Irony

I stumbled across a bit of irony today. I was doing the usual early Sunday morning ROTW reading when I stumbled on a thread about fast food places. I live on a mountain. Most of the communities up here are small. Big Bear is the largest at somewhere around 15,000 full-time people. Course that number varies depending on who you ask. Anyway, most of the smaller communities up here in the San Bernardino Mountain communities don't rank a Taco Ding Dong or a Burger Bust.

Used to be those conversations about what new restaurant/fast food place may or may not be going in and where mattered to me. Obviously they don't anymore. I still live in fear of any food not personally cooked by myself from whole foods with known ingredients, so I could care less what restaurants are or aren't up here. Well, with the notable exception of Starbucks. I love decaf espresso coffee. I can't drink fully caffeinated coffee anymore. The "buzz" is physically painful to me now. So I've chosen to mitigate the damage by drinking decaf. A buzz is still possible, but you have to drink one hell of a lot of it. But I love Starbucks, and I love the variety of decaf coffee's they keep in stock. For variety they beat anything the stores up here have to offer in the way of bean varieties and availability of decaf. So I love Starbucks and wish them all the good luck in the world taking over this planet.

Later as I was standing over the stove slicing and frying potatoes in olive oil and scrambling eggs for my special Sunday breakfast I got to thinking about all the things I've put in my body over the years without thought or consideration. My body had been rejecting so much of it in it's own small subtle little way and I hadn't been listening. When it couldn't take it anymore and subtle wasn't getting through that's when things got ugly. It had to get as bad as it did for me to finally hear what my own body was telling me. I just hadn't been listening.

Just then a line from a Gordon Lightfoot song came to mind: "See the ocean wild and blue, think of all that's in her, she will not surrender to the likes of us, but then she must, they tell us, wise men tell us . . ." That's from a song called "Too Late For Praying." Mankind tends to view the ocean as this wide vast place, too vast to be affected by one single man. But we have misjudged the damage millions of humans over the course of a couple hundred years have done to the oceans, from over fishing to pollution to the dredging of inland water ways and bays. She's not invincible, she can be destroyed. Just as water wears away stone over time.

Ironically, I've been doing the same thing to myself all these years. I think perhaps I've viewed my body as some marvelous adaptable creature that enables my life and will always be here. Or maybe I just never thought. Yeah, most likely I never thought. Ironically if you had asked I would have said I'd treated it fairly well. I never did drugs or smoked or consumed more than one or two vodka martinis a week - dirty vodka martinis being my weakness. But in realty I've been damaging it daily for my entire life. Celiac Disease had to win; of course it did. I've been polluting my body all my life with basically toxic substances and not knowing, not caring, probably not wanting to know. I've been as careless with my body as the human race has been with the planet it lives on. Here I was so passionately aware of what we were doing to this planet, yet oblivious to what I was doing to my body. How does this planet ever stand a chance when humans are so busy blindly polluting their very own bodies?

I suspect that most everyone has that same schism, that same disconnect from their bodies that I had. They must. Otherwise how could the Taco Ding Dongs and Burger Busts of the world survive, grow and prosper? They'll recycle bottles and cans and talk endlessly about global warming, but in the end I wonder if there is truly anything we can do about the shape this planet is in when we won't even safeguard our own bodies?