Friday, November 22, 2019

Welcome Back To CrazyLand

I ain't got it no more. Never had it, really.

I may be a dick but not a crazy one. Some are. Lots here, it seems. I don't like this country any more.

I parked at Margaret McKinney Campground early enough to go for a hike, even with the short days we have here now, getting on toward the end of November. I parked and then went for a hike.

At the last minute I decided to grab my canister of bear spray, to have it in addition to my pocket tube of pepper spray. Almost immediately after getting onto the trail here comes a woman with a huge dog. She was different though. Her dog was on a leash. Attached to the center of her chest with some kind of harness. Odd, but I was grateful.

A couple of weeks ago I was returning from a Sunday hike on this trail when I saw a dog aim itself at me and then launch full-tilt down the trail. Happy, happy dog. Not me though.

I had time to yell "Get your dog under control!" about three times before the dog was on me. So happy, it, to put muddy paws all over me. Not so much happy, me.

The owner's comment was "Most people don't mind."

After the dog jumped all over me a second time I pointed at the owner and yelled "FUCK OFF!".

"I'm so sorry was what I heard as I walked away." What? Makes no sense.

I put on clean pants and headed for the laundry the next day. Not much harm done but discouraging.

Day before yesterday was somewhat less fun. A guy threatened to shoot me after I pepper-sprayed his three dogs.

See three dogs on the trail. See them see you, alone. See them begin barking and watch them fan out as they come at you, Jurassic Park style to surround you, all barking, as two people on horseback bring up the rear.

Back off the trail as far as you can, both to avoid the horses and to get as far back as you can from the dogs. No good. Not enough.

As a last resort, pull out the pepper spray and hit the button, fanning across all three of them to keep from being bitten. Get a dog bite and then you've got weeks of hell being vaccinated for rabies and filling out criminal reports and all the rest. Pepper spray at least keeps the teeth a few inches from your skin.

That part worked, but then the owner, the guy, looming over me on the top of his horse, told me that he was armed and if I did that again he'd pull out his gun and shoot me.

The woman of the pair kept yelling at me about how I couldn't mace her dogs.

Etc.

I managed to get past them and backed up the trail in the direction that they'd come from, then continued up to the top of the ridge where I grabbed a late shot of Mt Rainier, which wasn't worth the price.

About then I began wondering about the state of my car, the only vehicle in the vicinity besides the two pickup trucks with horse trailers, fantasizing about all the windows being broken out, or worse.

That didn't happen, but I left the campground and spent the night at an undisclosed location, in relative peace, just to be sure.

I'm not liking life in the USofA much any more.

 


Comments? Send email to sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
See if that helps. (The commenting system quit working for some reason.) I've found that beer still works, though. Glad for that at least.

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

You Can Trust The Cold

I'm not freezing any more, and I hate it.

I got back to Washington State on October 4, bought a car, and began living in it. According to plan.

According to hope, but not hopefully, I caught a spell of fair weather, which is like free bags of gold dust handed out on street corners in western Washington in November. Rare. Unheard of.

Usually the rain doesn't start until the third week of October, sometimes earlier. But November is dead set on rain. It's always there, no avoiding it.

Except for 2002, when blue skies, sun, and calm air prevailed pretty much through the whole month of November, when I made one of the greatest day hikes of my life up the west slope of Mt St Helens. And except for 2019, which is now.

First, I got back here. Then I got the car. Then the rains began and I went nuts.

The bad part of buying a car is that you have to wait for the registration and the title and the plates, which takes about six weeks. You can't avoid that.

So there I was, here I was, in the rain, and looking at another five-and-a-half-weeks-of-it, so I bugged out for eastern Washington and got away from it for four or five days. And by then?

Well, by then a high pressure zone floated in and western Washington also got clear and sunny. And cold. Very cold some nights. Hard cold. Hand-freezing cold.

I managed.

It hurt, but it was only pain. Pain isn't always bad, because this was clean weather. Dry weather. Cold weather. Almost a month of it in total, combining eastern and western Washington locations.

If you're cold, you warm up, by going inside somewhere, by putting on more insulation, or by exercising. That's it. Wet does not work that way.

Get wet, and you stay wet, sometimes for days, even indoors. It used to take two full days for my bicycling clothing to dry after I washed it in winter, in the cool air and the humid air inside my apartment.

Cold isn't like that.

