Tea tree oil to treat infection in impacted wisdom teeth until a dentist can be seen- a fable

Today was busy, and devoid of nature, and I ate several random, stupid things, and now as I sit at the end of it with my healthy, well-balanced dinner, I have a cautionary tale for you.

Allopathic doctors do not have your best interests in mind.

They are a product of the pharmaceutical industry and they do not care about you. They think you are stupid, and that you have no original thoughts, and that you are incapable of critical thinking. They do not trust you to take care of your own body. I do not trust them, and so it is a mutual trustlessness. We circle each other, the doctor with her big red dusty book, and me in my paper dress. I want to claw them like a feral, cornered cat, when they will not give me the exact drug that my naturopath recommended (but cannot prescribe), when they tell me that something new and abnormal “Is just part of my anatomy”, when they constantly interrupt me and roll their eyes and then charge me hundreds of dollars. I want to yowl and claw them and tear their eyes out and then run away and hide in the woods where I am safe and no-one can ever find me. I’ll start a militia with the Barefoot bandit and we’ll live off huckleberries and make clothes out of cedar. We’ll grow our own herbs and stage raids on hospitals for medical supplies and set up clandestine clinics where treatment is free. We’ll write catchy songs with anti-pharmaceutical industry lyrics and spread our propaganda on the internet until everyone is free, and then we’ll break the internet.

I saw the dentist today. My left bottom wisdom tooth has been impacted for about a hundred years, and yesterday it finally decided to become infected. This is amazing because as of three weeks ago, for the first time in my life, I have health insurance, on account of starting school. So today I called the dental clinic and they gave me an appointment right away, so that I could be seen before the infection spread to my neck and suffocated me. So I rushed through breakfast (fried eggs and corn tortillas rolled into tacos, dripping yolk all over my fingers) and biked to school as fast as I could. In the dentist’s office the assistant put a lead apron on me and x-rayed my head and made me bite on pieces of sharp plastic and then left me in the chair, looking out the nice window at the nice tree with its nice leaves turning orange-ish. The dentist came clacking in her heels and smiled gently at me while she washed her hands. She had a soft thin face and her jewelry glimmered modestly. She stuck her metal scraper in my mouth and tapped at each one of my precious, steadfast teeth.

“There are so many cavities.” She said. “You have cavities all around your fillings and bigger cavities on the other side where you don’t have fillings. We can go ahead and set up a treatment plan to get all of these cavities filled.”

There was a picture of a tree on the ceiling. This is why my university is called “the greenest university”, I thought. Because, in the dentist’s office, there is a picture of a tree on the ceiling.

“No,” I said. “I just want to get the wisdom tooth out.” Then I told her that in January, when I have money, I plan on paying someone almost all of it to remove the amalgam fillings that I already have.

Her dainty metal pick stopped in mid-air.

“Why would you want to do that?” she asked.

“Because,” I said, “exposure to mercury, even in small amounts, contributes to long-term chronic digestive problems, and I have long-term chronic digestive problems, and the number one source of mercury exposure is amalgam fillings, which begin to wear slightly as they age.”

Her mouth scrunched up, wrinkling her pale lipstick, as if she had smelled something bad. Fear crept through me as I realized that I had broken one of the most ancient taboos of western medicine- Thou shalt not challenge thy medical professional.

“Then, after that, I’m going to get composite fillings,” I said. “the white ones. That don’t have metal.”

“Well,” she said, as she set down her pick. “as long as you’re well informed of the drawbacks to those fillings…”

“I know that they don’t last as long,” I said. “I know that having your mercury fillings removed can expose you to more mercury than if you just left them in, if you don’t go to a dentist who specializes in that sort of thing. I’ve done lots of research.”

The dentist grimaced, but just barely. I was obviously insane, ranting about nothing. Another lunatic who thinks they know something, just because they read it on the internet, or heard it from lots of other people who had the same experience, when everyone knows that all fact about the human body comes shooting people full of chemicals in giant, pharmaceutical-backed clinical studies. The dentist frowned absurdly and returned the pick to my mouth. She was no longer cheerily ushering me into the land of oral health. She was enduring.

After confirming that my mouth was riddled with cavities, the dentist handed me an antibiotic prescription for the inflammation in my wisdom tooth.

“This will help with the pain until your extraction.” she said.

“I don’t think I’ll take that.” I said. “The extraction is on Saturday, I think I can make it three days without needing an antibiotic.”

The dentist set her jaw and looked at me strangely.

