Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. For years, I cared for Em, as she slowly turned to ashes and dust. I crumbled, too.

Mind you, I'm not sure I'm complaining. In many ways, being given an overwhelming task is a gift. Nietzsche said that which does not kill us makes us stronger. Hemmingway said when you're broken, you end up stronger at the broken places.

Before you buy what they had to say at face value, let me remind you that both Papa Hemmingway and Friedrich Nietzsche went crackers, and Hemmingway ended up swallowing a shotgun. Sometimes, you don't end up stronger at the broken places; sometimes, you just end up broken. I would not recommend finding yourself married to someone dying a long, slow death from an incurable illness.

On the other hand, I don't know how you avoid it, except to not marry.

Minor Surgery

I took Blondie to the hospital today, for a relatively minor surgical procedure. The surgeon said it was five minutes in the operating room, and an hour in the recovery room. Perhaps that was true, but I was waiting for two hours in a room of uncomfortable furniture and nothing to read. Give Headline News 30 minutes and they'll give you the world; give them two hours, and you'll be wishing you had Papa's shotgun.

So I engaged in self-pity, a practice I really don't commend to anyone, because it just makes you feel crappier. I knew that. I kept telling myself not to do it. I kept doing it anyway. I slapped myself on the wrist, telling myself to behave, but it didn't work.

I breathed a sigh of relief when Em was gone. Part of it was on Em's behalf. She was too good a woman to be subjected to that kind of misery. Part of it was for me, though. Finally, it's over, I thought. I'll never have to go through this again. But today, I kept thinking about something Em said, years ago. "You know, they told us in the gas crisis, that gas might eventually hit a dollar a gallon. But they never warned us that it would not only hit a dollar but keep on going up." I am once again married to a woman who is failing.

It Hasn't Changed Much

It isn't that what I do for her has changed all that much. She is forgetful and easily confused. She finds herself wondering what she was doing, so she looks around, and decides that the dishes need washed, or there is laundry that needs to be washed or she decides to head for her computer and play canasta. Eventually, she stumbles onto whatever she originally was trying to do, and she completes that task.

But she will ask me a question. "What day is it?" and I'll tell her. And she'll ask me again five times in the next fifteen minutes. I really shouldn't raise my voice at her. It's not like she rudely ignoring my answers. It's that she can't remember my answers. But I find myself getting annoyed at having to answer the same question, over and over again, and I raise my voice, and then she gets upset, and then I get upset. That's not the way my momma taught me to treat a stranger, and certainly not the way I ought to be treating someone I claim to care about.

Losing Her Freedom

The big thing, though, is her driver's license. She's really feeling trapped, that she can no longer drive. That means she can't go anywhere unless I go, and being agoraphobic, I really don't want to go, not ever. I think her feelings of impotence are more devastating than my agoraphobia.

She understands the burden that places on me, and she tries not to ask, and then feels pissed off that she is being constrained by my disability, and I understand the burden she's under, and I try really hard to accommodate her wishes, and then feel really pissed off that once again, I have a wife who is fading into the sunset.

Eating And Eating And Eating

She was NPO this morning, and I didn't want to have her smell cooking this morning, that would be cruel, so I stopped on the way to the hospital and grabbed a drive-thru breakfast sandwich and a large coffee. During the two hours I was in the waiting room, I spend 30 minutes in the hospital's cafeteria, eating a $4 baloney sandwich and drinking a $2 pepsi. And when we went home from the hospital, she asked if we could stop at McDonald's, then changed her mind and said no, we didn't have to.

We didn't have to? She knows I don't care much for McDonald's. On the other hand, she hadn't had anything to eat since the night before, and how could I deny her a Big Mac? I went there anyway, got a Filet-O-Fish and a vanilla shake, and she decided she really wanted my food and drink instead of the Big Mac, fries and Coke that she'd gotten. Increasingly, she's like a 3-year-old. But that's all right. I don't mind.

Catching Up On My Zees

And because I had fretted all night, and loaded up with coffee and then a bottle of Pepsi, I was really to collapse when I got home, so 30 minutes after we arrived, I closed my eyes and fell asleep in another 10 seconds.

