Just Ask

If you ask the "universe" often times it answers, or at least helps you figure out what the answers are. I put two and two together last night. Well, actually this morning.

I had a series of dreams last night that I remembered this morning. I don't always remember dreams, but these seem to have intentionally stuck in my brain at least enough to finally make the connections happen. I dreamed about the house I grew up in. In the dream someone had walled over the front door of the house. Where the door should have been there was just stucco. Literally I could no longer go inside. And I can't. The house belongs to someone else now which is an idea I'm still getting used to. I wonder if they're happy there? I wonder if they survived the ARM crunch? I wonder if they love how the sun comes in the living room windows in the afternoon?

I also dreamed about the car I used to own which is now also gone. Gone from my life. So many things are gone.

I found out last week, Christmas Eve that my cousin is being treated for rectal cancer. She's undergoing chemo and radiation. She's fighting for her life. She and I share the same middle name. Why in the hell both our mothers had to fucking do that to us mystifies me to this day. What the hell were they thinking? It was my grandmother's middle name, but you know, it's not like there was much more to it than that. Great grandmother named her daughter after a silent screen actress so our middle name was someones last name. And no, I'm not publicly saying which one because then the whole freaking world would know my middle name and quite frankly it's stupid. No white kid from Pacoima should have that as a middle name. Let alone some white kid from Pacoima who's mother was born and raised in Oklahoma. Long story, but trust me on this.

Anyway, when I heard about Teri I was stunned, saddened but not surprised. Her son has been battling POEM's disease for a couple years now. How terribly hard for all of them. I can't imagine what that is like.

I wasn't surprised because rectal cancer is a digestive cancer. People with untreated Celiac Disease are prone to digestive cancers. Some numbers give them a 50% higher risk than the average population. With treatment, which is a gluten free diet, the numbers go down significantly, returning to normal after a year or so.

I carry a Celiac gene, that's pretty obvious. Which one and in what combination I don't yet know. It's possible I inherited a double gene. I'm pretty sure my mother had Celiacs. I would not be surprised if my father did too. I finally ordered a gene test to try and find out. While it no longer matters to me which gene or genes I have, I'm hoping I can use it to convince my siblings, at the very least my siblings, to get tested for Celiacs. My mother's entire family should be tested, but most people don't want to know. My siblings don't want to know. My sister is truly mystified as to where I could have gotten this "rogue gene". The odds are good she carries the same gene. but she'd rather pretend I'm some how extraordinary.

And that's why silence scares me. In theory I'm in a better place now because I'm gluten free. But the years, decades, maybe a lifetime of eating gluten have already taken a toll on my body. I know that, I experience that every day. I regret not knowing, and I'm angry at doctors who never had a clue. But what can you do? You can't go back and relive your life. This is the life you're handed, the one you're meant to live.


It may have already shortened my life, and the lives of people I love. And I get angry all over again at the way whole grain products have been pushed down our throats by a government trying to artificially support it's farmers. I see that stupid food pyramid and all I see is blatant commercialism in the guise of healthy living. Whole grains kill.


The silence I now fear is mortality. Teri's battle brought that home to me to live.


I wonder if anyone ever dies thinking "I did it all, everything I wanted and I have no regrets"? I've never known anyone who died who felt that way. It's not the dying I fear I don't think. Either there is something after this physical life or there isn't. Either way works. It's this nagging sense that perhaps I'm not doing it right; living that is. It's not even about regrets. I want some guarantee that I did what I was supposed to do here; some nod from some God that says I'm on schedule and headed in the right direction.


Does knowing about the silence stop the fear? I don't know yet. Time will tell. I need to figure out what to do with all this. How do I guarantee that when I die I do so thinking I covered all the bases I was supposed to cover? How do you do that?

Bringing Determination to the Table

Odd title maybe, but I happened to catch a segment on 20/20 this evening about Jenny McCarthy and her son Evan. He was diagnosed with autism and she has put him on a casein and gluten free diet as part of his treatment. The link between Autism and gluten intolerance has been whispered about by so many, as has the link between mercury based preservatives in vaccines and autism. But main stream media doesn't really want to talk about it and the medical community surely doesn't want to talk about it. I admire her determination and her outspokenness. The passion she brought to that interview left me in tears, huge sobbing tears. So few people take charge of the health of themselves and their family and follow their instincts, choosing instead to abdicate control and healing to some supposedly all powerful doctor. It was heartening to see someone stand in the public light and talk about autism and gluten and damn the so called experts. I'm not sure she realizes how strong the opposition to her simple determination to make her sons life better may turn out to be. But you go Jenny! You'll find a whole lot of us Celiacs standing right behind you.

