Every Other Way Besides Monetarily

The Lord helps those who help themselves.

So, I didn't help myself to a Digourno Bacon And Cheese Stuffed Crust pizza (gee, that sure is a mouthful) as I had a week ago, on Friday. Nor did I eat a whole box of Pop Tarts as dessert.

After losing my food card and having to wait a week for a new one I decided that it would be a good time for another "intermittent" fast; which I did mostly on juice, alternated with alkaline water.

When the new card came it had $347 on it. 

Having to rely upon busking cash alone for juice and water all week; the money that had accrued felt like it was excess. I wondered if I had gotten an extra hundred for having had to wait a week; or if there had been some kind of stimulus applied.

A few days of fasting and cleansing had me feeling so well, like I was bullet proof. I felt like I could splurge with impunity on the finest pizza pie that the Family Dollar has to offer -one that sells in that particular "dollar" store for $8.57. 

I was drinking an Andy Gator IPA. Drinking these days seems to just turn into a gateway to other destructive things. Like it rips away a layer of inhibition or maybe common sense. I had a reckless urge to eat a whole pizza. 

I like to reserve the word "incredible" for incredible things; but, after I added my own touches to the thing, a sprinkling of salt and a few drops of hot sauce, here and there, the pizza was incredible. I had also lucked out with the oven; not too hot or cold; too long or short, type of thing.

I deceived myself into thinking that my body would be so grateful for the nutrition that in the pizza that it would give me a pass on some of the other ingredients listed in the two paragraphs of them on the back of the box.

I'm returning to a subject from a couple weeks ago concerning the "addict," which is a distinct classification of personality type, or a disease, I'm not sure.

It seems like if I choose other things like kratom, occasional weed and a little therapeutic LSD every other weekend or so; then I might be able to avoid being a helpless and hopeless alcoholic.

 "You've got to serve somebody; yeah, you gotta' serve somebody. It may be the devil or it might be the Lord; but you're gonna have to serve somebody" -Bob Dylan, (from the "Slow Train Coming" album, that I had on cassette in the late 1970's.)

But, you can serve the Lord with a cigarette in your mouth. Your hands would still be free. My Hindu chiropractor back in the 1980's said that enlightened spirits can dwell in bodies that are not necessarily wholesome, saintly and pure.

Baptist preachers, not so much. I think the Baptists I knew would find fault with any sermon preached by a guy who would step outside for a cigarette when he's done preaching. All this, while knowing at a cerebral level that Jesus walked around in sandals and dressed like a hippie. And the wine at the Last Supper is well documented.

A Baptist friend of mine, who was also the choir director at Bethany Baptist church in Gardner, Ma., a city of 18,000 people at the time, where I went to community college, asked me why I couldn't just become addicted to something positive; like people can choose what to become addicted to. 

That seems to belie the notion that addictions are like thieves in the night that creep up on you, or things that gradually seduce you, type of thing. I think she was trying to get at why I didn't get high the Lord, and leave tobacco and weed and wine alone.

Like I could replace alcohol with an addiction for reading the bible; I could be up until the sun comes up for days on end; and wind up kicking myself over it and being full of self loathing; as if I was a slave to reading the bible. I would be planning to take some time off from it, but, after a couple beers, I'm back at it that same night. Now I've got two bibles open, side by side!

If I can get into jogging while tripping, I can add that addiction to my arsenal.    

When I ate dairy every day, I became sickly. I had a short sighted notion of blaming whatever I had just eaten for any chronic dermatitis that might be plaguing me. I didn't know that one must fast for a good week in order to rid the body of things like fats and oils that can kind of soak into the cells and trigger reactions to benign things. I once was itching like crazy after I had petted a cat that had oily skin and then applied some lotion to my face. The lotion seemed like an agent for transferring the cat oil under the skin making me feel like a thousand mosquitoes were stinging my face. 

But, growing up in middle class New England, I, along with just about every other kid, got a lot of milk in our diets. The 8 oz. carton at lunchtime was most certainly followed by a tall glass to go with supper; and then in the morning there might be a bowl of cereal or two in cow's milk. Even if breakfast was pancakes, milk would have been part of the recipe. It's easy to understand how convenient a source of protein, fat and calories milk was. 

It was one of "the 4 food groups."

I remember watching a video for the Navy; at a recruiter's office. This being after I had discovered my intolerance of milk. Right in the middle of the thing, while hyping the diet provided to Navy guy's the narrator added: "and plenty of milk!" as the screen showed smiling ensigns, or whatever they were, opening the tap on a large stainless steel dispenser and filling tall glasses with the white liquid.

It had been lost upon me when I went into Army Basic Training that a good portion of my fellow recruits were eating better than they ever had, and that the black leather boots they issued to us were the nicest footwear that some kids had ever put on. No wonder they got so many youths to face the cannon balls.

Society, almost in lock-step, believed in cow's milk. Maybe it actually is good for some people. It has enough growth hormone to double the weight of a calf every 2 months, I read once from some critic. But, hell, maybe growth hormone is good. You might hit more home runs in a season.

Even if I wasn't allergic to it, I would still balk at the taste of it (to stay on the baseball analogy). To me, it only had two flavors, tolerable; and sour. The latter being probably the worst thing I've ever tasted, along with what I was subjected to the one time I was given penicillin to swallow down in pill form, but bit into it, out of curiosity.

My mother said that when I was a baby, I would throw the bottle of milk that she gave me, as far as my infant arm could hurl it (pun intended) from the high chair or crib. She thought this a curiosity at the time; one that would gain more significance about 15 years later when, in the high school cafeteria, I would be reaching for the carton of milk on the lunch tray that we all got every day.