That must have lasted all of 30 minutes before my panic-plagued wife woke me to ask me about what the surgeon had reported. I explained as best I could, and she immediately calmed down. It is so rewarding to see her calm down and smile. She's prettier without makeup than most women are with it. But I knew that in another 30 minutes, she'd wake me up again and ask me the same question. No point in arguing with the weather. I closed my eyes, and in ten seconds, I was again asleep. And so it went, lather, rinse, repeat, every 30 minutes for the next 2 hours.

One of the nice things about Old Timer's Syndrome, they say, is that you can hide your own Easter eggs. I'm finding out that vascular dementia is pretty much the same story. I can tell the same joke to Blondie five times a day, and she laughs each time as if she has never heard it before, and maybe that's because she hasn't. I told her that I really need another wife, not a replacement wife, but an additional wife, to help with the cooking and the cleaning, and helping to make the mortgage payments.

Dating A Twin

I was dating a nice woman before I met Blondie, someone whose life goals were entirely incompatible with my own, but she was pleasant company on lonely nights, and she was a sexual athlete. After 4 or 5 dates, I mentioned that my grandfather Harl had been a twin, and Em and I had stillborn twins as well, and she responded by mentioning that she was a twin as well.

I thought for a minute, and asked her if she thought her twin might be interested in a threesome. She said I wouldn't enjoy it. When she was little, she used to share a bed with her twin, and not only did he kick a lot, but he kept stealing the blankets. Fraternal, huh, I asked, and she laughed and nodded.

Something tells me, I said, that you've had this same conversation with other guys in the past. Yes, she said. It rarely takes more than 30 seconds to get from the point that she mentions she's a twin until her date suggests a threesome.

What doesn't kill you, it seems, makes you stronger. It's not a bad thing to remain weak.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
CNN Headline News - disability - driver's license - Filet-O-Fish - Friedrich Nietzsche - gas crisis - hospital food - panic - Papa Hemmingway - white matter disease

There were nekkid wimmen in my dreams Friday night, and that didn't make sense at all. Any guy who thinks he has the endurance to keep up with even one woman is a conceited jerk, and if he thinks he can keep up with multiple women, he's Charlie Sheen.

What's more, these nekkid wimmen were really girls, and while I find athletic bodies to be nice to look at, whether they are of deer, porpoises, or men, young wimmen scare me, as anyone under the age of, uh, about 27 or so, strikes me as looking too much like jailbait.

And Then A Guy's Voice

And then I heard a guy's voice, and I cracked open my eyelids, and realized that it was free HBO/Cinemax weekend on DirecTV. TiVO was plugging away, recording recording whatever dirty movies it could find for me.

I used to really enjoy porn, but it just seems to have lost its salt. I don't know if porn has changed or I have. To be fair, most of it was always pretty crappy. Zalman King could be counted on to do good stuff - he was the one behind "Red Shoe Diaries" and "9 1/2 Weeks" - but most other porn was pretty poor.

You know, when the Supreme Court of the United States struggled to define porn, one of the phrases then genned up was "prurient interest". Pruritis is a medical term, meaning "causing an itch." Seems to me that most porn over the years has had nudity, but it wasn't really porn, for lack of itching powder.

Guilty? Not Me!

I don't feel particularly guilty about the boobiage, as one reader identifies it, that comes on display in The Canthook every so often, because there's no itching powder here, either. It's about laughing. There's a little about warmth as well; snuggling with someone you like is one of the nicer activities of life. Raunchy sex is a lot of fun, too, but since I can't write that well, I choose not to write it at all.

I took a look out the bathroom window Saturday morning, and the colors were saturated. So, might I say, was all the vegetation. I didn't notice it letting up, not all day, and it's still raining at 3 AM. I've always loved rain, especially the rain with the really huge drops that really go splat. Just looking out the window, though, the temperature reached in and grabbed me by the, well, this sounds funny, but it grabbed me by the toes of my feet.

My Tootsies HURT

Daggonit, my tootsies are frozen. And though I spent most of Saturday in bed, they never warmed up. At suppertime, Blondie commented on how cold she was, and that's a woman who feels comfortable with her feet soaking in a tub of salted ice. I've been back in bed for several hours right now, and my feet covered by several warm blankets, and they just won't warm up.