“Infection in lower wisdom teeth can spread very rapidly.” She said gently. “Infection can enlarge the glands and interfere with swallowing and, ultimately, breathing.” The dentist swung the tray away and removed my paper bib. I thought of the time, two and half years ago, when my other lower wisdom tooth had become infected. At the time I was living in a yurt on the Olympic peninsula and I had no money. The tooth was swollen and painful, I could barely chew, and when I squeezed the gum, yellow puss came out. I mixed a few drops of tea tree oil in a glass of water, on advice from Allie, my land-mate, who’d done it once on a bike trip, and gargled with the mixture twice a day. The puss disappeared, and then the swelling and the pain. I kept the infection entirely at bay for six months, until I finally had the money to see a dentist.

I didn’t tell the dentist this.

The rest of the day was unremarkable. I hadn’t packed a lunch and so ate underwhelming, expensive foods from around my school- a weird food bar that was made from oats and raisins mashed up, bland sushi, beans and rice with an anti-climactic scoop of guacamole. When I finally got home at eight I made dinner, green beans sautéed in bacon fat (YUM) and pinto beans and risotto rice, and I made up a tea-tree mixture, and I swished it around in my mouth. Now it is night and cold and I am going to make a fire in my woodstove, again, from the pile of scrap wood outside my cottage, and then I am going to sit next to it, and listen to it crackle. And while I sit there I am going to think of people, of humans, of how wonderful and smart and clever and good we are. And I am going to think about all of the knowledge that we have, knowledge that goes back thousands and thousands of years. And it is knowledge that is written down and passed down from one person to the next but it is also knowledge that is inside of us, that we have with us always, that is stronger than anything. And if there is one thing that we can trust, it should be that.

Anchorage

In Anchorage, it’s really spring. All the snow is gone, and the air smells like dirt. And the sea, too, although I cannot see it, beyond these dead potted plants and ratty driveway, ground down by winter’s ice-age of weather. I can smell the sea, though, and hear the seagulls. I know it’s close to me, the sucking mud beach, the flat shallow water, the reluctant whales. The white volcano in the distance, just across the water. I forgot about the volcano! I suppose this town should be covered in ash, buried. Well it’s not. I was here when Redoubt blew the first time, in like 1989 or something. I was approximately seven. The skies turned black and for days ash fell like fine dirty snow. I went to buy groceries with my mother’s food stamps, and a man on a bicycle handed me his paper dust mask. I collected the ash in a pickle jar, labeled it, put it up in a closet, and forgot it when we moved.

Earlier today I was sitting out here, on a friend’s peeling front stoop, breathing the good sea-air, and some kids were playing on the cracked pavement of the road, riding a little pink bicycle in the gutter and rowing the ground with their feet. I used to be those kids, I thought, not far from here. I lived, at one time, just down the road, in a neighborhood just like this, sort of sinking and neglected, with lots of children. When I lived here, and was a kid, the whole city, it seemed, was like that. Sinking and neglected, cracked and peeling. There were rich people, sure, and everything still cost a lot. But the rich people lived off somewhere, and you didn’t see them. And I’d walk along the silty sidewalks, head into the car-wind, with my paper bag of cheeseburgers, or whatever. And at the traffic light I’d hit the metal button, pong, pong, and the loneliness of all the poverty of the world would pour down around me in the form of rain, and hit the dirty snowbanks, whose gravelly crusts sported sad sprinkles of straw wrappers, crushed drink cups, and cheeto bags. I’d plod, it seemed, for miles on those sidewalks. And when I left Alaska in high school, that was always what I remembered of this place- the plodding. Lonely, hungry, empty-pocketed plodding. I’d had no magic tickets for anywhere, no street-smarts other than the ability to dumpster chalky old candy bars from behind the drug store.

Anchorage is different now. The first summer I was back here, twenty years old and hitch-hiked up the Alcan to meet my dad for the first time, I rode a borrowed bicycle to the low-income apartment complex where I’d lived as a child- Tyee Apartments, it was called, on Northern Lights Boulevard- slate-colored buildings that smelled of ramen noodles and echoed with the cries of playing children. Four years- it was the longest we had ever stayed in one apartment. A happy place. That first summer back I pressed my hands against the wrought iron gate that encircled the place, that had never been there before. The TYEE sign was gone, the one that had always blown over in the mid-winter Chinook winds. In front of each apartment, now, was a sleek SUV. A gated community? Really? The shopping mall next door, where we had dumpstered the candy bars and dragged them to the woods to devour among the spruce branches, was closed. Its sign had been gutted, windows black. The carpeted halls held no-one. There had been a library inside, once, where I poured over Seventeen magazine in my stained pink winter coat. Now it was all gone, just like my childhood. Like a movie set, that rolled over. Now it was someone else’s story- the people with the SUVs. But what were their stories, exactly? I Moved To Anchorage Because I Got A Really Awesome Job Offer And I Like To Wear Gore-Tex And Go Hiking? What kind of a story was that? An un-story.