If you're cold and you do something about it, you get instant results. Period.

Cold is predictable. It cooperates. Fight it and it yields, not lingering forever, not hanging around inside your shoes, making your skin feel slimy. Cold really is clean. I like it, a lot better than wet, but now things are wet again, and I've been having troubles with the dealer where I bought my car. Things are slow. Dragging on and on.

Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. I should finally have my plates, and then I can leave, can take back control of my life and tour. I want to head south to see the deserts and the desert winter sunshine. I can hardly wait.

Maybe in a day or two. Maybe I'll be free by then.

Meanwhile, I'm wet. I hate being wet. Time for sun.

 


Ruffle my fur, see what happens. I dare you.
Comments? Send email to sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
See if that helps. (The commenting system quit working for some reason.)

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Showertime Fun

Lovely. Bathing.

Not much fun sharing that bathing space.

I abandoned the state park yesterday and showered in town today. A different experience. It is.

Millersylvania State Park south of Olympia, WA is nice. The facilities suck. They look like they were built with CCC crews in the 1930s. I'm sure that they were at least inspired by that period.

Last year, early on, the main restroom was closed, leaving only one "bathhouse" open as a shower location, and it too often was still locked in the morning when it should have been open. Later on it was working but someone vandalized it. Even later there was more vandalism at other points in the park. Someone seemed to have as life's mission the destruction of shower facilities in the park. Whoever it was hit the coin machine parts: where you drop in your tokens and it turns on the hot water. Looked like the person had a pry bar, the way they were ripped off the wall.

This year the main (i.e. in the RV area) bathhouse has one of its two showers working, and it was fine. Fine, considering the location. At Sportsman State Park in Yakima, WA, they clean the restrooms three times a day during the summer months, and the showers at least once, maybe twice. At Millersylvania State Park the schedule seems to be by phases of the moon, if anyone feels up to it, possibly only when the howling grows loud enough.

And anyway, the facilities are old and shaky. Shoddy. Sad and rundown. Even the one working-and-available shower began balking a few days back.

I found this out when the water stopped about three minutes into a six-minute shower, leaving me covered in suds with only a slow trickle of cold water emanating from the shower head. Not a good sign. Not usually. Not this time either.

I tried banging on the meter, which procedure did not work, and tried rinsing in the drippy-drops of water coming out of the plumbing, which did not work, and tried more banging on the meter, which produced hot water.

After this, I decided to put in one token at a time, which also did not work, though adding a third token after the second one failed, seemed to be the solution, for the time being, which wasn't really quite good enough, and banging had no effect either, and so.

I had my last bath there yesterday.

Today I was back at the Olympia Center downtown. Three naked guys were there. Fun. One seemed agreeable when I asked what the fare was these days. I think I used to stuff in four quarters, so that's what I did. He said it was two minutes for each. Four quarters seemed a safe bet.

Then another guy with a hooting voice came over and started flinging verbality at me. His is the kind of voice I cannot hear (being mostly deaf these days), but it sounded like he wanted me to give him a towel, and then soap, and then money, so I gave him two quarters. Generally speaking, I'd rather give a wet naked guy a couple of quarters than my soap and towel.

I think it was rinse-and-dry-only day for him. After he finished with the water part, he went under the forced-air dryer and rubbed himself a lot and got mostly dry.

One guy left and it was just him and the other guy I'd talked to and me then.

I finished and toweled-off and dressed while Noisy Man made some phone calls begging people to send him money with the third guy's phone. I didn't want to be there but I was. Too bad for me.

About the time I was ready to go we were down to Noisy Man and me in the locker room, and he hit on me again, starting with a couple of things I could not catch, followed up by him asking in his extremely loud voice what my favorite color was. Truly.

After that was something I don't remember, but I gave him "I don't have one" as a color answer, and he hooted a few more things before I scuttled out.

You never know.

We seemed too close to the edge of an aggressive moment for my taste.

I'll be back again tomorrow, but maybe a half hour later. It could be that if he's a regular he'll be gone by then and I can still slip in and be done by the 9:00 a.m. deadline while entirely missing him. I hope.

Yeah. Real fun, but I did tell myself before leaving Ecuador that I should seek out colorful characters during this trip. So at least I'd have something to write about.

Yeah. Real fun, and today I got one. Didn't really like it though. Here's hoping for quieter times, starting Real Soon Now.