My late first wife Em used to tell me that if I was cold in bed, I should stop putting my feet under the covers, because they were inevitably cold, but this ain't funny. As opposed to, say, the Dan Patrick Show. There's nothing much on HBO/Cinemax, but The 101 seems to be my favorite channel these days.

On the Dan Patrick Show, they were talking to Kobe Bryant. Apparently, Kobe was fined $100,000 for calling an official what was referred to as a "anti-gay slur", and from what Dan and the Danettes were saying, Kobe admitted using the slur, and not for the first time.

Googling For Slurs

I tried to google for it, and the best I could find was a reference to "the other f-word", and it didn't explicitly state that Kobe had used the term "faggot", but I'm guessing here that was the word, anyway.

Is that really an anti-gay slur? If you want to piss off a gay guy, you'd call him a Santorum. Call him a cocksucker, and he'll likely say, "Yes, and a good one, too!" Faggot used to be slang for a cigarette, which you suck on, and as a non-slang word, means a bundle of sticks used for kindling.

This whole thing is silly. They fine players $100,000 for expressing themselves orally, but players get elbowed, tripped, and otherwise physically battered and there ware no real penalties for that. I think they have their values out of whack.

Costas Weighs In

Bob Costas also talked to Dan this morning. They were talking about perjury and steroids, and Barry Bonds' conviction for obstruction of justice.

Was there any possibility that someone was going to go to prison for dealing in anabolic steroids? No. In the real courts, they have a rule of thumb that in order to be convicted of perjury, you must not only make a misstatement of fact under oath, but you must knowingly make that misstatement of fact, and it must be a material of fact.

Barry Bonds defended himself by stating that he did not knowingly take steroids. I wonder if his lawyer might not have been better off arguing that the misstatement was not material, since nobody was really facing prison.

Between 'Roid Rage' and testicular atrophy, Barry is losing his wife, his daughter Aisha, and half his stuff, but his testimony doesn't change that one bit.

Weighing The Asterisks

The discussion, however, was whether the records of such baseball superstars as Sammy Sosa should have an asterisk. Blondie is of the opinion that they should be, since those who took steroids cheated.

Bob argued that the Commissioner ought to put a page in the front of the record book pointing out that different conditions prevailed in different eras, not just steroids in the 1990s, but things like live ball / dead ball, the difference in ball gloves and athletic shoes over the years, and the height of the pitcher's mound, it's hard to compare anything in one era to another era.

At lunch, I pointed out to Blondie that today's ball players travel in quiet jets, and they used to travel in DC-3s, and before that, in trains and busses, and that affects their performance on the field. She said that with today's screeners, it's not like today's travel is easy, but then she realized that it's a different experience if you travel on a private jet.

All The World's A Stage

And it's all just a game, and even at that, it's not an important game, like between two organizations that do something else, like colleges that educate people, but it's all just exhibition, between teams that do nothing but play ball. Watching professional athletes play baseball is about as satisfying as watching actors screw. It's a sorry substitute for doing it yourself.

Eventually It's Complicated with Meryl Streep came on HBO, and it was sort've amusing. It wasn't like something from Nora or Delia Ephron (think: "When Harry Met Sally" and "You've Got Mail") or from the Coen Brothers (think: "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski") but it was adequate, which is to say it's better than 95% of what's out there.

Theodore Sturgeon

That's Sturgeon's Law in action. Ted Sturgeon, an excellent science fiction writer, got up in front of a convention and proclaimed that 90% of all science fiction is crud. The fans were aghast at that proclamation. They fell silent. Then he proceeded to declare that 90% of everything is crud.

Some would argue that is an incredibly pessimistic point of view, but I instead prefer to think that it says something optimistic about people. Most scientific laws, one of my chemical engineering profs used to proclaim, are restatements of the obvious, if you only look at what they actually say.

Nature Compensates

His favorite law was "Nature always compensates. If someone is born with one leg shorter than the other, the other leg will invariably be longer to compensate." The thing is, if you have one leg shorter than the other, that's just another way of saying your legs are of different length, which is another way of saying that you have one leg that's longer than the other.

If you apply that logic to Sturgeon's Law, it becomes obvious that we are spoiled by excellence, and come to expect it, so that we are disappointed by the merely average, terming it crud.

And as we talk about crud, perhaps we ought to discuss the latest person to talk loudly about running for President on the GOP ticket.