On this particular day, even before I had a chance to try to identify the kid on the back of the carton, I felt a wave of nausea hit my stomach so strongly, I jumped up and ran to the boy's room, expecting to puke. But when I got there, I felt fine.

Returning to my tray, I reached for the carton again, and could actually feel nausea traveling up my arm and towards my stomach.

"Maybe you're allergic to milk," said my mother when I told her about the incident. "You did used to scream and throw your bottle of it when you were a baby..."

There had to be some logical explanation for the eczema I was beset with, and the stomach cramps that always accompanied a trip to Kimball's Farm ice cream place, for one of their 3 pound banana splits.

On warm summer evenings, the things melted fast enough to keep you busy, spooning up the liquid from around the edges of the plastic boat shaped containers they came in -the runoff from their 3 humongous scoops of ice cream. The ice cream was heavy and rather solid, not like the soft stuff that Dairy Queen made.

This yielded a blend of molten vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, which was kind of like a metaphor for the good ol' USA, a land where cows roam freely and vanilla people coexist with chocolate people, and strawberry folks live happily on reservations...a wonderful melting pot; where beef is king, and dairy, queen.

If my memory serves me, Kimball's, was in a large building shaped like a barn, with a dozen or so screened windows, where a dozen or so lines of people might stretch all the way to the parking lot on a busy summer evening. 

The above metaphor could be extended to include the whole Family of Man, as represented by, of course, the namesake banana, the fudge, chocolate, pineapple and strawberry syrups, caramel, butterscotch, whipped cream sprinkled with walnut crumbs, all poured over the humongous scoops of ice cream, and topped with a cherry.

This is where the inspiration for my song: "The Man Who Couldn't Decide What Flavor He Wanted" came from.

The Man Who Couldn't Decide What Flavor He Wanted 

Standing there thinking with finger on chin.
His other hand clutching a crumbled up fin.
Exasperated was the look on his face
like the 50 behind him who'd moved not a pace.
The ice cream girl waited behind the screen,
condemned to be part of the whole dreadful scene.
He asked for a minute in which to decide.
She said "no problem," she lied.

(chorus)

He was the man who couldn't decide what flavor he wanted.
Yeah he was the man who couldn't decide what flavor he wanted.
The man who couldn't decide what flavor he wanted;
as the whole world grew just a little bit older.
It was mid summer of '86,
we were happy to have found this place in the sticks.
But we learned that day under mid summer's sun,
that waiting for ice cream is not always fun.
Immediately sensing that something was wrong;
for why would this one line have grown so long?
'Twas then that we all saw him standing there;
at the head of the line with the head of blond hair.
(chorus)
The line was abuzz with a querulous tone
for theirs was to suffer in quest of a cone;
somewhere a small girl was heard to say "Aw, come on!"
(chorus)
Everyone started to raise our voice;
which prompted the fellow to make a choice.
Later we saw him reclined on the grass.
We joked about shoving the cone up the ass of...
(chorus)
(outro)
"...Sir, French Vanilla is like vanilla, only it comes from France...
Rocky Road refers more to the texture than the flavor, sir...
I've never tasted Jerry Garcia, so I wouldn't know, sir....
I need to get to some of these people behind you, sir..
(repeat chorus)  

You could hear mooing coming from somewhere behind the people who manned the humongous scoops, as you waited in one of the lines.

I came to associate the 20 mile drive home with a dull ache in my stomach.

The youthful body is resilient, and for someone "allergic" to milk to eat one of those banana splits, as fast as possible, then only suffer abdominal cramps is a testament to this. But the body deals with such matters through tolerance, and some type of "chronic" ailment eventually rears its head.

Some people are true to the American way, believing certain foods to be good because the advertisements for them say so, and thinking things like cleansing fasts to be the doings of fringe lunatics. Give them their bacon cheeseburger, a large fries, and supersize that Coke. And, why not some ice cream for dessert?

Despite having lived a healthy life on baked fish, greens and red wine and having learned what I have; I occasionally get to where I feel so well, I talk myself into thinking I can get away with eating the very stuff that I thank God I learned to avoid.

I had a dermatologist that I was going to when I was about 17 years old, whom I know I have quoted here before as telling me: "Nonsense, son. You drink all the milk you want!" (the emphasis on the last two words made it sound like I naturally wanted milk; whether I realized it or not).

Now I know that the way of western medicine is to treat symptoms of diseases with chemicals; and having a lot of ill people is actually vital to the economy. Still, there was really no excuse for me to have eaten the pizza and the Pop Tarts. That was an "addict" thing to do.

It kind of sabotaged the busking, at least on my end, that Jacob and I did that Friday night when we made only 16 dollars in one dollar denominations. No wonder people who eat like that regularly have doctors and pharmacists and psychiatrists...

Things have been falling into place, musically; as long as I do my due diligence and keep practicing the Wim Hof breathing exercises, and avoid glutting myself with cheese. I find the combination of kratom and LSD to be like the Soma of The Brave New World

But, here it is the next weekend; and even though Jacob and I only made 36 bucks busking Friday night; it was a great night if measured in every other way besides monetarily.

I'm starting to get the hang of using the microphone in a way that I'm not backing off from it for fear of disturbing Lilly. She has been rather defensive of me lately, being quick to detect the sound of a different voice, the times other people have joined in, and rapping on the window, and even putting her hand through it one time about a month ago; when a young black guy was playing a drum along with us at 2 in the morning.