Yesterday I was sitting in River’s van in front of the bookstore on Northern Lights, waiting for her to come out. We’d driven down from Little House the night before, stopped to sleep in a pullout next to a frozen lake a few hours outside of town, but her bed was too small and our blankets were too few and finally we gave up, me reading an Augusten Bourroughs library book in the four a.m. dawn as we drove the rest of the way to Anchorage, giant jagged-edge mountains that showed flakes of dull grey beneath their white winter coats circling the horizon, and then the stoplights, overpasses, and newly-built strip-malls of the edge of town. Wasilla. This is where Sarah Palin lives. We started our errands early, as soon as the shops opened their doors. We breakfasted on sausage and hash browns from the Fred Meyer deli and one organic cucumber, delicious cellulose tube. And then I waited while River was in the bookstore, watching all the yuppies in their five-hundred dollar arcteryx jackets pour from the coffee shop next door. I was feeling delirious and sleep-deprived and prone to mild epiphanies that flashed like the last flare of a dying headlamp in the cabin at night.

These yuppies weren’t here when I was a kid, was what I managed to come up with. And then the reality of it hit me- really, they weren’t. They really, really weren’t. There were no eco-friendly parents pushing babies in jogger strollers, no tattooed hipsters here for summer jobs on the Kenai Peninsula. Way back then, back when, it was just me, and the city. Wasn’t it?

It’s strange how our memories of a place from the past and the realities of a place in the present can fail to reconcile. The don’t overlap or blend, one does not cancel the other out as the More True Reality. Nothing, really, is resolved. They both just are, stacked one on top of the other, a fine, thick wall between them that’s just as real as the passage of time and just as strong.

And yet, it’s amazing, sitting here on my friend’s flaking front stoop, watching the pale eight pm sky begin to darken, how being here makes me feel the same sort of hope I used to feel, when all the world was opening up, the daylight running into the evenings, the sun warm on the boggy ground. I had a fierce belief, even then, in the god-like power of springtime, of summer, of fall, of winter. The seasons were a god, I was sure, the passage of time, a god, the seagulls were gods, the trampoline of moss in the forest was a god, and I was in awe of it, it would make me drunk, and I would fall down into it, and it was, in the end, the only real thing at all. And then, of course, I would be free. Because if Nature was the only real thing, then what were cities? What was flaking paint, second hand smoke? What was hunger? That was nothing. That was nothing in the face of forests, of sucking mud-tide, of glittering white snowbanks in the dark of winter.

I guess, what I’m saying, is that Alaska gives me Hope. Even if it feels like another world and Sarah Palin might as well be president of the whole goddam thing, even if the forests are just an illusion, the last scrap of wood pulp waiting for the world to trash its last ream of Xerox paper. The bears are just props, the wolves, disposable, hunted down from bush planes when the moose fail to walk into the sights of trophy hunters. The musk-oxen, hunted to death by the first people with spears who came across the land bridge ten thousand years ago, are re-introduced from Greenland. The weather makes no promises anymore, just like everywhere else. The ocean currents carry PCBs from all the corners of the world and deposit them in the breast milk of the coastal Inupiat. There are over four thousand LUST (Leaky Underground Storage Tank) sites in this great green state, and they hold enough persistent organic pollutants to single-handedly birth a thousand generations of autistic children. And on and on and on.

Is it stupid, to have hope, in the face of it all? Is it stupid to sit on the peeling stoop and smell the sea-air and have hope? I’m alive, after all, I might as well act like it. And if Nature is a god then she is a strong one. And by Nature I mean Life. Life is strong, I think. Sometimes I don’t feel it, sometimes I forget. Sometimes just being alive feels like driving a broken car until the engine blows, not caring when or where. Just driving this stupid fucking car, for no reason I can understand, and all I know for sure is that the car is going to break. And even if I’m alive, I’m still stuck in a car, which isn’t like being alive at all. And I don’t know how to feel alive, I don’t know what to do. And there aren’t any instructions telling me what to do, no books I can get from the library. There never have been, really, and it doesn’t seem like there ever will be. All the books already written just sort of skirt the subject, never looking it dead in the eye, because if you look it dead in the eye it’s just gone, and there you are, and you have more questions than ever, and no answers.