An Unusual Ritual

In one of his wife's books, she writes that when their baby died, they took it home, slept with it, and introduced their other children to the dead baby as their brother before taking it back to the morgue so it could be buried. A lot of people find that creepy; I don't.

When my youngest daughter was stillborn, we were in a hospital about 150 miles from home. I had plans for that child. We had worried for most of the prenancy, because of prior stillbirths, and when the baby passed the mark of entering the third trimester, we knew that the child could survive on its own outside the womb. We were home free. We finally could breathe. Except that something that never happens, happened. She died of a true knot in the unbilicus.

Yeah, It Happens

That's what happens. Relax for just a minute and shit happens. But if I couldn't teach her how to ride a bike, couldn't dance with her in her prom dress, couldn't walk her down the aisle to give her to her husband, I could at least take her home. Swaddled in a blanket, nested in an ice chest, accompanied by papers, she rode in the rear of my car from the hospital to the funeral home.

Yes, papers. I can't imagine what would have happened if I'd have been stopped with a corpse in the car and no papers. And I started at 3 AM, because I was bawling all the way, and I didn't want anyone to see me.

A Blessing From Mama

I got to the farm at 6 AM, and I didn't want to wake anyone at the funeral home yet, it could wait until 9, but Mama wanted to see the child. I remember her caressing the face, saying that the girl looked like Em, and she held the baby's hands, pointing out the long, graceful fingers. It was a religious experience.

And that's the one redeeming characteristic I find in Mr. Santorum. He is a cruel, ugly, selfish man, but maybe he cares about babies. That's not a good reason to vote for him, but maybe I need not verbally consign him to the depths of hell.

Or not. We as Republicans used to be the good guys.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Barry Bonds - Bob Costas - Cinemax - Coen Brothers - Dan Patrick - HBO - Kobe Bryant - Meryl Streep - Nora Ephron - prurient interest - Rick Santorum - Ted Sturgeon - Zalman King

“Rape me,” she said. “Just tear my panties off!”

I was offended. I'm no rapist. Furthermore, as a writer, I wanted to lecture her. It's not rape if you request it. But my mouth was full of a bulky sweater, and a padded bra underneath that, and a breast somewhere under those inches of fabric. She wanted to play-act. She was my wife. We were in the privacy of the farmhouse, half a mile from any other human, as best I knew.

She PLANNED This

I flipped up the skirt. She planned this ahead of time, I thought. She never wears a skirt, even when we go to a nice restaurant. She always wears jeans or slacks.

We'd initiated every room in the house. The living room sofa was no place new. Never the less, it wasn't spacious and comfortable. I reached down with my right hand and found the elastic of her panties around her left leg, and inserted a thumb under it, and then the other four fingers, grabbed the gusset, and yanked.

“That's it,” she cried. “Just shread them suckers!” I yanked – and nothing gave. I jerked as hard as I could, and a few threads screamed blood murder, but nothing gave.

Lie There, Wench!

“Lie there, wench, or it'll be your life!” I cried. She giggled. Yeah, I didn't believe it, either. I got up on my knees so I could get better leverage. I pulled and nothing gave. I got to my feet, grabbed with both hands, and the panties proved up to the challenge. They didn't give a bit. I had lifted Em's entire weight by the gusset of her panties, and they weren't about to surrender.

“What the fuck are those romance novelists thinking,” I demanded. “The Department of Defense doesn't need Star Wars missile defenses, we just need to put our cities in panties, and the Russian nukes will bounce right off!

“So quit your bellyaching, ye lusty pirate, and ravage fair damsel,” she argued, as she pulled down her panties, “Or I'll have to find someone else that can do the job.”

+++++

We Weren't Exactly Dating

Debbie and I, strictly speaking, weren't exactly dating. She had been dating a jerk for about six months, and I'd been biting my tongue for at least five and a half months, but she finally said “Good Riddance” to him, and I told her it was a smart move.

I had been dating a variety of really nice women, some exceptionally nice, but somehow, none of them were people I wanted to spend the next decade with, much less the next hundred years. Debbie and I had been talking about life and love over coffee workday mornings for about a year, and never dated before.

She was a bridesmaid at her cousin's wedding, though, and she needed an escort to replace The Jerk. Would I care to fill in? It was 200 miles away, but she had cruise control, she said, and she'd already paid for a room with two king-size beds.

