stick a label on me, spread the bull-shit thick, manipulate everyone around you

I’m sick. Physically, mentally, and socially.

Fizz:ical (PX)

Tuberculin Zone Ahead

 

Seems I picked up some kind of lung thing in Mexico.  Despite heavy doses of miracle powders ranging from deep forest mushrooms to marine algae–I still look and feel horror show.  The other physical malefactor being stress from work issues I don’t want to elaborate on, and my own piteous incapacity to handle life…

 

gone Mental ( -MH )

Children who don’t sleep at night are creepy birds.  I was one of those wide-eyes, and it wasn’t/isn’t a hoot.

FML

So much seems to be about sync, records just don’t play right if spun even a little too slow or fast.  My reset button was intense exercise, which is unfortunate, due to pernicious injury I spend a lot of time sidelined.  If I wasn’t eating as healthfully as I am now and drinking as little–I’d be sunk at the bottom of the deep end of the depression pool.

Social defunct (S&M)

Being immune-compromised, exhausted, and synapse taxed makes it toilsome to be around others.  If you have ever worked in “the service industry” you know how unserviceable many of the bloated, baffled, boring, and banal who stumble through are.

Lately I've been lacking in flair.

Here in Palm Springs California, most of the tourist look as if just seconds before someone smashed them in the face with a baseball bat.  Stunned and confused they want me to make them a drink identical to the swill they drink back home at their neighborhood Applebee’s or Tweedledicks.

It’s painful even pretending to be interested as they tell their grating stories or stammer about how they don’t really mind homos as long as they don’t make a show of it or act, you know, too gay.  And then I’m supposed be funny,  endearing even, while I cater to their every piggish whim running back and forth for diet coke refills and extra ranch dressing.

Looking for a bridge to live under

Beyond the food service thing, I am fighting to find a way to communicate with people that doesn’t feel like it is sucking the life out of me.

TOTALLY legit

Rambling Radiation and Macro Thinking

Back from a crazy weekend in Tijuana (TJ stories coming soon!) to the sometimes myopic world I inhabit.

Just before crossing the border for a weekend of drinking in Mexico I attended one of the world’s largest natural foods conventions dubbed “Expo West.”  Hundreds of thousands of square feet in Anaheim California were covered with pretty girls hawking “natural” cosmetics, pills, chocolate, gluten-free products, beer, and even pet food.  The Expo is a place fraught with myopia and attention to the fragments and macro-elements of nutrition.  The words “whole foods” are used frequently, but few foods can actually be found in their whole form.  You will not see any bananas, tomatoes, mangoes, or spinach.  But there are lots of extracts and powders containing these “miracle” foods.

The labeling on most of the products is testament to marketing genius.  One companies Teas are labeled exclusively with the disorder or ailment you are hoping to treat–the variety of tea is found only in the small print.  Imagine walking up to a display rack full of tea packets and choosing “long life tea” or “asthma no more tea” or “stop crapping my pants tea.”  At one very reputable company’s booth I found a pill bottle simply labeled “Beautiful Legs.”  Beneath the product shelf, you guessed right, a poster of some beautiful legs.

 

Now available in a capsule.

While it was heartening to see so many companies trying to craft minimally processed foods devoid of GMOs, chemicals, crap fillers like gluten, and unneeded animal products, I could not escape the feeling that I was in the midst of so many snake oil sellers.

The fiber pushers especially confound me.  Yogurt that will make you poop?  Water containing fiber.  Pills with fiber.  People do realize that if they just eat some fruit and greens they have this whole issue covered, right?

 

This banner was in the mens room...

When I was walking around and looking at all the new stuff I couldn’t help but be impressed with all the ingenuity.  But it felt like I was in a mega store for astronauts who would need all these products because while journeying through space they wouldn’t be able to enjoy something as simple as an apple.

Or maybe these products will save us.  The web is full of speculation about radiation poisoning here on the west coast as a result of jet stream carried fallout.  The nutrition gurus are cashing in on split-cell chlorella pills and anything containing loads of iodine.  I’ve already taken all the free samples I was given at Expo West of each…

Part of the Exclusion Zone--Or the Zone of Alienation surrounding Cherynobyl

The Pinocchio Effect

My entire life has been a sort of déjà vu.  Circular worlds, never time expressed linear, a sailor ever sailing concentric.

While living in New York City, it got so bad that I began living manic.  In love with words, I’ve never lost the desire to look up any who introduce themselves.  Sometimes I become aware of a word that I know I have never read or heard before, but then I start hearing and reading it everywhere.  In gambling and science something like this is called bunching.  The roulette doesn’t go red/black/red/black/red.  Roulette tables are for screams and grief.  Black/black/black/black/black.  So you bet red?  BLACK again. Bunching happens.  But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

And not only with new words, sometimes it happens with the absurd too.  Always I have deeply identified with Pinocchio.  First Disney’s little donkey boy, later the dark, much taller Italian.  Pinocchio and I are kindred—questing  for authenticity—baffled by our lies. I understand you Pinocchio, truth is overmuch revealing.