River was telling me, once, about how when she was a kid the Athabaskan elders in the village would tell stories, they’d sit in a wooden chair and tell stories that just went on and on and on, and the stories wouldn’t have plots the way our western stories have plots, now, and the stories wouldn’t have story arcs, and hooks, and soft rounded edges that tie the world up all neat like yarn in the corners of a woolen scarf. They’d just go on and on, and then they’d end, without any resolution at all.

woodsponies

Today we ate a late lunch of re-heated pinto beans and set out, sleds in tow, to move spruce rounds from the edge of the oil road. There are two sleds, both black plastic, one large, one smaller. One holds five spruce rounds, stacked in a pyramid, tilting and tipping on the packed-snow inclines of the trail. The other holds five smaller spruce rounds, stacked in a pyramid, tilting and tipping on the packed-snow inclines of the trail. They both have loops of rope on their fronts- the larger has a red and white striped rope, the smaller has a thin black rope. To drag the laden sleds we step into the rope, pull it across our hips, and walk, leaning forward. Pulling the sled in this manner makes me feel like a pony, and I tell River as much. River, I decide, is a stronger pony than I. I set out in the afternoon to pull fifteen sled loads of spruce rounds from the oil road to the woodpile in front of the cabin. I have done some shaky math, attempting to quantify every little thing like I always do, and have decided that if we each pulled fifteen sled loads of spruce rounds today from the oil road to the woodpile, we can move the whole pile in a day, a veritable mountain of logs. Three hours and eight sled loads later I, with my smaller sled, am tired, and decide in the weakening light of eveningtime to make cauliflower and smoked salmon curry and do the dishes instead. River is a strong, tireless pony, and she says Yes, of course you can make food and no, you don’t have to haul any more wood and sets off down the trail towards the road, sled in tow. The dog Brosef follows along, stick in hand, too old to help and doesn’t have a harness besides. The men on the oil-road sometimes joke, when they see us pulling the sleds with our hips, strong woodsponies- Why doesn’t the dog pull? Why don’t you have the dog pull, ha ha ha.

Inside the dimming cabin I start a fire, though the walls still hold the memory of last night’s oppressive heat. When we go to bed, generally, the stove is still warm, and we don’t want the fire to run out of fuel in the night, so we put a big green log on the coals and shut down the damper and the vent and cross our fingers, knowing that the green log will either catch and burn eventually or it won’t. So it’s heat, and lots of it, or none at all. Last night the log caught, and so we had an eighty-degree night, both of us awake at 2 a.m. to fling off the covers, throats dry, and strip down to our underwear. The walls of this cabin are insulated against fifty-below winters, in spring they hold the heat for days, like a ghost. And the stove itself is huge, a great hulking mass, much larger than reasonable for a 16 by 20 foot cabin such as this one. The stove is so huge we don’t even have to cut some of the logs, we just open the creaking, asbestos-lined iron door and toss them whole into its orange and fiery depths. The stove is, apparently, an “earth stove”, although I call it a “smoke inhalation stove”, because it doesn’t draw, at least not when the door is open- instead it sends out plumes of nasty woodsmoke, which gather like smog in the air above my bunk.

Once the fire is lit in the stove I gather rusty knife and unreasonably small cutting board and set about to chop the head of cauliflower- conventional, of course, and of questionable freshness. There are corn fields in Alaska, no fields of blowing wheat. There is no agriculture at all, save for one small valley near anchorage, where they grow carrots and potatoes for five minutes in the fall, and are always losing entire crops to blight. There was a dairy there, too, Matanuska Maid, but it went under. There are no factory farms in Alaska, either, and no cattle herds. There are no battery cages filled with chickens, no pork processing plants. The cauliflower I am cutting, in the dim and warming cabin, comes from the Fred Meyer in Fairbanks, a few hours’ drive away. The Fred Meyer got it from a barge, or a truck. The barge or the truck got it from California, which is in another universe, three thousand miles south. Everything I eat, unless I hunt it or grow it myself, comes from three thousand miles away.