She Looked Really Nice

Come morning, she dressed, and she looked nice in her bridesmaid dress. That never happens. Brides deliberately choose dresses that make sure there's no competition for the bride's own gown. Debbie was a farmer's daughter type, study enough to pick up an 80-pound bale and throw it across the barn, and shapely enough to make any traveling salesman swoon.

I reached out to feel the satiny fabric as it passed over her butt. “No panties,” she said. “None of us are wearing underwear, including the bride. She didn't want any VPLs - visible panty lines - or any bra straps peeking out. The other bridesmaids are all married, and they say their husbands are really turned on. You might position yourself carefully when the groom reaches for her garter. She says she isn't going to warn him. You might get an eyeful.”

I laughed, and she threw her arms around my neck and hugged me, pressing her bosum into me, Thank you so much for bringing me. I would have been so embarassed to come stag.”

Reception At The House

Her cousin's parents must have been rich; the reception was in a huge white tent at their home, which was huge and nicely appointed. The bridesmaids were pouring champagne down their throats by the gallon, which struck me as odd.

Most wedding receptions I'd attended were dry, although a few got a keg of Sunday beer. They say that 3.2% beer isn't an intoxicating beverage under Ohio law, and that's because it makes you sick before it makes you drunk. Not so for this champagne.

They were flirty, too, pulling their long skirts up to their knees. One of the husbands said something about his wife having the best legs, and another one objected. A third one demanded that they all stand up and raise their skirts, so we could do a fair judging. They raised their skirts to five or six inches above the knee, and one of the husbands complained that he wanted to see more, so they raised their skirts to within an inch or two of their crotch.

I Had To Judge

One of the wives insisted that I had to do the judging, as I was the only one not married to a bridesmaid. “Go ahead,” another one said, “check the closeness of the shave. That counts.” She grabbed my right hand, and stuck it between her thighs. I was half afraid that a husband might be upset at me. I hemmed and hawed, and the women raised their skirts high enough that I could tell that all of them had shaved their crotches. Suddenly, I heard a couple of kids playing tag running towards us, and skirts immediately dropped to knee level or lower.

“I guess with all the kids around, a taste test is not going to work very well,” said one of the husbands. They all laughed, and I decided that I didn't need to worry about the husbands. I don't know what things were like once everyone sobered up, but right now, these guys were quite happy to let their wives do anything they wanted to, with anyone.

So Who's The Winner?

“So who has the best legs?” demanded the redhead.

“You're all winners,” I said. “Not a cough in a carload.” She pressed me again. “Well, a gentleman can't hardly be expected to name anyone except the one that brung him, right?”

“Thank you,” she said, and she came over and gave me a whole-body hug, pulling my hands up to her breasts, and french-kissing me. The other bridesmaids vied to be next in line to attack me.

“Whew,” I said. “You guys better take care of your wives, and quick, or they're going to knock down a waiter and rape him.” The guys all laughed. Debbie whispered into my ear. “Want to see the house?” It wasn't really a question.

Touring The House

It was a really nice place, I admit. “He must own a railroad,” I said. She said railroads weren't profitable enough; he owned an auto parts factory. After seeing the downstairs and about three bedrooms upstairs, she grabbed me by the tie, pulled me close to her and said, “Remember the Godfather? Want to do some play-acting?”

“You want to wake up with a horse's head in your bed?” She laughed, and said, “No, silly. I want you to nail me to the door.” She pulled me into position, wrapped her arms around my neck, and jumping up, wrapped her legs around my torso.

Debbie wasn't a 60-pound waif. She was strong and sturdy, and probably weighed 165, maybe 180. The strain on my neck was impressive. I pressed her against the door, reaching down and grabbing a thigh in each leg to hold her weight. And that's where it stopped.

What's The Matter?

“What's the matter?” she asked.

“Well, for one thing, I'm wearing my pants, and I haven't got a hand free to do anything about that,” I replied. She removed her right arm from around my neck, and tried to reach down to unzip me, or failing that, to unbuckle my belt. Her arm wasn't long enough to do the job.

What's more, I was having trouble supporting her weight. She was sliding down the door. Her dress wasn't. Her dress was accumulating in her armpits, making it harder and harder for her to breathe. Speaking of which, I was having trouble breathing, too.

