. It originated around the arid regions around the Mediterranean basin. The olive tree has elaborate root systems that really reach deep into the dry soils of the desert-like areas of the mideast. Australia has lots and lots of land like that. What's not to like about the growing olive oil industry there? 

If you're more of an esthete and/or have territorial loyalties, then it's easy to placate those feelings by making choices in that vein. The info I'm reading states that if it's thoughtfully processed in the same place it's grown, you really can't go wrong. I bought a bottle of Israeli oil simply because the label claims it was entirely grown and processed in the Halutza Highlands. 

After I've decided which countries olive trees I wanna patronize, for whatever reason, it's then just a matter of acidity and taste. I'm not Jewish. For me, buying the Halutza brand was just the idea that it was grown and processed in the same place, and that it was not heated or treated with chemicals. Italian or Greek olive oil is fine with me. Olive oil from Senegal or Yemen, if it's entirely grown and processed there is just dandy with me. In the U.S., it's gotta say where it's from on the label. 

The acidity of olive oil seems to be a big deal to many people who consider themselves purists. Some people like a light taste. Others like a little more tartness and as stronger acidic taste. I've tasted several kinds now, and as long as it's not bitter or rancid I can go either way. Granted, according to my present research, the healthy ingredients found in olive oil may differ a little according to the region it's grown, but not enough to obsess over unless you're exceedingly fastidious. 

The way I'm preparing olive oil for dipping now obviates it's country of origin anyway. That, and my plebeian taste buds. The taste is modified too much by the type of ingredients I put in it. Parmesan or feta cheese works well. I bought some blue cheese to try out that I haven't used yet. Even better for taste in my opinion is miso. A half teaspoon of miso with a dash of soy sauce along with the grated cheese, and I'm a happy man. It's choosing the bread to sop it up with that still mystifies me. 

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Tattling On Myself

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Sleep did not come easy. Even when it did I woke up early. Woke up dreaming of being at a party that took place in between two regular one-story family type houses. People drifted from one house to the other. Most of the time I was in the middle between them. The party-goers would stop by to visit with me from time to  time. Hanky panky plus was a'going on. I was fairly lucid, but kept holding back because I was semi-committed to some woman that in the dream I appeared to know for a good long time. 

The dream went on and on until I was fairly awake, and I lay there on the bed feeling real good that I'd had such a good time. I decided not to think about it too much and started counting in the same way as I do when I meditate. Exhales on odd numbers. Inhales on even number. Count to twelve, then start back at one. Again and again. It could have happened for an hour or so, but time was flying because I was enjoying the rapture of my body being totally focused. 

Eventually I got up outta bed because I knew I wasn't going back to sleep. It didn't matter that it was still dark outside. I clicked my computer outta Sleep Mode to see what time it was. Five o'clock in the morning. 62° Fahrenheit. Warm for this early in spring. I might as well stay up, make some coffee and enjoy it. The next week the weather is forecast to be unusually cool. Fine with me. It'll be hot all night ere long. 

The problems I've been having with my mouth and tongue seem better. I'm afraid to trust that it's merely a matter of a food allergy involving cinnamon. I still have a little sore spot on my tongue, but it appears to be going away a little at a time. My swollen lips are much better. I had to figure this out for myself. The doctors simply don't care. They get their government check anyway. No blame. 

Money is money. Why complicate matters with people's illnesses if you don't have to.  There is nothing they need to do to get what they're after. I'd probably do the same thing. Go through the motions without emotional investment. Most of them will be paying off their student loans for most of the rest of their life anyway. 

My personal medico friend got mad at me last night again, and stormed outta my house again. He don't like my attitude toward him being an agent of the state, even though he openly agreed with my argument. At one point I thought he might get over it. Now, it don't look so possible. It's easier to be mad at me than himself. Silk purses and sow's ears. 

The software aided meditation I've been constant with for a while now not only appears to make me more fearless in the dreamtime, but now it seems to make me less tolerant in beta consciousness. I seem to be pissing people off with my plain-spoken, thoughtless remarks. 

This is not exactly a recent development, but for a while I thought I was doing better by the people who act friendly toward me. After the milk spills and I insult their intelligence it's too late to try and abdicate my arrogant faux pas. I got no shame after doing these digitally driven meditations. I just say what I see and move on. 

I felt fairly removed about viewing the various celebrations about what's his name getting assassinated. I never saw the pictures of 9/11 during the time all these people were getting all worked up patriotically. I might have gotten upset if I'd had a working TV at the time, but I didn't. By the time I did see the pictures it was all over but the shouting. 

This is not new for me either. I seem hesitant by nature to invest emotionally in events I have no control or input in. Slowly I'm realizing this has a lot to do with what I read about my type of person according to the Enneagrams. To wit, a #5 type of persona that put their feelings aside until they have a chance to be alone to contemplate the given results. 

