The Catcher In The Oats

The clock strikes midnight.

And, I'm wide awake because I've been staying up every night, lately -with the intention of getting certain things done "first thing in the morning." But then the urge to take a short nap comes, and I find myself waking up as the sun is setting, having slept through the day. I guess in order to break out of the cycle, I'll have to stay up for something like 32 hours so I will succumb to drowsiness at a more convenient time.

I woke up at 6 pm. as the sun was going down. I have an appointment at 10 this morning (10 hours from now). I should know better than to try to stay up the rest of the night and then ride my bike the 5 miles to get there. It's the same as getting up at 6 in the morning and hoping to be full of energy at 10 o' clock that night (when you should be going to sleep so as to get up at 6 the next morning...

It's a conundrum and I guess I will just read from Stephen King's "Under The Dome (a novel)" novel -an activity that has made me pretty drowsy in the past. For some reason the "sleep meditation" video I have doesn't put me to sleep as intended, but rather, puts me in a state of mind just relaxed enough to make ideas pop into my head. So I will stop the sleep meditation, well short of its 8 hour length, make some coffee and then pursue whatever idea popped into my head, as I was imagining floating through the cosmos, towards the bright red fireball of slumber, out there in space. The meditation also provides positive affirmations that are supposed to sink into your subconscious mind as you sleep. Things like "I co-create my reality along with the universe," rather than sinking into my brain might jolt me into awakened consciousness, hellbent on adding a horn section to one of my songs, or something..

I need to go to Google Maps to find a route to Touro Hospital that is shorter than the 5 miles or so that I rode the last time, when I wound up following a huge right angle to get there, instead of the proverbial shortest distance between two points of the straight line.

I'm listening to Bobby Womack and Lana Del Rey doing "Dayglo Reflections" on Spotify, kind of anxious about the amount of data that I'm streaming and wondering if it is worth the bytes. I have so much music already stored on my sticks and drives...

Off to the Stephen King book hoping I can at least catch a "power nap" -something I've heard about some people being able to take. I often wake up more tired after sleeping just an hour or so than before I drifted off. Then there is the "cat nap" which I probably wouldn't fare much better with..

The appointment is to participate in the clinical study of the shingles vaccine (and make $450 over the course of the thing). It would be ironic if I wind up making a guinea pig of myself by signing up for this and other studies -I could get $50 just for undergoing a colonoscopy, for example, I've been told- when for more than 2 years I refused to get a certain medication that was practically being forced upon everyone (everyone in countries where the taxpayers could afford it, that is; to the devil with the people in poor nations, like Chad, or Niger, but I digress). 

I'm not sure if I'm a better candidate for these studies because I haven't been diagnosed with any disease since I had "eczema," as a teenager, which I now know was the fallout from having eaten whatever was put on the trays in school cafeterias my whole life. In retrospect, I admire the handful of kids who brought their own lunches every day; they knew something. 

Surely enough, by the time I graduated, I had a disease to call my own. I suppose I fared better than the one girl in my class who died of cancer our senior year. 

Every winter, it seemed, some kind of infectious disease that "everybody" got went around. The government never locked us in our homes and shut down businesses and churches, I recall. Some years it was just "a bug" going around, but there were variants like "the grip," and my favorite (despite getting it) was "the croup(!)"

 "There's no known cure for eczema, It's a chronic condition that comes and goes; there are some things that can make it worse, but nothing that cures it," is the gist of what my dermatologist told me. We were embarking upon a lifelong relationship, was the assumption.

After a few episodes of me feeling a palpable sense of nausea creeping up my arm and towards my stomach, originating in the cartons of milk that I was in the process of opening in the school cafeteria; and then being told in a stern tone by that dermatologist: "Nonsense, son; you drink all the milk you want; you can't be allergic to milk!" I made a bold and courageous migration away from him and his framed degrees, to a chiropractor/nutritionist named Doctor Delisle.

This happened at the point where I had eliminated so many foods from my diet that one of the only "safe" things I could eat without having to worry about any flare ups of eczema, was oatmeal. I hadn't learned yet that some things -seed oils, for one, and of course milk fat- can stay in the body for at least a week and can trigger reactions to other foods, acting as a "co-allergen" in those cases. So, after having eaten a ton of hydrogenated soybean oil -almost a whole half gallon sized carton of Malted Milk Balls comes to mind; I may have had reactions over the next few days to a variety of substances, not realizing that without the presence of the oil, those foods would have been fine for me. And so, I had pared down to a main diet of oatmeal. Some things can make it worse; but oatmeal wasn't one of them, type of thing...

And so, this Doctor Matthew Hampton Delisle shows up at the high school that I was attending for the last 3 months of senior year.

Side note: I had been expelled from the Catholic school that I had previously attended for "collecting funds from the students without approval from the administration." That was the legalese that said administration settled upon in expelling me for publishing "an underground newspaper." I suppose they were protecting themselves against me suing them on the grounds of free speech, or whatever. If I hadn't been selling copies of the "rag" for 75 cents apiece, then I wonder what their grounds for dismissal would have been. Probably the defamation of the character of the teachers and/or students that I had "published" articles about.A few of my fellow students had come as close to protesting my expulsion as good little obedient Catholics were capable of; and had referred, in an open letter to the administration, to the parable of The Good Shepherd and its lesson about the titular shepherd being willing to abandon the whole flock that were doing fine, in order to rescue a lone sheep that is in peril. They posited (anonymously in a type-written letter) that: wasn't the school contradicting the lesson in that parable by expelling one student that had gone astray? They never heard back from the principal. (They may have gotten more traction with the argument that, hey, won't that be one less boy for the priest to get drunk and fondle in his rectory? but that is outside the scope of this post...).