 


Clean but annoyed, me. How's by you then?
Comments? Send email to sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
See if that helps. (The commenting system quit working for some reason.)

Saturday, October 26, 2019

Why Am I Here, Really?

I still don't know nothin. Winging it.

Barely escaped rain last week. Lots of it. The worst of it.

Friday, October 11, I got up, stored what I didn't need in my little rented cubby, laundered my dirties, and left for Eastern Washington. Better forecast there. Turned out to be true. The forecast did.

I was going nuts in the Olympia area, and rain had closed in. I can't take that, not while living in a car. That life is extremely constrained. You can't get up in the middle of the night to piss. Or you can, but need to do it inside the car, which gives you one chance to get it right. And then you have to store what comes out of your peepee until sometime the next day, when you also need to go looking for a place to put it.

And whenever you leave your car to cross any stretch of ground whatsoever on foot, you pick up some wet. Which returns with you to the car, where it's really hard to get rid of it.

Have an apartment? Fine. You go out, get your shoes wet, maybe your pants cuffs, a rain jacket or umbrella, and then you come home. When there, you set your wet stuff where it will dry, and then it dries. Next time you go out, you put on your dry clothes and life is fine, except for the rain, but the rain is not a major problem.

But rain is a major problem when living in a car. Mainly because there is no place to put your wet things to dry. Wet things dry a bit, if you are a lucky and careful person, but while rain is still falling, those things do not dry completely. And if those things do not dry completely, then they will rot. Decay. Mold. Stink.

Unless you drive to the self-service laundry to use the dryer at least once a day, preferably in the afternoon, when you are done going out, and before you park for the night. The cold, dark night, when rot goes creeping.

So visiting Eastern Washington was nice. I avoided all that. For a short few days.

The first night, Friday, I made it across White Pass where there was sleet, and parked along the Tieton River near Rimrock Lake, and listened to the rain all night, but heard less of it than on the western slope of the Cascades, for sure.

This was followed by a nice Saturday, a nice Sunday, a nice Monday, a nice Tuesday, and then I was back in Western Washington, where the weather had somehow, suddenly, become nice.

Although Monday night, when I was parked on the Columbia River at Jackson Creek Fish Camp, things got windy. Srsly. The whole car was bouncing. Gusts must have hit 70mph to 80mph. Roaring gusts. Ripping gust. Roaring ripping gusts.

I knew better, but was still afraid that the car would flip over.

So that covers my sleep between 11:30 p.m. and whenever it was that I woke for the final time, around 5:30 a.m., when the whole world was calm again. And not a drop of rain, unlike the west slope of the Cascades, which I'll let Cliff Mass cover: Heavy Rain, Strong Warm Front, Flooding, and Model Problems

But what's the point here? The point is that I'm still waking up in the dark wondering what the hell I've done and WTF I'm going to do next. In different words, Why Am I Here, Really?

Right now, I guess I could say For waiting. I am waiting, and I can do absolutely nothing until the car I bought is registered, titled, and plated in my name. Can't go, can't plan, can't have fun, can't even bail out and leave and scurry back to Ecuador as a last resort.

Which is why I had even more fun last weekend than I've mentioned so far, because while at the post office on my way to the laundry, I found a FedEx envelope in my mailbox, and it was sent to an address I used to have, and Hertz, where I bought the car, seems unable to understand that the address they have from a year and a half back is no, not my address now. But at least I got the envelop. But it contained an "odometer disclosure report" which the kind and thoughtful professionals at Hertz Burien, where I bought the car, had forgotten to have me actually sign it. So there was that.

Lovely.

There was an included prepaid return label with something scribbled on it. Also a note to call, with a number. So hey. I tried that. Got ahold of Erika S, who was "in a plane over Utah". I do not jest.

Why call? Who knows. I don't.

Signed the report and sent it back, hoping for the best. Got an email the following day, saying that I would be receiving an odometer disclosure report to sign and send back. Wrote a long reply. Got no response, but may have to end up by putting this into the hands of the Department of Licensing, possibly (and I hope not) continuing to small claims court oh god no.

So I still don't know. Still winging it. Having a fucking adventure, eh?

 


Currently screaming into the void, etc.
Comments? Send email to sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
See if that helps. (The commenting system quit working for some reason.)

Saturday, October 19, 2019

Forks: Let Us Praise Metal

I did. I bought a fork. It's a good one and it's mine now.