For most of my life I figured I was just an apathetic person who cared little for the ways of the world. It's apparently not true, but I do seem to have a choice about whether I invest emotionally. If I have that option available to me, why would I drive myself nuts when it doesn't do me or anyone else any good? 

Most of the ti-me I'm calm like the eye of the storm. I literally have to put on a false front and act like I'm upset about whatever the prevailing hysteria is about in order for the insane people around me to accept that I'm a fairly normal person like they think they are. For a while I thought it was me that was insane for being so detached instead of acting out like them. Not any more. 

I have had my share of emotionally-based behavior, but it's mostly either been acting or elsewise when I am is off by myself with no witnesses. I'm not saying there was nobody around, just that there was nobody who knew I acted differently than the tumultuous manner on display for their eyes only. That's one of the advantages of living like a stranger in a strange land. Nobody knows. 

Monday, a week ago, I missed my high school reunion, but it wasn't intentional. Not consciously that I'm aware of. It could have sorta been intentional, but not really. I was writing when I was supposed to go, and when I write, the outside world just isn't there for me. Literally, "time flies when I'm having fun."

The only reason I harbor for suspecting I may have deliberately ignored going is that I put up the letter announcing the reunion was coming up on the wall where I keep my other appointments. I used a black Sharpie to write down the time and date in prominent lettering so I wouldn't miss it. 

I keep a close eye on these notices of appointments. I'm normally aware of them for weeks ahead of time and do a constant countdown until the actual date shows up. It's like that with my VA Hospital appointments. Not keeping those appointments can make life difficult because they kick you out of the clinics. Then, you're left to get treatment only at the Emergency Room. That's not good. 

As far as the reunion was concerned, my suspicions that I didn't really intend to go arose because I didn't really anticipate it by paying attention to the reminder note I had on my "appointment wall". Interestingly enow, I wasn't even being aware that of it being Monday, the 25th of April until a couple of hours after it happened. 

I felt no shame for forgetting. I always felt I was on the outside looking in with my classmates. I became a classmate late in the game when my family moved here when I entered the Sixth grade. The small town cliques were already formed by then, and I was the last one chosen to play games at recess. It wasn't the first time I was Johnny-come-lately. The new guy. We never got over it. 

Maybe I'll show up at the next reunion. I got what I wanted to do done at the last reunion, so it doesn't really matter to me anymore. I recited a long poem I'd written with only one brief memory lapse. I did it in keeping with the saying that nobody can be a healer or prophet in their home town. 

It worked. They were as astounded by my performance as any group of strangers have been since I've become my own man. My performance and my classmate's reaction proved to me that this isn't my hometown, and I can wax shamanistically with aplomb here, as if merely another mysterious visitor performing miracles, just because I decide to.  

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Dogs And Gut Reactions

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Deep sleep for me is a precious possession. I had to reflect a moment before calling it a "possession". More correctly, maybe, deep sleep possesses me. It might more aptly be called a commodity I need to keep up the big show of life in between the ditches.

When I returned to consciousness this morning I lay in my bed barely moving for a good long time. I felt every breath I took. I noticed that in consciousness I seal off my mouth parts by placing my tongue up against my palate to control my breathing, as if meditating, and deliberately send and receive the air through my nose.

When I inevitably drifted back toward sleep again, however, I noticed that my resolve dropped off. My tongue loosened as consciousness faltered and it got slack again, even though my lips remain closed, and I continued to breathe through my nose. In this way the palate seal was broken and the air circulated through my open mouth in it's sojourn to and from my lungs. Seven chakras. Seven seals. Selah

Bin Laden's murder was revealed to me via my computer and caught me by surprise. Only then did I turn on the TV to hear the rumbles I knew would arrive. I say "murder" not meaning to say revenge is not sweet, but to imply that execution is still murder. Assassination, even that directed by Bin Laden that called for his death, still ends up with a bunch of innocent and not-so-innocent people dying in agony. 

According to the stand-up comedians, death is like laughter. When his audience laughs uproariously, the comments imply that the comedian has "killed" his audience. Maybe death laughs at itself. It's easy to imagine Bin Laden laughing when he realized it was imminent. An eye for an eye. Live by the sword, blah... blah... blah.

It's been four days, I think, since me and my brother figured out that the problems I've been having with my mouth and tongue might be due to being allergic to cinnamon. I resolved to stop eating it immediately. I had not eaten any cinnamon for a whole day before we figured it out, so that makes it around five days since I've put any cinnamon into my body. 