More and more I find it disheartening and disgusting this hold western medicine is determined to have on our lives. They want to sell you a pill or a surgery as the answer to your problems. They don't want you to seek your own answers that lie outside their reign of influence. I find it revolutionary and yet so common sense this idea that diet and how you live your life has more influence on your health and well being than all the pills in the universe. They would insist that any cure lies outside your body and mind, and couldn't possibly reside within it's very fiber; that they must control your health and well being because you don't have their expertise and knowledge. We've been so brainwashed by them that we've abdicated our bodies and souls to them, keeping very little decisions making capabilities for ourselves.

And I am guilt of falling prey to that mindset. I've been itching for ohhh, about ten months now. Some days are better than others. Some days are misery. The best guess I can come up with, because the doctor was absolutely no help, is that it's a result of nerve damage caused probably by B vitamin deficiencies or pernicious anemia and or gluten antibodies. It seems to be a somewhat common symptom among both Celiacs and people diagnosed with MS and other auto immune diseases. I was desperate for something anything that would stop the itching. I was hoping for some miracle drug and I'd searched the Internet for it repeatedly to no avail. I wanted some drug with a complicated name that had side effects I could live with as long as the damn itching stopped. I'd beg my way into a prescription or sell my soul which ever had to come first.

I found nothing, no drug, no pharmaceutical wonder, nothing. What I did find were references to everything from tea tree oil to milk baths. I was sure they'd have some miracle cure. Surely something must be out there since so many suffer from this itching? But western medicine has nothing, nada, zilch, zero to offer. Then I came across references to Capsicum as being useful in treating pain from things like arthritis and *ta da* itching. I will try anything. You don't know till you have to live with it how powerfully the itch can motivate. So I found a local pharmacy that has topical cream with Capsicum in it.

Okay, there's an upside to this story and a downside. Capsicum is basically the pepper family. The hot side of the pepper family. On the upside it's virtually orderless when applied to the skin. It does indeed do a really nifty job of numbing the nerves in the skin. And I do mean NUMB. It's a miracle. Applied to the most common areas where I itch the itching stopped. But the skin is numb, LOL. It's an odd sensation. Oh, and while the numbness set in rather quickly it was followed by a mild BURNING where I applied it too heavily. Still, as I sat there with my left forearm on fire I came to the conclusion that it was preferable to the itching. And soap and water don't really wash it off your hands. I still get a mild sting every time I get my hands anywhere near my eyes nose or mouth in spite of having washed a dozen or more times since applying the cream. I'm gonna need to buy some gloves for this stuff I can see that.

But I came to realize something curious about the itching. It's one of those self perpetuating miseries that is as much about my mindset as it is about my physical body. Now on some level I knew that before I began burning myself with capsicum. I knew that I was allowing the itching to aggravate me and take over my life, but there is something about having the power to stop it dead in it's tracks that gave my brain the ability to suddenly cope much better. I am no longer powerless to stop it, and can stop it any time I choose, and that power is liberating. The endless chasing of my tail so to speak has been stopped cold. Just in a matter of ten hours I've gone from obsessed to relaxed. So then the question is, and this is an old question, could I have gotten here without the capsicum cream? Ha. Who knows. And right at the moment I don't much care.

So there's the whole point. I allow myself to be victim to this western medicine mind set. I think I've kicked it, the dependency on pills and doctors, but I still search for the miracle cure outside myself first. I scream in desperation "Heal ME" when I should be quietly saying "I must heal myself". How many times must that happen before the first thought is not "Someone heal me", but "How do I heal myself this time?"