First it was a knife. Knives are essential. How else would you stir your peanut butter? See?

You need a knife, and it has to be strong, so that's steel. You need a steel knife. That's what Wally Mart is good for. They have table knives, of which one can buy one, individually. For us singletons. So I bought one.

The peanut butter is yet to come, but I can feel it in my future. I never get far without reverting to peanut butter, and it is sure to arrive on-scene soon, expecting my knife to stir it. I am so ready, now, but having only a knife left me feeling incomplete, so I went back to the World of Wally.

And there I found Spoon. Spoon-ness. Became spoonified, with two. Had to get a package deal, but I'm set in case I bite the head off the first spoon, because I have two. Or I can commence lunch armed with one spoon in each hand, which works at times, and is mandatory at others.

So, the score: One knife, two spoons, and a box of plastic ones, plus plastic forks.

Plastic forks are amazing, but not for eating with. Likewise the knives, spoons, and so on. Amazing. But try to eat a can of cold Spam with a plastic fork. Iffy: bend, break or catapult are all conceivable outcomes.

The bendy part should be obvious, because plastic. Get over-bendy and you have breakage, which is disappointing at best, and breakage is always better than a bit of slippage resulting in catapulting food in every direction, to stick all over the inside of the car. And the cold Spam?

You were probably wondering. I understand.

Spam. It's food, even if you don't think so, but it is. Meat, and other things, packaged nicely. Keeps forever in its can until desperately needed.

A life saver if you haven't eaten in 36 or more hours and need fat, and can buy the "lite" sodium version which still has more than enough salt in it if you eat the whole can at one go, but lacking refrigeration and being hungry, you do. Do buy. Do savagely eat.

So I've eaten three cans of Spam as the major part of a meal in the last week-and-a-half, and damn-well worth it. Lifesaver. Did I say that yet? Miracle food. Better sauteed but hey. If you gots it, then eat it and be full. And you will be.

Fat. It has fat and once it's on your inside you're set.

But you need a decent fork for it. Plastic is entirely iffy. Entirely so. Therefore I bought a steel fork. $1.78 and worth it. It's amazing how sturdy a steel for is, which I realized when I used in on dill pickle spears. Wham. Jam it. Just jam it in, no worrying about bending or breaking or anything. You see a pickle you want, stab it and then bite. That's it. No more, no less. I love it.

So now I have flatware good enough to survive World War 3, and am content on that front. Envy me, for I am satisfied.

 


Comments? Send email to sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
See if that helps. (The commenting system quit working for some reason.)

Currently wondering where to sleep tomorrow.

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Why Am I Here?

My problem is that I'm alive. Being dead is easy compared to this — you just lie there and rot. Anyone can do that. Even I, I think.

Probably. I may try it some day, but not quite yet.

Which leaves me wondering. Wondering "Why am I here?". Which is what I began thinking at the Cuenca, Ecuador airport (Mariscal Lamar), waiting for dark, and then waiting for my plane on Tuesday, October 1 of this year. Why. Why?

In other words, what am I doing, if anything? And why?

Still don't know, and now it's October 16 and I've been back in the U.S. for a whole two weeks. Two weeks and I still know not.

I have been busy though. That's a change. I might not know why I'm here or what I'm supposedly doing, I've been pretty busy doing it. Because doing it is better than doing nothing, which is not an option at this point. Not now, and definitely not here.

I spent the first few days fretting about missing my tidy and simple life in Ecuador, wherein I arose at about daylight and had coffee and read the news and sent a peevish reply to the local idiot gringa food blogger, a Mediterranean Diet™ proponent. (And also a low-process proponent, and a strident no-added-sugar campaigner. Who loved to sing the benefits of chocolate candy as a healthy food. And also wine, though it contains alcohol, a proven human carcinogen. And so on.)

Anyway, a quiet life, full of fine coffee (one cup a day), and going out for lunch, and walking five big ones a day, and not being responsible for anything else, all while saving up gobs of money because I didn't need to spend it on anything. Quiet, boring, safe, well-defined, predictable. Yeah.

Not much to do, and no schedule, and every day a day of fine weather.

Not the same weather every day, but fine. Agreeable. Mildly interesting, and then home by dark, because I had nothing to do after dark and a single (sane) person would not be found alone on the streets after dark. Or more likely would be found, but only by someone best never met. So I was always locked in by dark.