The condition I have described earlier is better, but that's due, for the most part, to the prednisone steroids I've been using to reduced the swelling and pain. If it's the allergy that's been causing my discomfort, then avoiding cinnamon will continue the healing process after I stop taking the prednisone tomorrow. 

I took 10 mg for two days, then 5 mg for two days. I'll take 2.5 mg today and again tomorrow, and stop. Then, after the prednisone effect wears off I'll find out if not eating cinnamon does the trick. This problem probably ain't fatal. It's worse. Not being able to eat comfortably because it hurts, to a drama freak, is like a fate worse than death.  

Diet or the lack of it has been a big deal to me forever. I've been tortured by my own empty hands off and on since childhood. My very life started out with very real diet problems, but my neonatal problems were not my fault. My mother had a breast-feeding problem that even cows get called mastitis. 

Her milk clabbered up inside her huge breasts, and suck as a I may, I couldn't get any nourishment from my efforts. This didn't become known for six weeks and I nearly died of starvation. This was not a good start. It may be the reason I've never been attracted to females with large breasts. 

For the purposes of contemplating my own life using oracles, and in this case astrology, being born with the Sun in Taurus in the sixth house makes health a big issue. My lifelong goal. As opposed to my day by day goals represented by the eastern horizon which is intercepted by Scorpio. 

Having my natal Sun in the sixth house (the natural home of Virgo), and opposed by having the opposite sign of Taurus (Scorpio) ruling my Ascendent can be troublesome. It's complicated by the existence of Saturn in Aries (in it's Fall), and in weak conjunction with my natal Sun in the sixth house. My life goals are opposed to my daily goals, and vice versa, and at times I can barely discern which is what. No blame. Shit happens. Things change. Aiiiyyyeeeee!

I really sort of think my diet problems are beginning to resolve themselves. Perhaps my gut bacteria are the real comforters in my life. As I am bejinning to read it, presently, they act more like Gods. Good to know. I'm gifted in pleasing Gods. It was a hard row to hoe early on, but over time the Gods knocked some sense into me. 

Discomfort I can easily ignore. Outright pain is another matter. The Gods have no pity. Why would they. THEY are immortal. No discomfort they experience will lead to death. It doesn't frighten them. With mortals it's a different proposition altogether. Discomfort can be a warning that death is nigh. If ignored, it can become one with acute pain. Ignore pain and you're dead. Hah! Like I would know....

My immune system, as far as staying alive is concerned, has always been my friend. It has saved me from a perilous death time and time again. The very idea of circumventing it's power through prescription drugs to combat my internal enemies is antithetic to my reason for living. I just had to find another way. 

I bear hope. Not much confidence. Life has forever delightfully surprised me both pro and con. The probiotics (for life) information just makes sense to me. If I can please the friendly bacteria in my guts, then they will take of me. 

It's a little like the dynamics with my brother's dogs. They love him because he feeds them. He knows that. We were brought up by a gifted animal breeder and taught the ways of nature under the advent of his auspices. My brother keeps dogs because of it. I don't keep dogs because of it. 

When I go walking back in the woods toward the river, my brother's dog are delighted to accompany me. For a brief moment I think they're with me because they love me too. It's not real. Their "love" for me is easily transgressed by the appearance of my brother. 

In the recent past my brother and I have been taking walks at night before he goes to bed. Doctor's orders. I've been walking with him until recently. The dogs go with us. Part of our routine has been for him to walk over to my house to get up with me. I live closer to the paved road. he lives a couple of hundred yards back further in the woods. 

He starts walking from his house, calls out for me to join him upon his arrival at my house, then we both walk together until we've had enough, whereupon he stops when we get to his house on the last round, and I continue on to my house. His dogs never accompany me toward my house on that last round. He feeds them. They are loyal to him. He is their master. 

It's pretty much the same way with my gut bacteria according to the more in-depth reading I'm getting around to recently. If I feed them like my brother feeds his dogs, they guard my guts from any interlopers. First, they warn me of potential trouble, and then if their barking doesn't make the perpetrator come to their senses, they attack as if my enemy were Bin Laden. 

Okay, maybe that's a little over-the-top. I do, however, think its a likely metaphor. That's what the writers on this topic appear to be saying. The "friendly" gut bacteria will somehow eliminate the "bad" bacteria to make sure their host remains viable to keep feeding them and providing them with an ideal lifestyle. They take care of me. I take care of them. Nothing could be finer, right here in Carolina. '-)

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Changing My Default Settings

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There has to be a reason why the URL links I place on this blog are not activated. Once more I meandered through the settings to see if there is a feature that allows this to happen. I changed one setting from No to Yes. Maybe that will do the trick. Only time will tell.