I cut the cauliflower, precious vegetable, into florets and set it in the cast-iron skillet, where some butter is hot and spitting. The pound of butter in its greasy wrapper came from the cabinet. Before the cabinet it lived in River’s van. When it was in the van the dog, Brosef, got into the butter, and it still bears those wounds, a deep gouge in its center, like the circular hole in a donut. Brosef loves butter and will hop onto the counter and pull the unsuspecting butter off, to lick it from its wrapper on the dirty cabin floor.

Once the cauliflower is sautéing I open a freezer bag of smoked salmon from our friend Kaz. Kaz is an angel, always showering us with gifts and cooking us fried-chicken dinners and letting us read her autobiography which she types in chunks, a story of growing up white-trash on Crisco sandwiches in Nevada near Lake Tahoe. She caught the salmon herself, last summer, and smoked it, and I break off a piece and eat it, delicious oily meat-candy, more precious and rare than anything you could find in the lower 48 anywhere, except maybe hot basil plants in July or homemade goat cheese, or the sickening-sweet stretches of blackberries, obscene in their invasiveness and sheer volume of fruit, along the roadsides in Oregon, in august.

Alaska. At least we’ve got good meat.

I’m not sure if smoked salmon and cauliflower even go together, much less smoked salmon and curry and cauliflower, but it’s what we’ve got and it’s not beans and rice or fish and potatoes, which we’ve both, in our own ways, grown weary of.

A few minutes later I step out in the golden evening light to pee and River is back with her tenth load of wood, and she’s talking to somebody. We’ve got company, she says. Oh, I say, and duck back inside, to collect the unwashed dishes and stack them haphazardly on the table, sweep the onion skins off the crusty countertop and toss them in the stove. I feel like I should tidy up a bit, although it doesn’t really matter. I used to think it did, until River told me a story about what happened the first day the men came to cut wood for her, the old Athabascan men with their chainsaws. They showed up in the morning to buck the spruce and she met them at the trail and stood by awkwardly, unsure of how to help. One of them, Rick, pulled a sausage from the seat of his snow machine, and told her to go cook. It’s ok I’ve got whitefish, she said, and set off down the trail to make some stew. By and by the men ran out of gasoline for their chainsaws and walked down the trail through the woods, gathering in the dirty, cluttered cabin to eat, sitting on the cooler of salted fish and spooning stew into their mouths. When River freezes whitefish she leaves them whole, and when she cuts them up for stew she slices open their bellies and pulls out the sticky, silvery eggsacs and tosses them into the dog’s slop dish, which is a stew of its own sort, sprout water and eggshells and moose bones and cabbage hearts, sitting for weeks at a time in the stuffy cabin to ferment. The eggsacs of the whitefish are, to River, infinitely and immeasurably gross, and she tries not to touch them, even if she is a strong Alaskan pony, raised in the bush on fried beaver-tail and bearfat. And indeed, not even the dog will eat them, and he doesn’t even get up from his bed when the fall with a SLAP into his bowl. And so the men are sitting on the cooler eating stew, and one of them, Rick, the one who gave her the sausage, sees her drop the pouch of whitefish eggs into the dog’s filthy slop bowl, and he stoops over, retrieves the eggs, and eats them.

And so this is why I know that it doesn’t matter, when they come over, if the cabin is messy. And it always is, anyway, because there isn’t any running water, and because River has better things to do, like read about sex magick and commune with nature, and write the sorts of stories to liberate the human race.

The curry is nearly done and I really have to pee so I go back outside and walk to the rear of the shed to squat where the dog poops, out of view of the men. There are two of them, Rick and Timmy, two of the guys who cut wood for us. They are old Athabaskan men and they work on the oil road, Timmy drives a big dump-truck and dumps gravel all over the forest, Rick claims to be in charge of the whole operation. The exploration itself is being done by Doyon, which is their Native corporation. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, at some point or other, gave corporations to the different Native Peoples in Alaska, along with some land. And some of the corporations are ethical, but all of them are capitalist, and some of them, like Doyon, make Total Destroy, and mow down the forest and fill the creeks with gravel, all in the name of petroleum, and newer and shinier snowmachines for everyone.

But what can we say? They’re nice guys. They cut our wood. When we ripped all the squirrel-pee insulation from the sauna and dragged it out on a giant tarp, Timmy was our partner in crime and hauled it to town in his pickup truck, laughing, and dumped it in the dumpster behind the gas station. Rick comes by, albeit unexpectedly, on his snowmachine, and gives us long strips of smoked salmon prepared the native way, without salt, and we eat it like oily candy in the snow.

