I Get Life

Life Cereal, The Lesser of Evils

The first day that my fast failed, it was a can of beef, yesterday it was a box of Life cereal that was the implement of demise.

They were all out of Urkel-O's

I will, once again, have to start all over.

I was craving something with sugar in it. After being up all night and into the morning, I was thinking of having strong coffee along with maybe a Dunking Stick, hoping to remain awake long enough to watch some college football on TV.

I rode the bike to the Family Dollar, where I settled upon what I consider the least of all the evil foods with sugar in them. It felt weird to be riding all the way down there on what amounted to a sugar run. I grabbed a couple cans of tuna for Harold in order to rationalize the trip to at least some degree.

Lack of sleep can weaken a person's resolve; and forgoing sleep is something that I consider a high risk behavior.

Life cereal is comprised of oat flour, corn flour, wheat flour -all the flours, in other words- and, of course, sugar. It no longer contains soy flour, according to the label, and the Quaker Oats website.

Enough to ruin the juice-only fast for the third day in a row. 

But, at least I didn't get anything with oil in it like Zebra Cakes, which have palm oil. Oils take a lot longer to wash out of the system, kind of like in the way hair conditioner doesn't wash out like shampoo does, but rather stays in for a few days...

It is about 10 p.m. Saturday night now. I fell asleep shortly after Michigan State defeated Michigan on my TV, then slept through the next game, the news and the first 5 innings of the World Series. I must have logged about 6 hours of "quality" sleep, if you can count sleep plagued by dreams, the content of which derive from whatever is leaking from a TV into the subconsciousness.

I wound up becoming a case study on the effects of sugar on mood and energy level.

I woke up thinking about how I had failed to stay on the juice fast and rued how much energy and focus I was not experiencing, due to the half box of Life cereal. It was worse than when I had eaten only a can of beef with mustard.

I thought about Jacob and the Halloween jam that he was planning at the house where he lives. He said that he already had a few other musicians lined up, so many that the jam is going to have to take place in the parlor of the house, due to space considerations.

Brief Sidenote

The translation of a comment received October 25th, underscoring my point about increased blog traffic not always being a good thing. The only sense I could make out of it stems from the fact that it was left on a post which was mostly about kratom, an Asian produced substance which "Big Pharma" is trying to make go away, due to it's being a natural alternative to pain medications...

I'm hoping I can make a complete 24 hour turn-around and be in fine fettle 8 hours from now. And I'm hoping Jacob doesn't have any mood swings and cancel the jam. Some of the other musicians invited are pot heads and so the organization of the event is subject to the whimsical nature of that drug, about which I blogged a bit yesterday.

I was awakened by the horrendous sounds coming from my TV. 

I missed whatever came on after the Michigan/Michigan State game, but now the World Series was on, and the game was in the top of the 5th inning.

All I can do is slug down some prune juice and try to put the half box of Life cereal that I had eaten, in the past. It was consumed, along with the coffee that I was using to stay up long enough to watch Michigan State come back from a 10 point deficit to win against their longtime rival.

Life, In General

Of course, during the coverage, the announcers provided some background on the two team's rivalry and mentioned that, way back when, Michigan State had had at least one improbably victory when they had "some quarterback named Tom," who went on to have a "not bad" career in professional football. Those announcers can be facetious.

The fact that Tom Brady had been drafted in the 12th round, out of Michigan State by Bill Belechek as something like the 278th player selected that year has always been part of the lore. 

The fact that "the pros" had deemed 278 available players to be better picks than the guy who would become the "greatest of all time" say's a lot about life in general, I think.

"If You're Really Unlucky, They'll Give You Life"

Back in 1991, I was doing time in a jail in Massachusetts.

This was actually around the time I was living in the house with the 3 gay men, blogged about yesterday.

Being that I was a white, college educated guy who was living in that middle class neighborhood, I was placed in the "protected custody" area of the jail.

This is a special area that, as the name implies, is used to house inmates whom they want to keep safe from the depredations of the general population.

Here you will find basically 2 groups of inmates. The first are those whom they want to keep safe from the other inmates. 

This includes, first off, the wealthy, whose lawyers, as part of earning their keep, will try to insure that not a hair on the head of their client is harmed. Maybe payoffs are involved; but the son of a billionaire, should he ever be arrested driving drunk in his Lamborghini, will wind up here.

He will have his own cell, probably with his own TV, and will have a newspaper delivered to him and maybe be given a special diet of food much better than what the general population would eat; would be able to shower in a private area where he wouldn't have to be careful not to drop the soap, etc. 

Also housed in "PC," as it is commonly referred to, would be the famous.

Fame is another ticket to PC. 