Nobody gets individual answers from these huge corporations. Especially if you don't allow Google to put their ads on your blog. I don't allow it. Why bother? They wouldn't make any money off the few readers attracted here. If Google sent me a record of how few readers I get here I might get disgusted and quit posting. I only know poor people or those who fool me into thinking they're poor.

My youngest brother and my older sister took me out to eat for a belated birthday supper. Actually, my brother and sister-in-law took me and our sister to this new Italian restaurant that has opened here. Classy place for a small town. Very sophisticated people. They fawn over their customers, and their asking price might spell their eventual doom. These used-to-be farmers are not big spenders. Many people have opened restaurants like where they come from and failed miserably. Maybe these people will succeed. It will be good for all of us if they do.

The eggplant parmesan was tasty. It came with spaghetti. They had Italian bread with olive oil and parmesan cheese for an appetizer that was good. I remember going to a place similar to this in Pennsylvania once with a former Greek girlfriend. When I realized they expected me to dip bread in olive oil and eat it I was astounded. Nobody I knew of ate oil. They just used it for frying when they didn't have any lard or fatback. Southern cooking is... ummm... unique.

Now, I'm going crazy over olive oil. After never eating it for practically all of my life, I'm sopping it up like red-eye gravy from country ham with a biscuit. Shit happens. Things change. A couple of days ago I read about olive oil in Wikipedia. The article only said good things about it. The most interesting to me was that olive oil contains the same stuff as ibuprofen has in it, but it's a wholesome food rather than a pharmaceutical product.

I had bread and oil laced with parmesan cheese for breakfast with my coffee this morning, and a teaspoon of inulin powder to feed my gut bacteria. Doing that does seem to insult my Protestant upbringing, but a man gotta do. I got brain receptors on my mind this morning, and how refrigeration screws with their primitive origins. Refrigerated foods have only been available in the temperate zones for around a hundred years. Human brain receptors have been around much longer than that.

The very idea of kowtowing to what some call The Mediterranean Diet is antithetic to the way I was raised, but upon investigation, in light of the fact that my natal family didn't own a refrigerator until I was around ten years old, my mother employed a lot of the same techniques for using fresh food before it spoiled as other civilized cultures have. She used different words and naymes to describe her processes. No blame. I gotta get back to the Garden again.

She did season food with fatback and lard. We used to have pig-killings and cook the lard out of the pig fat in a large cast-iron pot that I had to cut kindling wood for from long leaf pine roots. The only way I know of that the old folks in my youth used vegetable oil was peanut oil and mayonnaise. T

hat's as close to olive oil and other vegetable oils I was aware of, but I was a male child and wasn't allowed in the kitchen. I worked in the garden and plowed the fields and milked the cows. I didn't know nothing about no woman's work except for the physical labor of churning butter.

Soul food was eaten by both the blacks and the whites in the Reconstruction South. It was the cheapest food not having a cash based society we could grow or barter. We made do. Why would we not? Before World War Two came along it was easy to "keep 'em down on the farm" with their rustic, but horrible diet. Po' people literally died from that "soul food".

No wonder they turned to religion as a way of coping with lard biscuits and molasses. When the State cranked up the school lunchroom program in my early years, it was the best and only-est food many blacks and poor white kids had to eat. Even though it consisted of canned vegetables and processed meat, it was still mo' tasty than what we were used to at home. Lots of homes didn't have enough food. I remember stunted, skinny children from that era. Lunchroom food was just lovely.

The most striking change to my current diet arrived in the form of learning about gut bacteria. I knew a few things about gut bacteria from early on, but most of it concluded that any bacteria at all was bad news. All bacteria was the enemy of the people. It took a while for me to grok that ain't necessarily so. I had to do something. I was unknowingly killing myself trying keep from dying by my own ignorant hand.

I only started calling gut bacteria "probiotics" after seeing an informercial on PBS that they tried to pass of as a documentary and get people to send them money to run their one-side television programs controlled by the wealthy. Imagine the gall of these dunces?

Yet, when this good looking woman started explaining about the positive aspects of "friendly bacteria" I began to listen. I'm a sucker for charismatics. I wanna be just like 'em. Now, that's Protestant for you! "Hear the woid of tha' Lord!"

It took about a month of mulling it over. A relatively short amount of ti-me for me. Double Taurus not withstanding. When this woman started preaching billions and trillions of gut bacteria in the intestines, and how feeding them the right stuff to get them to proliferate in a positive way I was hooked. I just "knew" she was right.

I weighed in on my old bookworm ways and learned that what she was selling was actually old news, but with a bright new cover on that book. Presently, along with discovering a possible cinnamon allergy, I'm devilishly not taking my prescribed medicines, and I can't get enough of these wonderful new/old elixirs. They at least appear for the moment to heal wot ails me.

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