Mountain Sunsets

I'm sitting here watching the sun set. In a mountain valley it's not so much of a sunset as a long slow slide into deepening twilight. That comes from being surrounded by a ring of mountain peaks. People in the flatlands get sunsets, we get an hour of these lovely pale blues and pinks and purples. Then there are the stars. Oh the stars. I spend more and more of my time watching the sunsets now, and waiting for the billions of stars to slide into view. I seem to have more time now. My life seems more focused of late, more confined, but by the same token richer.

It's been a tough weekend. In my new quest to live a healthier life I decided to try the sweetener Stevia. I've read repeatedly about how terrible white sugar is, and how artificial sweeteners are full of chemicals. Stevia seemed a good answer. Unfortunately it didn't occur to me to wonder what family the Stevia plant was a part of. Turns out it's second cousin to both sunflower and ragweed. And I'm allergic to both. It took three days of two packets a morning in my coffee to make me sicker than I've been in a long time. Saturday was a total loss. Initially I just figured I'd somehow glutened myself, but by Saturday I figured it out when I looked up info on Stevia.

What was even more alarming where the somewhat psychotropic effects it had on me. I have a rather distinct memory of thinking I was a chicken there at one point. Fortunately I had the good sense to stay in bed with the covers over my head. Yeah, weird stuff. But you know it's "100% safe all natural and there's never been one single adverse reaction to it reported." Uh, until now. So where do I go to report this? You gotta love the whole new green marketing machine out there. I now realize they're no more honest than all the other marketers out there. Everyone wants to sell you, but no one is going to be around later when you start clucking in your sleep and hunting for bugs.

But there are so many opinions out there about what is good for you and what is bad. I encounter that daily as I read more and more about gluten intolerance on the web. In the end I think you have to keep reading and figure it out for yourself: figure out what works for you and discard the rest. The Federal Government is convinced that wheat is good for me and should be the basis of a good healthy diet, whether it kills me or not. I seem to recall grains being the foundation of their silly food triangle. But I read a statistic the other day from a doctor doing research on Celiac Disease. He thinks as much as 80% of the population has one or more genes for gluten intolerance. I saw another figure, more widely accepted, that 1 in 113 people are gluten intolerant, most without knowing it. But wheat is good for you, any school girl knows that; it's just common sense.

I don't particularly enjoy listening to people prattle on about common sense these days. "Well, it's just common sense you know." Lately when I hear someone use the phrase common sense it seems to be emotional shorthand for "I don't understand" or "I'm afraid of learning that I don't already know everything." People just want to return to a time when common sense ruled, whatever that means. Things have gotten too complicated for them, and they just want to curl up in their cocoon and wrap themselves in what they've always known and eat their Wonder Bread. Gods, here's a thought - death by Wonder Bread. What a way to go.

But common sense to me has always meant something different. It's always meant listening to what my head and heart and soul are telling me. To me, in a very real way that is COMMON sense. I subscribe to the theory that we're all of one soul, all connected by this invisible thread. We can all, in theory, tap into the common knowledge, the common brain, the common sense, a common past and future. I said in theory. Actually achieving that has only been accomplished in bits and pieces in my life.

Of course my common sense theories puts me at odds with most other people's common sense. They'd tell me to shut up and eat my bread, it's good for me because the Federal government has always said so. The government knows these things and they wouldn't lie. These are the same people who think I should be married with 1.4 children and a Labrador Retriever, be Christian and living down in the flatlands in some suburban sprawl like place. Obviously I've never much listened to them or subscribed to their theories.

So I live in a mountain valley. I somehow figured when I moved here I'd encounter like souls. I'd find people here who aren't cut out of normal square cloth just by nature of the place they've chosen to settle. It hasn't worked out that way. Not at all. I'm surrounded by common sense people. They don't much like that I'm single or Pagan, or a single female Pagan. There is no community up here for single women, no way for them to fit in. We live on the fringes of their common sense view of the world. Then you throw in gluten intolerance and you rule out the one mode of socialization that exists for the single woman in these mountains; restaurants and bars.

So here I sit, watching sunsets. Watching the wind bend the trees against a darkening sky. I've always been more solitary a person than not. At one point in my life I did a lot of past life work and got glimpses, little vignettes of the past out of it. One moment I remember was unexpectedly loosing someone who was my world and the crashing agony of that. Who knows, maybe that's why I keep a distance in this life. Who knows how much hangs on from one life to another, how much of who we are is not just the sum experience of this life, but of other lives.