River’s property is a small piece of land bounded on all sides by a much larger chunk of property, which is owned by a woman who lives far, far away, the daughter of the old man who lived in the cabin through the woods a ways, the cabin with the iron bedstead and sheet metal stove and neat tins of pipe tobacco lined up on the windowsill. This far-away woman’s property butts right up against the oil road. At some point in time Doyon may want that property, and this one, or not. At the very least they could pollute our water by drilling down and pushing contaminants into the water table, which they will most likely do. Any way you look at it, it sucks.

The men leave before I get the chance to ask them to dinner and we eat the curry, and it tastes good. Then River reads from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek while I do the dishes in melted snow water and peppermint soap, and I marvel again at the fact that Annie Dillard could find so much, a whole universe, really, the beginning and the end, a closed loop, safe and limitless, enough- in a dry field of grasshoppers in West Virginia.

“This is what I had come for, just this, and nothing more. A fling of leafy motion on the cliffs, the assault of real things, living and still, with shapes and powers under the sky- this is my city, my culture, and all the world I need. I looked around.”

Braggs is made with hydrochloric acid and baking soda, Raw Foodism is for the wealthy, panicked classes, and I need glasses

.

Last week I decided to be Raw. Maybe because I’ve been sick off and on for the past four months, whereas before I got sick maybe once every two years- maybe because I always find ways to sneak sugar into my diet and Raw Foodism is a diet of such restriction that I wouldn’t even notice the missing sugar what with the missing Food and all- maybe because I really like those expensive raw crackers that taste like coconut curry- maybe because the only raw vegetable I eat is kale- maybe because I live in the land of privilege and my foodstamps just got refilled.

Also, maybe, because the Raw Food movement is the new Veganism, and is populated by the same moralistic, self-righteous individuals that that once defined Veganism, striving for superpowers and desperate for representation in the Snack Food Aisle, and, well, it’s been a long time since I’ve gotten to be one of the Chosen People. (I was only vegan for two years, quit when I was 22.)**

An experiment.

For those of you who don’t know what Raw Foodism is (and good for you, there are better things to look up online) it’s a newfangled, purely modern way of eating (much like Veganism, the western diet too, come to think of it) that has absolutely nothing to do with what sort of good solid dirt you live on, what it can grow and when, what the people who used to live there and be healthy (before your great-grandparents killed almost all of them) ate, also what the weather is like, and how many hundreds of dollars you’re willing to spend each month on powdered pond scum and out-of-season cucumbers. We’re a bunch of displaced people milling about on a piece of dirt in a very globalized world, so not only do we not remember what to eat, but we have access to absolutely anything that might be edible (fundz withstanding). Raw Foodists eat these things-

-raw vegetables
-raw fruits
-raw nuts and seeds (coconut meat and oil, almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, sunflower seeds, flax seeds, sesame seeds, etc.)

aaaaaaaaand that’s it.

But just open any raw “cookbook” and you’ll see- it’s not just nuts and vegetables- it’s PIZZA! And LASAGNA! And CHOCOLATE CAKE! (It’s like veganism ten years ago- trying so hard not to feel deprived!)

So why do people do it? One word- Superpowers. Or maybe it’s the fountain of youth. The holy grail? Desperation? All of the above? Look at raw food blogs (don’t look at them, please) and you’ll notice a consistent demographic- do I have to tell you or can you guess? It’s those white people again, but not just any white people- but that very certain sliver of white people, a sliver that grows larger every day- desperate white people, scrambling all over each other for the last bits of unpolluted earth and good clean air and the will to get out of bed in the morning, WHATEVER IT TAKES AT ANY COST, clawing each others’ hair out and blowing whole trust funds in the name of being the last one left without cancer in the year 2025.

How fun would that be, really? Skipping along the filthy gray streets post-apocalypse, blank-eyed children sifting lethargically through the ash, their bodies covered in tumors- and you just wave merrily as you pass, stopping to admire your reflection in a broken pane of bank-glass, thinking- “I just have the best skin! And my senses just feel so alive!”

Or maybe that’s what it feels like right now, when I go read these raw foodist’s blogs. (Don’t read them. Please.)

And how better to understand a people, than to join their ranks? To walk among them, to eat cucumbers in February, to toil along with them as they search out the very Rawest sunflower seed? And so I bring you- my short-lived foray into Raw Foodism.