Well, that was my life and is not my life now, and I am still wondering "Why am I here?", but a little less than last week.

I've been busy.

First with buying a car, and then with buying lots of outdoor things that I need to re-buy because I dumped everything I had a year and a half back and have to replace all of it, and then with searching all the stores for things I need to customize and cozy-up the car, and things to wear and so on. Busy.

Been busy but not with importances. Busy with many little things requiring lots of thought and much careful shopping. They kill time.

What I'm really waiting for is my car's license, registration, and title. Should be here by November 18 at the latest, the last day I can legally operate with the temporary documents. Meanwhile the rain is closing in.

The last two weeks were good. Lots of sun after a little rain. Monday afternoon was even uncomfortably warm, given the layers of insulation I've been wearing. Rained last night. More this morning. Eighty percent chance for tomorrow, and so on for another week, after which it might let up for a day or two, but winter, you know. The Big Inevitable.

Lovely weather in its own way, this wet stuff, but I am living in a car. Living in a car means that your space is always over-populated. There are fights. Swearing. Spills. Lost goods. All kinds of things. And you are always in public. Always, even while parked out in the woods. Because you never know. Really. You never do. People come out of nowhere, at all hours, doing every variety of odd thing. Though usually, in the woods, it's quiet, if a long drive from town, and I don't have my car fixed up so I can sleep in it unobtrusively while in town. Not yet.

I am working on it. It's a thing. One of many things. One of the many things that are keeping be busy and not wondering "Why am I here?", which I still do anyway, in every odd moment.

Well, it will either get better or it will get worse, or it will stay the same. Pretty much like the price of real estate, so there's no real progress on that front, is there?

Maybe I'll know more later.

 


Currently making the transition from old creepy guy to creepy old guy.
Comments? Send email to sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
See if that helps. (The commenting system quit working for some reason.)

Monday, February 11, 2019

Sounds Kind Of Like

 

First, the state of nutritional science in 107 words:

The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

The Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.

Conclusion: Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is what kills you.

That's about the sum total, folks. No one really knows nothin', outside of a few hints.

 

Dhoti? Dhow? Dia? Dido? Die? Die Away? Die Out? Diode? Dit? Ditto? Ditty? Do Away With? Do It? Doh? Doha? Doodad? Doodle? Dot? Dote? Dotty? Dowdy? Dud? Dude? Due Date? Due To? Duet? Duty? Dye?

Nope. Diet. Let's talk diet.

A diet is a way of eating to achieve a purpose. All diets exclude. Every general-purpose diet, intended to cover people in general, is a fraud. Let's label that fraud as "fad". There are three broad classes of diets. Two of them are not fads, and they are critical, but those two classes are so narrow and so tiny that they are almost non-existent. We'll start with them.

 

Class One Diet

What works for you. Like the woman who eats only beef, with water, and a bit of salt. Perfect.

I'm happy for her. Whatever she says is fine. I cannot judge what she does, and I also have no interest in even trying to eat this way because I don't want to. I also don't think that it would help me in any way. Probably the opposite.

This diet is exclusionary.

I know that I could not eat cow brains, cow livers, cow kidneys, or cow hearts to get at their essential fatty richness, which is required because lean meat will not sustain life. I wasn't raised on organ meats and could not even force myself to eat them now. I also know that I could not afford to buy enough beef to keep myself alive, and I have no interest in spending hours each week cracking open long bones to get at marrow.

This diet is an interesting data point for me but nothing else, a curiosity. Some people are more oriented toward vegetables and grains, or fish, or meat. Some can't handle milk. Some can. Evolution has worked in different directions in different parts of the world. We have all been tuned differently. We come from separate sub-species. We need to eat differently, accordingly.

My people are flatlanders. They are tough and stupid, hard to kill. They can stand out on the prairie in their underwear, at night, in a blizzard, just to see what it feels like and say things like "Hey! This is the real deal then, not?" And then go back inside to watch more TV. They eat potatoes and meat and butter and milk and cheese and eggs and dumplings and a little cabbage and some borscht now and then, and grow very old and feel utterly fine, while remaining skeptical of those vegetable things lurking in the garden. And they love gluten, passionately.

Maybe not you, but who's asking?

 

Class Two Diet

This one is prescribed by a qualified, knowledgeable, experienced medical professional for exactly one person, based on a diagnosis backed up by verifiable, quantified data, to treat a real medical condition. It is exclusionary.