I used to worry that I was living this life backwards. That I was here to get past this need for solitude that seems to be hardwired into me. That somehow I was supposed to discover some magic, some point of view, some relationship that would make me a happy people person. But I don't think so anymore. Perhaps that's my karma. Yeah, I know, never second guess karma. But perhaps part of the lessons to be learned here is how to be alone, be still, be focused, be just me. How does that Eagles song go:

Though the world is torn and shaken
Even if your heart is breakin'
It's waiting for you to awaken
And someday you will-
Learn to be still
Learn to be still

Moving On?

I need to remember for future reference just how bad bad was. I don't want to forget because I don't want to let denial or carelessness or frustration take hold in my life. I can see that happening. But this cannot be a short fling of passion. This has to be a lifetime commitment. I have to let go of the past and move into this life finally and permanently.

Uh, well, okay, commitment has never been a favorite word in my vocabulary. And no, that's not the reason I'm still and always have been single. Shut up. Anyway, I never cared for the concept of commitment; not to anyone or anything. Hell, even the animals, if you think about it, are a short term thing. The dog at the outside will live to be 16 if she's lucky. The cats, may the Gods help me, could live to be 20. I have no clue how long house finches live, but I'd say since Fidget has already survived what should have killed her that she's been on borrowed time since I met her. The point is, I've never said "Forever" to anyone or anything in my life before now, most particularly to myself. I can't even imagine how extraordinary a man would have to be for me to agree to that whole "Till death do us part" thing. Me and forever do not have a stellar track history.

But we're talking about my physical life on this earth in this incarnation. I'm here for a reason and I know I haven't finished up here yet, not even close. I'm also positive that this whole experience is part of that grand sick twisted plan the Gods have for me. I've grown to hate their sense of humor - truly. At any rate, I would prefer to die quietly in my sleep at 98 than in pain from some horrible malady at 50. So in many ways I'm up against a do it right or die enemy. I've never contemplated that before. And in truth I always figured cancer or diabetes would be the bugaboos that would eventually come along to frighten the crap out of me. I was so not prepared to face an enemy masquerading as soft chewy golden brown and warm out of the oven. The enemy is supposed to be dark and menacing. It is not supposed to arrive in the person of a loaf of crusty french bread. How do you take an enemy like that seriously?

But the lifetime complications of gluten intolerance read like a who's who of chronic disease and disorder. The complications I've already experienced are chronic diarrhea, indigestion and acid reflux, severe anemia and vitamin deficiencies, brain fog, depression, extreme exhaustion, nausea, horrible joint pain, kidney disease, chronic bronchitis and various and assorted minor auto immune issues. I'm lucky. No - really. The real nasty complications can kill you.

The depression was probably the worse side effect. I suspect that it's colored my entire life, how I've lived, the choices I've made, all of it. It leaves me to wonder when people throw around the phrase "chemical imbalance" if they even get the implications. Do they get how profound a link there is between what you put in your body and how you feel? Body and mind are not separate entities. Vitamins and minerals play a big part in how well the brain functions. Gluten intolerance destroys the small intestines ability to absorb many crucial vitamins and minerals which in turn effects the thyroid and hormone output which throws everything out of whack. It's a cascade effect. The perfect balancing of the body's mechanisms is so fragile in some ways. I wonder if some day we won't come to understand that we create the chemical imbalances, all of them by not understanding our physical bodies, our very genes?

I came across a diet concept the other day called the Paleolithic diet. It's the idea that man evolved as a hunter gathering, and his genes are programmed to a hunter gatherer's diet. Then there are my genes which specifically do not allow my body to process gluten. Genetically speaking I was never meant to eat grains. So what else is there we don't yet understand about the human body? We know it needs sunlight, some people need it more than others. What else are we as individuals genetically programmed to need that we're not giving out bodies, or what is it we're giving our bodies that they can't handle? Western medicine wants to hand us a pill, all of us, the same pill and be done with it. I don't think it's that simple.