Steampunk Pinocchio Redux?

Back to NYC, the city where Paul Auster’s characters also suffer the malaise of déjà vu.   Districts for everything. Diamonds. Fur. Dance. Sex.  Books.  Advertising.  Poetry.  Sex.  And thrift.  Which is where, appropriately, I found Pinocchio.  Again.

A discard hiding in a stack of old cookbooks froze me into the posture of one slightly afraid to proceed. A very early edition of Pinocchio full with stunning pencil sketches of a gaunt but phallic Pinocchio, and his almost Uncle Lester styled Geppetto.  The girl wanted twelve dollars. I would have paid a hundred or more.  Buying that book began a month of hell and wonder.  And for the first time in my life, the circles, the impossible bunching, all of it, had a name—the Pinocchio effect.

I am especially obsessed with this turn in the story.

Few waking hours passed that month where I didn’t hear or read the word Pinocchio.  No hour of sleep was absent his name.  At first it was amusing.  Ha!  The whole world loves Pinocchio as I do.  All these people, they never mentioned Pinocchio before, not once.  Not my boss, or clients, or the hot dog guy and his passerby.  It soon wasn’t funny.  It is exhausting to wonder if you are mad.  I quickly grew tired of suspecting the world was only a theater stage, where I was the only one not acting.

I still have that book somewhere.  Hopefully in a box.  The Pinocchio incident was years ago.  I can’t remember the last time I heard someone mention him.  Years and years and not a single Pinocchio dropped in conversation.  There is a restaurant in the desert town where I now lived called Pinocchio’s.  It took courage to eat there, I went alone.  Just a place for omelets really, not a portal of any kind.

They have good breakfast burritos. Free parking in the rear! is Palm Springs humor.

 

 

 

Is it even possible to avoid Monsanto’s GMO products?

Food that is really born in laboratories...

I am going to cheat in a big way today and provide an intriguing link to another blog.  I’m doing this for three reasons:

1. It is fucking gorgeous out and I want to go on a bike ride before work instead of writing.
2. This is a really great article on one woman’s telling experiment.
3. Seeing the recent news about Bio-science companies getting approval to grow rice in Kansas spliced with human genes freaked me out!

The story is about her decision to live without Monsanto for just one month.  And it was a lot more difficult than she anticipated…

“By day two of my attempt to remove Monsanto from my life, I realized I was in way over my head.”

–April Davila

Take a friend to a Farmer's Market!

But don’t worry, she also provides some spot on suggestions on exactly how we can avoid genetically modified foods too.

Please click here to read her story and enjoy.  I would really like to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Shocker: I’ve lost 19 pounds since Valentine’s Day by avoiding Industrial Food!

I want to share where I am at with my efforts to walk away from Industrial food.

An Inner Debate

On Feb 9 I listened in as Daniel Vitalis and David Wolfe participated in Kevin Gianni’s “Great Health Debate.”  Click to read my review of the event and see why it immediately motivated me to make some serious changes in my life.

That was only 3 1/2 weeks ago–just before Valentines Day.  Since then I have honored my commitment to avoid meat, dairy, GMOs, processed foods, refined sugar, coffee, and I’ve eliminated all gluten from my diet.  The result?

I Break the News

I FEEL GREAT and I HAVE LOST 19 LBS in just 25 DAYS!

I wasn’t expecting these kind of results.  When I went to weigh myself today I thought the scale would tell me I had  lost around 10-12 LBS.   The reason I am surprised is because I have been unable to exercise due to injury.

100% Raw VS My New Approach

This level of weight loss is almost identical to the results I had when I did my 100% raw food challenge.  Even the starting and ending weights are within a few pounds! Here you can see full body Before & After pics taken during my first 30 days raw. However, this time around I am only eating about 1/3  of my calories in raw form (uncooked fruits n’ veggies).

Cooked Carbs

I was concerned that my increased intake of cooked carbohydrate like potatoes, carrots, beans, brown rice pasta, and organic corn tortillas; might even result in weight gain.  When I did 100% raw I gave up ALL alcohol.  The past 3 1/2 weeks I have enjoyed red wine and even cocktails made with only fresh ingredients.

Fat Phobia

The other difference between how I eat now VS when I ate only raw food for 60 days–is my fat intake. While I have not been fat phobic in any way, I am eating way less fat than when I did 100% raw and was eating a ton of nuts, nut creams, nut butters, and 1-2 avocados a day. I don’t include nuts in my diet every day now.  I eat a half an avocado every other day or so.  I cook sparingly with olive oil and try to instead use it in it’s uncooked form in salads or pesto. I do eat a few eggs each week.

So What Exactly DO I Eat Now?

If you are curious to read more about what I HAVE been eating, and even see some pics, check out my daily food log called What I Ate Today.

The only current “Before & After” pics I have kinda suck, but I will include them here because I think you can see a dramatic difference in my fat face.  My apologies, the first pic is creepy.

 

Scary Valentine photo taken Feb 12 256 LBS

Same hat, looking a little more Grapes Of Wrath, less than 3 weeks later, Mar 7--237 LBS