It's Not REALLY Steel

“You know,” I said, “Guys talk about steel, but it's really not. That bone is only flesh, and it can't support you. And you might even snap it off.”

She started to laugh, and that was the end. We collapsed in a fit of laughter on the bed. “If I'd known we were going to screw, I'd have done the gentlemanly thing last night,” I said.

If I Had Known

“If I'd known we were going to screw,” she replied, “you'd have been doing it for months now. It's all those other women that did it to me.” And then we proceeded with the kind of really satisfying calisthenics that are only possible when you really know, trust, and care for each other.

Marriage isn't about sex. It's about spending your life with someone. We continued to have sex with each other while we dated other people, for another six or eight months, when she decided that the guy she was seeing might be the right guy. I thought so, too, and was happy for her.

They say these things never happen except in the letters column of the magazine. They're wrong. God made women insatiable sluts and guys incurable romantics, so these things will happen until the end of the earth. It's just that when they happen, they tend to go wrong.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
3.2% beer - bridesmaid - champagne - going commando - mishaps - padded bra - panties - pirates - rape fantasy - romance novels - The Godfather

A doctor - not pictured here - at the Conshohocken Weight Control has been arrested for his alleged behavior towards female clients.

News reports vary, but they agree that Arie Oren, 64, of Narberth, has been charged with four counts of aggravated indecent assault and eight counts of indecent assault for his alleged conduct with six patients who range in age from 24 to 59.

The women felt like he was attacking them, and that's all that matters. Whether it's medical or it's sexual, you need informed consent. On the other hand, it's quite possible that a good love life can result in weight loss, if it reduces stress. (If you want your partner arrested, it's a sign that it's not reducing stress.)

Diets Don't Work

About 40 years ago, there was a book published that said diets don't work. Minor fluctuations, less than ten percent of your body weight, could be temporarily influenced by diet, they conceded, but not significant permanent weight loss. The publisher offered a $100,000 prize for anyone who could come up with a diet that was proven to work. To win the prize, dieters had to lose 40 pounds, keep it off for four years - and what's more, you got the money even if 80% of the people who started it failed to meet the objectives.

Nobody claimed the prize. The author said that weight loss surgery was the only technique that could achieve even a 5% weight loss.

I've spent a lot of time, over the years, scouring the PubMed database of the National Institute of Health. There's still no progress on coming up with a successful diet. Neither does exercise help. It will reshape your body, but it builds muscle mass, and you end up heavier, rather than lighter, if you do that. It turns out that about 2% of the population has significant weight loss in any given year without surgery - but that's 2% of those who are dieting, and 2% of those who aren't.

A Quick Ten Pounds

If you want to lose ten pounds in ten days, I do have a diet that will work for you. Confine yourself to eating raw bacon and rancid tuna. Boy, if vomiting and diarrhea don't take the pounds off, nothing will.

And I know you weren't wondering, but I'll answer this for you anyhow: it's as hard to pack on the pounds as it is to take them off. Dieting just doesn't work.

When I tell people dieting doesn't work, one common reaction I get is a scornful, "Sure, you fat slob. Just give up!" I point out to them that I'd like to be able to fly. No, I don't want to pilot an aircraft, I'm taking about me flying. How many times should I jump off the garage roof, my arms flapping, before I give up on that? Why is it considered admirable to repeatedly do something futile?

Researchers in the United Kingdom decided in the 1980s that obesity is normally caused by stress, and although it took a while for that idea to spread, it was commonly accepted by obesity researchers worldwide by the mid-1990s.

Diet Pills Don't Work, Either

So what about the various prescription diet pills? Don't they work? The quick answer is "no". They get approved, and then they go off the market a few years later, often because of the many lawsuits coming from people harmed by the pills, as in the case of phen-fen. I took a look at the trials for Meridia that were submitted when they were trying to gain approval by the government.