I'm not knocking the pill. I took an anti-depressant for about a year. I remember the profound sense of relief when it kicked in. The lows were gone, there was just this calming steady plateau suddenly in my life. I began to understand for the first time what life without depression is like. It saw everything with new eyes. It was a tremendous lesson. But it came to the point where I couldn't afford it. With no insurance to pick up the cost I couldn't manage the $120 dollars a month. But just knowing that life can be like that was a revelation and later, there were many days when that knowing sustained me.

As the effects of Celiac Disease got worse and worse over the last year the depressions came one on top of the other, just piling up, incredibly dark. I could feel it coming most days, and it had started to scare me. It was all I could do to breath, to sneak a breath in between crashing blows. It was no longer just a vague grayness that colored my life, but sudden, devastating descents into pitch black holes, over and over, like riding a roller coaster that periodically got close to the light, but never really saw it. I was scared and puzzled and devastated by it, and that was on top of all the other bodily effects going on. Once I began to understand what was happening to my body I began to see the patterns in the roller coaster ride. Hell, I can now see the pattern running throughout most of the last ten years of my life.

Yeah, then a new kind of depression took hold. Once I went gluten free the sudden descents into the deep dark holes stopped, but it was replaced by a persistent anger fueled depression. I'm still trying to find my way out of that. But that's okay. It's not the bleak insane darkness, and I prefer it. I don't know exactly how to explain it. Behind the anger fueled depression is a calm backdrop. The insanity is gone. I'm not on the roller coaster anymore. Now I just have to come to terms with the anger.

And that's where letting go and moving on comes in. I've got to find a way to do it. I haven't watched cooking shows for awhile. I tried watching one last night. Bridget goes to Belgium or something like that. Well, in Belgium they eat a lot of gluten. Turns out waffles, well duh, are the national food. Fortunately I've never really much wanted to visit Belgium. Cross number 94 on the list of places to someday go off the list. I suppose someone not understanding reading this would think I was just a big baby. So you can't eat everything Paula makes, you can eat some of it so shut up. What's your problem? The problem is every single time I see something I can't eat, I can't cook, I can't bake I'm angry and I'm hurt. And boy, let me tell you, I'm freaking surrounded by anger and hurt. It's everywhere, on TV, on the radio, in the paper, on the Internet, on billboards, in stores, everywhere. Here it is, and you can't ever have it again, nahhhh nah na nah nahhhhhh. Yeah, there damn well better be some big meaningful all encompassing outstandingly significant cosmic lesson in this. If this is just a joke guys, I'm not amused.

So I'm still casting around, trying to find a way to be happy with what my life is. I need some way to make it all right that doesn't involve me sneering at everyone who deigns to eat a croissant with their morning coffee, or breaking down in tears during a Burger Bust commercial. I have to find a way or I'm doomed to fail.

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?

Just Holding On for Now

I have yet to understand why people create blogs. But tonight I began to get a sense of why someone might. Well, this someone.

It always seemed like an odd concept and I even gave it a shot once, but, well, I had nothing to say and no reason to say it. Sure I have friends, on-line and off and email lists and boards where I read and post, but why be this lone voice on a page talking to yourself? Why would that appeal to anyone?

The answer for me came in a half second tonight when I screamed at no one in particular "Why. Why do people and things just keep getting taken away? When do I get something back?"

Once again the cats looked annoyed and ran for cover and the dog just cowered. That's what they always do when I scream at the walls. All this took place while I was boiling the lovely corn pasta I later choked down for dinner. If you don't have to eat corn pasta, my advice is don't. It reminds me vaguely of plastic. Remember this if you remember nothing else I say: Wheat is a miracle, never take it for granted. Maybe that's where I went wrong? Don't make my mistakes.

I've lost people I loved, and I've lost so many things in the last 15 years; things large and huge and small. I've lost the sense I had once that I would always land safely on my feet. I know now you don't always land feet first. Sometimes you crash and burn and it takes you years to get over the injuries. I have an odd list of the things I miss most. This is in no particular order: My father, my couch, my innocence, the ring my parents gave me twenty years ago that I sold so I could pay the rent and eat that month, and the first car I ever bought.

But what ran through all those years, what was always there to turn to when something or someone was taken away, what never let me down, what always sat quietly in the cold dark to comfort me, the one thing that I never realized how much I needed was food. There was always food. The ultimate drug. While I ate, all the pain, the loss, the grief, all of it took a back seat to reveling in the food for that moment. Lovely french bread, orange chicken, cakes, cookies, ice cream cones, pancakes, warm waffles . . . the list just goes on. And now everyday I realize I've lost yet another food on the list for friends, comrades, comforters, sympathizers.

