The Path To Inner Peace

 I got up this morning and struggled with coming up with "the 3 things that I am happy and grateful for."

But, that exercise actually gets easier with each morning that it is done. 

For one, you learn how to set the bar very low, to avoid having to think too hard. Or to have to re-interpret some "bad" thing that is looming in your consciousness, to make it a good thing "in disguise" and then be happy and grateful for it.

I felt very physically off and remembered the "meals ready to eat" that I had eaten. This is better than the army food that I had been subjected to back in Basic Training, whenever we went on bivouac, which we called "sea rations."

Those had been left over from the Vietnam conflict, and every once in a while some Private would open his "rats" to discover a cigarette had been included, which meant that his box was even older. I would imagine they stopped putting the cigarette in there around the early 1960's. You almost had to have a smoke if you ever made the "coffee" that came in the things, using water that had been treated with sulfur dioxide in your tin cup, then heated over a fire.

But, those sea rations made me get eczema so severe that I was offered a chance to get out of the military, before I had really even started. Eczema, I was informed by an army doctor, is on the list of "profiles" that, while not disqualifying one from service, gave the guy or girl a choice of whether to stay in, or not.

I just couldn't let a thing that wasn't killing me, stop me. I was thinking that if I quit, then I would be a quitter the rest of my life, type of thing. There is no way I could remain motionless, up to my neck in water as I squatted in a rice paddy, my helmet and weapon covered in moss as camouflage, with mosquitos landing on my face, if the eczema was flaring up; I could see the doctor's point on that..,but, once a quitter, always a quitter...

So, fast forward to 2020 and not only can you be a transgender drag queen in the army, you will be fed banana and sweet potato puree, maltodextrin, sugar, whole milk solids, apple juice concentrate, water, fully refined soybean oil, all in a packet labeled as a "Banana Apple Smoothie." Having your body ripped apart by shrapnel in some desert ten thousand miles away never tasted so good.

So, after getting a bottle of fine wine and deciding that I wasn't going to go near any drugs like pot or cocaine that night, my biggest concern was that I would throw that thinking out the window after consuming enough of the bottle. 

This didn't happen, but I did start to rip apart the meals ready to eat packets and unleash cookies, crackers and, sure, smoothies upon my digestive tract near the end of the bottle. I found red wine and papaya to be an excellent pairing, but not as good as slices of plantain, fried in olive oil, and red wine. That was divine. 

I was drinking a Bogle "old vine" red blend that boasted, along with being a "top ten for the money" value, the use of grapes from some of their outlaying vineyards in varieties that normally don't make it into wines because of their extremes, in the areas of acidity, tannin quality, etc. By making the blend maybe just 5% of some of these radically flavored grapes, Bogle has made the perfect complement to plantain slices fried in olive oil with salt and a dusting of black pepper. 5 stars!