Highly motivated dieters, as you would imagine, initially they lost quite a bit of weight. The pills do have an effect, and dieters lost more weight than non-pill dieters in the first few months, but by the end of a year, the amount of weight lost was about the same for both pill and non-pill dieters. The second year, even though the dieters had not yet achieved the weight they wanted to achieve, they lost no more weight, and after 18 months, some of the dieters were starting to regain weight, even though they were still following their diets

If you look at other diets in PubMed, you find the same thing. In the third year, dieters are gaining back the weight they lost. According to one study, if you would weigh the people today, who started a weight-loss diet five years ago today, they would average a weight gain of 5-10% from their former weight. Dieting stresses your body.

If you really want to improve your diet, I have two suggestions for you. One is to restrict your sodium intake. They have studied everything over the years, and someone announces that coffee is bad for you, and then someone else does a study and decides that, no, coffee is good for you, and it's been the same story with everything they've tested - except for sodium. They've never found that excess sodium levels are good for you.

Electrolyte Balance

I've read articles that say it's not sodium per se but the electrolyte balance that matters. When you get too much sodium, your kidneys expel both sodium and potassium and it's the low potassium levels that get you. These articles point out that our blood isn't greatly different in composition from sea water - and they recommend that we consume sea salt, which is a blend of sodium and potassium, rather than table salt or kosher salt, which is just sodium. Maybe they're right. I try to use sea salt instead of sodium salt.

On the other hand, the foods we buy in supermarkets and restaurants are generally prepared with sodium salt. I suppose one could carry a shaker of sea salt into restaurants, but I rarely salt food in restaurants, so that is of limited value. Switching in the supermarket from buying canned food to frozen food, and from frozen food to fresh fruits and vegetables is far more helpful. It's not cheap, but the co-pays on pills and doctors' visits aren't cheap, either. Just remember to buy sea salt and to throw out the sodium salt.

Vitamin "F" - Fiber

The other suggestion is to get more fiber. Nutritionists aren't the brightest bulbs - they haven't caught on to what obesity research is showing them - but they suggest that most of us aren't getting enough fiber nor enough calcium.

These days, bariatric surgeons are promoting the idea of reducing food consumption by restricting the size of the stomach. They used to promote the idea of reducing food absorption by bypassing most of the length of the small intestine.

The old surgery was dangerous. Patients had to get B-12 shots monthly because the site that absorbed it was bypassed. Because food passed through the body so quickly, patients had severe problems with gas. If they got the flu, the food passed through the body even more quickly, and that led to electrolyte imbalance, which can cause heart attacks. On the other hand, the old surgery was much more effective than the new surgery at producing the desired weight loss.

Nutrient Density Matters

If you get more fiber into your diet, you reduce the nutrient density in your intestines. Food passes through your system more quickly, and less of it is absorbed. Some people with eating disorders take laxatives to lose weight, and it works somewhat but eating more fiber is a safer way to do that. What's more, eating more fresh fruits and vegetables accomplishes this goal at the same time that it reduces your sodium intake.

Over the years, the US population has been getting fatter. I have previously suggested here that it may have something to do with high fructose corn syrup. I've been recommending here for three years that we all follow the Rule of 1900: If someone's grandmother wouldn't have recognized it as a food in 1900, we probably shouldn't eat it. My grandmother, in 1900, didn't know what a Kiwifruit was, nor how to prepare a plantain, but somebody's grandmother did. The problem is not food from far corners of the planet, but foods that aren't really foods, for instance, Crisco.

What If It's Not Food That Makes Us Fat?

Over the past few months, Little Brudder and I have been talking over these things, and he poked me in the cerebellum. "What if we're not getting fat because of what we eat, but because of the air we breathe, or the water we drink?"

Boy, that set me on my heels, because he's absolutely right. There's a lot of crap in the air that wasn't there in 1900. Even more so, there's a lot crap in our water supply that wasn't there in 1900. In 2003, Enviro-Test Laboratories found prescription drugs in Canadian municipal water supplies, and in 2008, the EPA found them in US municipal water supplies.

Since I moved off the farm to Pennsylvania, I've been buying spring water to make coffee with and to drink, but my ice comes from tap water, and I obviously can't control the water that's used in producing the foods and the beverages I purchase. Conceivably, when I water tomatoes in the back yard with a garden hose, the drugs in the water are taken in by the plant's roots and are incorporated in the tomatoes.

Water Worries Me

I'm concerned about our water supply, especially because pure water isn't particularly desirable. The distilled water sold in supermarkets and drug stores is for steam irons, not safe for drinking. Even if it wasn't for pseudomonas that is usually found in distilled water, the lack of minerals leaches the minerals out of our systems.