I have friends who fast. Like, they don’t eat any food for a few days, just fruit juice, and it makes them feel terrible, but then at the end they feel amazing, and apparently it’s because fasting gets rid of things that have built up in your system (environmental contaminants from food and water and air and stuff.) But I don’t fast. I CAN’T fast. I’ve tried, and it makes me feel I’m dying. That’s because I’m hypoglycemic, and fruit juice, having been separated from the fiber of the fruit (which slows the absorption of the sugar into your body) is essentially refined sugar. So fasting makes me feel like I’ve eaten nothing but gummy bears and redvines for three days, which, if you asked my pancreas, is exactly what’s going on. And my poor pancreas- chugging along on one cylinder, held together with baling wire after 14 years of eating nothing but jolly ranchers and little debbies with the occasional Whopper Jr. supplement (aka my childhood). And still, still I find ways to punch my poor pancreas in the face- pilfering one too many chocolate-covered almonds from the bulk bins, eating 25 dried apricots at once on an empty stomach. And in the morning my poor little pancreas has to explain its new black eye to the other organs- again- “I fell down some stairs! Walked into a rib!” When really, what’s going on is long-term abuse and addiction. Why is it that everyday, we beat the shit out of the one human body we have complete control over- our own?

Huh?

So I can’t fast. But I wanted to CLEANSE! God, that is such a weird word. CLEANSE! BE CLEAN! PURE! It reeks of eating disorders and Catholicism (aka my teenage years). But seriously, I’ve been feeling somewhat rundown lately, and I know that it’s because I live in the city now. And I want to stay here, for longer than, like, three months, so I want to find a way to keep my health up so I don’t freak out and leave. And I thought, hell, if you can’t live in a beautiful pure green forest nature wonderland, why not bring a pure green forest nature wonderland to your internal organs? Because that is what Raw Foodism seems like to me. Like trying to do permaculture in your colon, or doing a tree-sit to save the last of your liver. And if it “cleaned out my system” and gave me more energy, heck- it’s cheaper than going to the natropath!

A fast, but without punching my pancreas in the face.

But really I just wanted superpowers.

So the first thing I had to do was confront the cultish bullshit of Raw Foodism in order to figure out what I could even eat. I got a “cook”book for this, a big heavy one with nice glossy pages, and in its extensive, rambling, incoherent introduction, I encountered such claims as this- that “traditional people” “thrived” on a diet of nuts and seeds and fruits and vegetables- and I thought, “Yeah, earlier hominids did! Like 2 million years ago! And then they figured out how to make spearpoints and learned to kill animals and evolved into homo sapiens, which is what we are!” and also all the weird weighted terminology for food- all good food was “live”, all gross, icky, clogging, impure food was “dead”- (much like early veganism.) I finally found the recipes in the big, heavy book, and was relieved to see a good assortment of cracker recipes- remember how much I like those expensive raw crackers that taste like coconut curry. I mean, I already eat the raw kale, so I needed to know what else. And crackers, I could do that. No matter they were made out of germinated flax seeds and powdered carrot instead of grains. I could eat a cracker.

So then I dropped a small fortune (aka a whole month’s foodstamps) at the store to buy big bags of raw almonds and flaxseeds and hazelnuts and apples and celery and more kale and tahini (which I don’t even like), and whatnot. Oh, and that brings me to my next point-

I HATE NUTS.

Like, really kind of dislike them, and more every day. If you ever ride trains and hitch-hike for five years in a row, you’ll understand where I’m coming from. And for a good three years of that, I’d say about a quarter of my total calories came from nut butter.

Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick.

Peanut butter, almond butter, sunflower butter (which is not so bad)…. And the very worst part of it, is that no matter how fucking sick you think it is, it tastes good when you’re hungry.

Not that I can digest it. I can’t. When I eat nuts it makes me feel like my colon is full of compost, and I’ve only in the last year admitted this fact to myself. They just sort of sit in my stomach and rot. Gross!

But when you’re a pure Raw Foodist, you soak all your nuts! Which makes them more digestible!

Or not. I’ve tried that, and my body still hates them.

So I filled my one remaining bicycle pannier with supplies, and strapped a borrowed dehydrator in a cardboard box onto my bike rack. I was ready! At home I soaked sunflower seeds and flax seeds, hazelnuts and almonds, and made my daily kale salad even bigger than normal. I dried out some crackers (which came out too oily) whipped up a batch of sprouted hummus, and then Monday was my First Raw Day.

The first half of the day was fine. My body was too confused trying to figure out what to do with the sprouted hummus and kale I’d eaten for breakfast to feel much hunger. Actually, I had tons of energy. But that’s probably just because I’m awesome.