Even if a guy's last movie bombed at the box office, or his last concert tour lost money, and he is basically broke; he would still wind up there, due to the fact that celebrities often are targeted by "nobody's" who might think that they could gain fame by harming a celebrity, like the guy who killed John Lennon just because he knew he would become as famous as the ex-Beatle by doing so.

Then, you have the physically weak and vulnerable whom they feel would be too easy a prey for the general population. For instance, even if Michael Jackson were not rich nor famous, he would wind up in PC because if he were to be involved in a physical scuffle, he would be more prone to "break in half" if someone hit him with what would otherwise be a normal attack.

And then, there are the very crazy individuals. Someone arrested for killing all the cats in his neighborhood and then walking around the block wearing a fir coat that he fashioned out of their pelts would qualify. They wouldn't know if such a guy was a danger to himself or others, so they would err on the side of caution, and he would get a private room with his own TV.

Then, there were the high profile criminals. This would often be a case where any combination of the above determinants might apply. If his face was etched into the mind of anyone who watched the evening news because maybe he lured a 5 year old boy into an abandoned building where he sexually assaulted him, then bludgeoned him with a two by four, then he would be in danger. Putting him in with the general population would be like the jailers trying, convicting and sentencing him to death by beating.

I mention the last one because just such a guy was in PC when I was there.
There was also a guy in there for molesting his grand daughter who had been arrested rather quietly and was not recognized by anyone. He became known, rather, as a guy who would give away cigarettes. If you wanted a cigarette, you could just go to his cell during the time you were let out to take your private shower and knock on his bars, and he would come forward and hand you a cigarette, or two.

He was most likely motivated by guilt and/or was trying to win as many friends as he could, as a preemptive measure, knowing that his sins were eventually going to come to light. And, sure enough, the night before his trial was to begin, everyone who had their TV heard from the news anchor that "The trial begins tomorrow for a man accused of..." and there was cigarette man, looking guilty in a mug shot. That guy is a sick pervert, many probably thought; ...but he does give me cigarettes...

What had sealed the deal for me, though "possession of marijuana with intent to distribute" was my worst charge was something I had said during my intake process.

When asked if I had any food allergies I had told the lady that that was a moot point, because I planned to fast the entire time that I was incarcerated. To meditate in solitude and work on my spirituality. The officer, a black lady of about 30 years of age, looked at me for a second and then said: "I'm going to put you in PC, I don't think you will do well in general population."

What does this have to do with cereal? Outside of the fact that I was being housed with "cereal" killers?

Well, the second group were the inmates who, while not being in physical danger themselves, were a threat to others. They were the ones who were suffering from "the biggest ape" syndrome, for lack of a better term. If they were put into the general population then they would begin to compete for supremacy, based upon some code that is beyond the scope of this post, but can be distilled into a theorem something like; If you put two 300 pound gorillas in the same pod, then they are going to fight to see which 300 pound gorilla is dominant.

So, they would remove one and place him where he would undoubtedly be the king of the jungle and would feel no challenge to prove it.

But, maybe due to a clerical error or overcrowding a scenario played out where we were all sitting in the area where our meals were served to us, and there were two mean looking inmates who took to staring each other down, each one trying to look more menacing than the other. We were otherwise always locked in our private cells, so mealtimes were the only opportunities for this king of the jungle game to be played.

"I'll kill you, man!"

The only problem was, we were served little boxes of cereal at breakfast, along with little cartons of milk and maybe a scoop of grits, a hard boiled egg and a piece of toast with a pad of margarine. 

True to the statement made to the intake lady, I ate none of it.

That turned into a 28 day fast, during which my weight went from 143 to 128. But I had a calm disposition and thoroughly enjoyed listening to AM radio all night (Deborah Norville had a show on one station from 1 AM until 4 AM; look how far she has come now) and I also became a keen observer of human behavior. It took the staff that many days to notice that I had never eaten, at which point I was put on a special diet of mostly oatmeal and vegetables, based upon me telling them what I was willing to eat..

The cereal boxes made for a bit of surreal comedy for me. There was this one mean looking son of a bitch, who had locked eyes with another mean looking son of a bitch, as if seeing which one would flinch first. And there was Tony the Tiger, with his goofy grin, staring right along with the first guy from the cereal box he had in front of him. Tony was just ruining the effect for the guy.

"Oh, I'm scared!"

The second guy wasn't getting any traction at all, from having Toucan Sam in his posse, and I was quietly amused by the whole spectacle.

Inmates had to just take whatever kind of cereal was handed to them. I remember thinking: "Dude, if you're trying to be intimidating, at least face Tony the Tiger in a different direction!"

Thinking about it more, though, I figured that in regards to intimidation, rather than them giving him a box of Frosted Flakes, it would have been better if they had given him Life. 

That cereal box might strike fear into the heart of a guy who is awaiting a murder trial...

Well, that's all I've got today; it's already almost 2:30 in the morning...