And Doctor Delisle spoke to an auditorium full of my new classmates for about an hour about the horrors of "the standard American Diet," and even had a few students in tears of despair over the prospect of no more white powdered doughnuts washed down with Coke-A-Cola for breakfast, that he seemed to be mandating. There was an audible gasp when he delivered the news about cottage cheese having Plaster of Paris as an ingredient, for example. He ended his talk with the words: "You'd be better off eating nothing but oatmeal!"

Most of the students left there shaking their heads over chiropractors, nutritionists and quacks in general. So there were just 3 or 4 kids in front of the fold out table that he stood behind, gathering up his notes and his diagrams and charts (showing an equal sign in between the images of a can of soda and something like 7 teaspoons of refined white sugar, for example) who had questions for him.

Since I was basically eating nothing but oatmeal at that time, I was compelled to be one of those 3 or 4 that had stuck around, rather than bailing for the candy and doughnut machines..But, instead of a question, I had the statement: "(Hi,) I eat nothing but oatmeal!" ready for him.

To which he amazed me to a degree with his response of: "Oh, so you're the one..."

Doctor Delisle was into "a lot of esoteric stuff," according to the priest and Doctor of Divinity at the Catholic school, with the wandering hands, who was familiar with him. I kept contact (excuse the pun) with that priest, even after the expulsion, because he also had a doctoral degree in music and was a personal friend of Leonard Bernstein.

Doctor Delisle, in a recent photo that I had to get from the Facebook of his daughter (right). One time, I showed up at his house randomly and knocked on the screen door in the carport; he appeared and opened it and said: "Come on in; let's find out why you're here..."

(another early lesson to be learned by me about the value of such degrees)

Apparently, those esoteric practices included, but were not limited to, deep meditation, astral projection and those arts that led to him to be able to have flashes of insight and divine such things as: You will speak to 240 students today, but you will be there for just one. He will reveal himself to you as "the one who eats only oatmeal."

More like the actual "Good Shepherd" in practice, than Sister Joan MulCahey had been, come to think of it. Or, maybe he was The Catcher In The Oats...

It took a couple years for me to be ready to make that leap; away from the dermatologist, with his degrees, and his cortisone shots, and his antihistamine pills that "may cause drowsiness" (and get you the nickname of "spaceman" at school) and to decry his "nonsense" about there being no such thing as a milk allergy. To bravely walk away from those who told me that the bones in my legs were just going to snap in half one day, as I walked down the street, because I had stopped drinking milk. The specter of that dermatologist shaking his fist at me and yelling: "You'll be sorry!" (I suppose he missed the checks from my health insurance company...)

But, eventually I had to thank that chronic incurable disease for having helped guide me along a much more spiritual path. It would only be a matter of a couple years before I would be dosed on 3 hits of blotter acid at a Grateful Dead concert and just 12 rows from the stage and would see Phil Lesh, the bass player, gesturing across the stage to Jerry Garcia, by putting his hands together in the attitude of praying and then holding them by his ear and laying his head on them, as if they were a pillow. It was pretty warm in the Providence Civic Center that night, and Phil might have trying to communicate that he was getting sleepy, or appealing to Jerry for "not another slow song, please," or maybe just saying: "It sure is hot as hell in here!" But at that instant, I heard a distinct voice say: "It's sleeping," and I believed, just then that I had been cured of eczema; or, more accurately, that it was "sleeping" (I could bring back the symptoms if I wanted to by going on a steady diet of potatoes, fried in hydrogenated soybean oil, slathered in mayonnaise and washed down with chocolate milk, I suppose, but have never tested that theory).

In the real world, or the physical plane, or the realm of the 5 senses, what had probably happened was some other nearby deadheads, seeing Phil's gesture might have said something like "Phil's sleepy" which may have gotten concatenated to any of the other dozens of words being bandied about me, so it sounded like "It's sleeping." But there was also the quality to it making it, to this day, the closest I've ever come to hearing voices "in my head," type of thing.. 

Plus, in subsequent days, when I might have unwittingly eaten the wrong foods (having been served breakfast as a guest at someone's house and eaten it, not wanting to be rude, when the cook divulges one of her recipe secrets as being: "I put a ton of margarine in my scrambled eggs; that's what makes them so creamy!") I was able to subdue any symptoms (runny, itchy nose; the sensation of dozens of invisible mosquitos randomly biting the body; then eventually itching that feels like it's it's coming from the bone that the skin needs to be scratched right through to get at --don't let any bleeding stop you, type of itch) by merely repeating to myself: "It's sleeping." The symptoms would instantly subside and I would become relaxed like a weight lifter who, after having completed his lift, just drops the whole thing to the mat -hey, it's not his floor- and walks off. I would then just avoid arriving at those friends house around breakfast time in the future....

I'm not really sure where I started here, but to bring it full circle: I wonder if I will be a desirable subject to the clinical study people (and if I'll get the 50 bucks for "qualifying") or if my dearth of a medical history -and the fact that I haven't really seen seen a doctor since the dermatologist, 44 years ago- is going to disqualify me. Who knows why that would be a reason to, outside of them seeing my lack of a track record with pharmaceuticals as constituting a risk to them; since I've never found out which medications I might be allergic to because I have avoided the standard American diet and, hence, never gotten sick and needed "meds". Maybe these clinical study people don't want to have to be the first to find out that I have a violent reaction to shingles vaccines...