End of story.

 

Class Three Diet

The fad.

I break this out into "fad", "fantasy", "fetish", and "cult" subclasses, but they are really all the same. They claim to be applicable to one and all — just "Do this, and everything will be perfect." That's the hook. Always with the hook.

These are also exclusionary.

Some exclude sugar, some exclude all fat, or only "bad" fat. Some exclude protein. Some exclude starches. Some leave out fruit, leave out everything but fruit. On and on. All of them promise. Promise big time. Lovely promises, all.

  • Cult
    • The Jim Jones Kool-Aid diet. Ends all your problems in mere seconds. Drink up.
    • Breatharian. Ditto — Death, but slightly slower to arrive.
    • Vegan. Guaranteed to kill you as well, but it could take a decade or two, due to deficiencies in vitamins K2 and B12 (B12 is not produced by plants).

  • Fetish
    • "Detox" diets, as if the body didn't do this, day and night, forever, on its own, relentlessly.
    • "Clean food" diets. (Which apparently prevent everything you eat from turning to shit.)
    • "Macrobiotic". Do anything you want, because the food will protect you, because it makes you holy.

  • Fantasy
    • Want a butt like Kim Kardashian? Then eat what she does.
    • Want a husband like Kim Kardashian? Then eat what she does.
    • Prefer Suzanne Somers? Then try Somersizing. Works for me! Ya-sure-you-betcha-right.

  • Fad
    • Almost anything, really — too numerous to list them all.
    • Mediterranean. (Enjoy sunny, lazy days the yacht, guzzling olive oil).
    • Baby Food Diet. (Yeck. You know how hard it is to hire a diaper-changer?)
    • Cabbage soup diet. (Like starving in the old country, when we felt blessed to find bugs in our soup.)
    • Gluten-free. (As if.)
    • Fruitarian. (Recommended by Sir Shitsalot.)
    • Grapefruit. (Or his wife.)
    • Master Cleanse. (Cf. Sir Shitsalot.)
    • Morning banana. (What — apples are out?)
    • Paleolithic. (Drag them knuckles, Knut. Grunt and fart like you mean it.)
    • And an infinite number of others.

 

Class Act Diet

This isn't a diet. It is inclusive.

The trick is you just eat. Food doesn't really matter that much unless you fuck with it. Like by not eating it, which is what each and every "diet" mandates. Or by obsessing over it. There is a line spouted by some that goes "Don't eliminate, replace." But replacing one food with another is eliminating. Fish isn't beef, isn't chicken, isn't tofu, isn't pork. Each is similar to the others in some ways, but no food is a drop-in substitute for any other. Better to add or maybe alternate than to either eliminate or replace.

Instead of all this crap, go back to step one, but not to eating only beef. Rather, pick a cuisine that appeals to you — Vietnamese, Peruvian, Icelandic — anything. Just pick one. Or what your grandmother ate, if she was born before the 20th century, before food became big business.

What you'll get is good food that has been vetted for centuries, possibly millennia. Guaranteed to make you happy and keep you well, because it tastes good and because it also supplies everything you need to keep going. Because it's what people have voted for, with their mouths, and because they stayed alive and happy and healthy on it.

Cuisines are continuously evolving, but they do so slowly, by adding new items, and seeing a few items gradually fade out. This is good. Because, if nothing happens suddenly, then there is plenty of time to make corrections. And because there are millions of mouths involved, the cuisine gets voted on by all sorts of people with varied lifestyles, body types, and nutritional needs, constantly.

That means that you yourself are guaranteed to be well treated by a cuisine, any cuisine, and if you just eat it you will be OK. That's it, all there is.

But I bet that much more depends on getting lots of sleep, shunning dangerous chemicals like tobacco and other drugs, avoiding contact with communicable diseases, and getting a lot of exercise. This last one is probably the most important. A good goal might be a tithe — exercise for 2½ hours a day, every day. Pant and break a sweat. Repeat tomorrow, forever.

Even a hundred years ago most people were physically active most of the time. Imagine being on your feet for 10 or 12 hours a day, at a job, moving, using your muscles, and then walking home and doing chores. We don't do that now. Maybe we should. Fewer of us might be crazy.

And food would be just something to eat and enjoy.

 


Comments? Send email to hoofist@nullabigmail.com

See if that helps.