When farmers fertilize their crops to get larger harvests, they produce "hollow foods", with more protein, fat, and carbohydrates, but not corresponding vitamins and minerals, so we can't distill water in our homes and make up for it with more fruits and vegetables.

And if fracking the Marcellus Shale poisons the streams and the ground water, what are we going to do?

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Arie Oren - bariatric surgery - Conshohocken Weight Control - Diets Don't Work - electrolyte balance - exercise - fiber - fracking - giving up - high fructose corn syrup - intestinal bypass - Marcellus shale - Meridia - potassium - Rule of 1900 - sodium - spring water

I don't drive down Rohrerstown Road very often. Mostly, it's because I'm not over that way very often.

Blondie hates Rohrerstown Road. The last time I drove along there, she complained that it was backed up, that it was always backed up.

Hmmm. But Blondie loves to drive through downtown, which is always backed up. At least, on Rohrerstown Road, you don't constantly have cars forced to switch lanes because of construction or by trucks parking in the middle of traffic to make deliveries.

Two Jerks And A Truck

This morning, as I was driving around, there was a truck loading a couple of furniture-type items, parked in traffic next to the Wachovia Bank at Manor and Hershey. There are two lanes there, but the left lane is left-turn only, and Wachovia has a bleeping parking lot, you jerks! I wanted to roll down the window and curse them out up and down for being such selfish arrogant bastards, but Blondie wouldn't have enjoyed that.

They say women have a civilizing effect on men. I think that's a nice way of saying that wives keep their husband's testicles in their possession, and only allow their husbands to have them on rare occasions.

It was hot today, and Blondie couldn't understand why I was wearing my jacket. "For the same reason you carry your handbag," I told her. She offered to buy me an European carry bag; I declined.

Aging And Droopy Drawers

When I was younger, I put everything in my pants pockets, but these days, my belly changes size quite a bit. My pants are snug when I put them on, but as I sit erect in the car or I walk about, but slimmer as time goes on. Consequently, I have a problem with my pants wanting to fall down as I finish a trip - and if i have anything in my pants pockets, it just makes the problem worse.

There's also the problem that there are no rear pockets on some of my pants, and I don't know what to do with my wallet. I also have a wife who picks up my pants, empties the pockets leaving the contents in random locations and washing the pants. Consequently, it makes it easy for me to keep track of my keys, wallet, coins (an old screw-cap pill bottle makes a convenient coin purse), and my camera. My phone spends most of its life on the charger, but if I have it elsewhere, it's easy to find - I just call it.

Back To Rohrerstown Road

But this whole narrative started out with driving down Rohrerstown Road. Every time I drive down the road, I see a fairly small sign, and I always spend the next five minutes wondering what were they thinking when they named their business.

It's Zigzags Hair Workshop. I mentioned it to Blondie, and she said she couldn't imagine what zigzag lines have to do with hair. Generally, she said, you're looking for a straight part, and either a straight or a feathered cut, but not a zigzag cut.

I wasn't thinking about zigzag shears. I was thinking about rolling papers. Rolling papers, Blondie says? I'd never heard of that. Blondie, it seems, had a misspent youth.

Not To Condemn Drugs

It's not that I have a hard-on about people using grass. As the late Bill Hicks put it, "You see, I think drugs have done some good things for us. I really do. And if you don't believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor. Go home tonight. Take all your albums, all your tapes and all your CDs and burn them. 'Cause you know what, the musicians that made all that great music that's enhanced your lives throughout the years were rrreal fucking high on drugs. The Beatles were so fucking high they let Ringo sing a few tunes."

But if an artist gets too creative, you don't have to hang the canvas. If a musician gets too creative, you don't have to listen to the music. If a writer gets too creative, you can always read something else.

But if someone gets too creative when they're cutting your hair, it takes forever for the hair to grow out. And those people are handling straight razors. I don't necessarily insist on a barber or stylist who's stone-cold sober, but by gosh, I don't want one that's advertising how stoned he is.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Bill Hicks - blocked traffic - branding - drug use - hair salon - pockets - Ringo Starr - Rohrerstown Road - testicles - Wachovia - zigzag rolling papers