I am gluten intolerant. Such simple words. They sound so simple. I'm intolerant of gluten. I can't eat gluten. I was born with a couple bad genes and now they've reared their ugly heads and told me in certain and precise measure that I can't have gluten anymore. Huh. So what's the big deal? Well, it is in everything. Gluten: it's not just for bread anymore. It's in wheat flour, it's in barely, it's in rye. And it shows up in some variation in a third of the foods in the grocery store. They put wheat in shampoos for Goddess sake! Anything brown is suspect. Anything thick is suspect. Anything low calorie is suspect.

My favorite place so far to find wheat was in the store brand of Lite Maple syrup I had in the pantry. Trust me, I had no illusions about that lite syrup tasting just like the real thing, but I liked the taste. It suited me. I bought it because it fit into my life in it's own sideways little cheat of a way. It made me feel good to know I was cutting out approximately twelve calories every time I used it, yet it still tasted like the syrup I grew up on and it was cheap. But now I have to buy the real stuff; 100% maple syrup, no additives no preservatives. Though it's debatable that I'll ever need maple syrup again since I can't eat pancakes waffles or oatmeal anymore. Yeah, I guess that one is a bit of a draw. That happens sometimes. What I can no longer eat is made irrelevant by something else I can no longer eat anyway.

Last night I went into the kitchen and stood there, staring at the frig. I could not figure out what to make for dinner. Every option, every meal I'd ever eaten was no longer an option. I paced up and down the kitchen floor for a few minutes, then turned off the light and went into the living room and sat down in the dark to watch TV all night. I never did get around to dinner. About ten thirty my stomach started to growl, but I ignored it and went to bed. Some nights I'm too frustrated to eat. Some nights I'm too heartbroken. Some nights I'm too angry. Some nights I seem to want to punish myself. For what I'm not entirely sure.

Then there are nights like tonight, where I convince myself it's not that bad, and I pump up my enthusiasm and venture out onto untrodden territory. So I decided to try the extremely expensive corn pasta I bought at the organic store last week. One hundred percent pure corn. No wheat stalks were shafted in the making of this pasta. I made a lovely garlic sauce with sour cream and butter and sauteed some shrimp. I now deeply regret dragging the shrimp into the whole fiasco. The shrimp deserved a better end than to wind up on top a plate of corn pasta. I feel like I cheated the shrimp out of a decent end to their scrumptious little lives. See, there I go again. I live for food. I love to cook. I love to bake. And now I'm reduced to eating overpriced plastic pasta.

And don't bother with the letters and emails. I fully realize that if this weren't so bone chillingly pathetic it might even be funny in an ironical, twisted, Machiavellian sort of way. You don't need to point out to me the insanity of my life. Its been brought home in a manner more pointed and vicious than any one person who reads this could ever muster.

So okay, let me get this straight. I'm a forty something single woman with no children, no parents, a dog, two cats and bird, and I live alone on a freaking mountain with no boyfriend, and now I can't eat bread. What exactly is the point to life?

So then why did I decide to create a blog? I realized tonight, sitting in front of the fire, crying my eyes out that no one was going to understand. There was no one to explain it to. I could say to people "I've lost my best friend". But can you imagine the embarrassment and shock when they ask my friends name and I say "Food". You're not supposed to love food you know. Not really.

So it came to me, if I can tell no one, if not a soul will understand, than perhaps I need to tell myself. Perhaps I need to type it all up safely and neatly somewhere just for me. Perhaps I need to be my own best friend. Yeah, yeah, life is a journey not a destination. Blah blah blah blah. Fine. But I can't shake this feeling that food was a better friend to me than I'll ever be to myself. I see the arrows on the highway. I know which way they're pointing. That doesn't mean I have to enjoy the journey. I reserve the right to go kicking and screaming till my lungs give out. Fine. I'll attempt to create a "healthy" relationship with food and with myself. LIKE I HAVE A FREAKING CHOICE!

Next installment: No I Don't Have To! - or why I'm such a freaking rebel