Extraordinary Health News Within

January 9, 2010
Seattle, WA

Dear Blog,

I’ve been feeling pretty bad lately. Sick and tired, depressed and deflated. Thick blooded. I went to the mirror and had a good, long look. “You look positively toxic, buddy,” I remember saying to myself. Then I got angry. I hate being called buddy. So I calmed myself down with a strong pot of coffee and a few mouthfuls of dry saccharine (see notes).

When the painful spasms in my legs and back were infrequent enough to support me in a sitting position, I merged carefully onto the information superhighway, with all the doors locked. Next thing I know a drunk bag-lady in a lab coat is rattling the door handles, screaming at me in a Kansan accent, “Are you toxic?!”

I answered emotionally, “Yes, I am so toxic, Doctor, please help me!” And I let her in.

“Toxins surround us” she whispered conspiratorially, “and most people who have not detoxified themselves will be approaching the toxics levels.”

Naturally I was alarmed by such a dangerously meaningless sentence, so I urged her to tell me more, and to take as much of my time as she would.

Thus the drunken bag-lady continued: “If you live near new construction, there is outgassings from the paint, glues from the floor, and various other chemicals and benzenes that can affect you.”

“O Lord no!” I cried.

“Now for your cleaning materials…you wanna be sure…” here she closed her eyes and rolled her head, “…some cleaning products do not have natural subsinsins in them…to clean them…and they transfer through your skin to go into your blood stream…Natural cleaning products, HOWEVER, are safe on your skin AND to breath them. Keep in mine that food priserfitifs can affect you at a sillular level and become toxic in your system.”

She fell asleep and when she awoke she told me she could use a ride to the Best Western, where I understand she does the washing.

My encounter with this esteemed health professional sparked a change in my lifestyle that lasted nearly eight hours. I avoided sugar, alcohol, caffeine, and wheat. I drank three liters of water in five hours. By four pm I had the worst headache of my life and was pissing every 20 minutes. On top of that, my soul was wounded from the uniquely offensive training seminar I had been paid to attend. The critical message of the program, you should know, was “Be in the now!” with the many implications, ramifications, extrapolations, and abominations of the powerful aphorism spelled out in detail, alluded to in allegory, poeticized in metaphor, and tarted up for use in true-life examples:

“I was buying some jam and I went up to the cashier and was checking out, making small talk, and I said something about how I was going to have to pack the jam in a suitcase to fly home. ‘You’re gonna put this in a suitcase?’ she asked me.” Here the presenter paused for laughs, and here I was astounded to hear people laughing. “Next thing I know she’s run off to get me some bubble wrap! She really had to ‘be in the now’ to do that! And you know what, it may have saved me a suitcase full of Nordstrom’s clothes! Could you imagine? Everybody, ‘BE IN THE NOW!!!!’”

My Vietnamese colleague sighed during the lunch break, “I think this is the last time I’ll work for white people.”

My headache reached a terrible crescendo after work as I attempted to bike up the hill on 45th. I don’t remember the rest of the ride home, but here I sit, many hours later, and still in my work clothes. I took a serious dousing of black coffee, ate half a baguette and a candy bar. My headache is nearly gone. I haven’t been to the toilet in over an hour.

So happy to be re-toxing.

Blog,


Josh

Note: Saccharine is banned in Canada
Note: Canada is America’s largest oil supplier.
Bonus Question: How many bones in a giraffe’s neck? How many in a dove’s?
Answer: The giraffe has 7. The dove has 13. Isn’t that wild?!