Then, in the late afternoon, at a friend’s house, I became very much hungry. No matter! I had a jar of tahini with me, and a nice head of celery! YUUUUUUUUUMM! Four twigs of celery, a quarter of a jar of tahini, two apples and a grapefruit later, I felt better… for a minute. Then, I just felt hungry again! So I ate some raw crackers. And… hunger! Yep, still hungry! I decided to ignore it, and my friends and I went to the soaking pool at the Kennedy School. At which point I realized, it wasn’t just the hot water making me feel slurry! My blood sugar had dropped through the floor! What I needed, was protein! And fast! Thankfully, there was a grocery store right next door, and I bought myself a nice quarter of roasted chicken. The dark meat part. And ate it, standing next to my bike, in the rain. And then I ate the rest of my crackers. And then I finally felt normal again. Except, my stomach felt fucking weird. And composty. From all those crackers. Which were really made out of nuts.

Undeterred, I went home and whipped up another batch of raw snacks (germinated buckwheat tossed with pulverized soaked almonds, cinnamon, and cayenne) and spread it in the dehydrator to “bake” overnight. I went to bed and fell, at last, into a fitful sleep, my stomach gurgling and clenching, my throat dry and hot.

I woke up at three a.m. to drink some water, and heard the most curious of sounds. It was a sort of popping, like- bubblewrap! But no, it couldn’t be bubblewrap- not at this hour, and not coming from the bathroom! (my bedroom is right next to the bathroom). The sounds went on for a good hour or so- loud, intermittent popping, and at last I was asleep again.

I woke up bright and early, feeling crabby, hungry, and hungover. I shuffled to the kitchen to check my buckwheats and mull over my breakfast prospects. I popped a soaked hazelnut in my mouth, and my stomach flip-flopped, kicking me- Stop doing that! Don’t you remember, on the train?! You HATE nuts!!! I prodded the buckwheaties, hungry. They were still damp. This dehydration was slow business. And not only that, but they were starting to smell kinda yeasty, like they were beginning to ferment. I stuck one in my mouth. It tasted totally sick. Sighing, I made a bowl of miso soup and sat down to stalk some peoples’ blogs.

At which point my housemate S came out of his bedroom, clutching his tummy and moaning. He’d been up all night, vomiting! With food poisoning! Oh no, I thought, remembering that I’d had him try one of my raw crackers the night before. Did I poison him? No, he said, it was some old meat that did it.

“Was that you last night? The noise I heard?” He nodded. He’d been puking and shitting, sometimes both at once, and he’d wanted to put some plastic down on the floor of the bathroom, just in case, but all he had was this bubblewrap…

S. went back into his room to suffer, and I wandered back over to the buckwheaties. The bottom tray was nearly dry, maybe I could eat those? I didn’t feel like I could stomach any kale, not this early… but what to do for milk?

My cookbook had the answer to that! Why, “Nut Mylks”, is what! I had those soaked hazelnuts, and a few leftover germinated sunflower seeds of questionable freshness, so I tossed them into the blender with some water to make “mylk”. The resulting slurry was, at first taste, creamy and delicious, and at second taste, totally made of nuts, aka revolting. I poured it down the drain, mourning my loss of fundz, and ate some buckwheaties plain. Then, admitting to myself that the buckwheaties were fermenting faster than they were dehydrating, I said FUCK IT! And poured them into a baking pan, shoving it in the oven at 340 degrees, to BAKE, thus ended my fearless and daring foray into Raw Foodism forever.

But wait! Afterwards I spent two hours on the internet, reading the above-mentioned blogs, trying to figure out how people get around the you-can’t-live-on-nuts thing, and I learned a couple of FASCINATING FACTS.

Fact number one- Some people call fasting “feasting”. As in, “I just did a sixty day juice feast!” To these people I say- “Where I come from, we call that an eating disorder!”

Fact number too- HOLY SHIT- Bragg’s Liquid Aminos (trendy condiment of post-vegetarians, a million kudos to you if you’ve never heard of the stuff) is made by soaking soybean “slurry” (aka agricultural waste) in a vat of hydrochloric acid and then adding baking soda. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And it also contains Glutamate, as in Monosodium Glutamate, which is why it tastes salty. The label used to read “no MSG”, but then the FDA made them take that part off. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) Patricia Bragg, you can take your fox stole and shove it! (too bad I bought the economy-sized bottle.)

Also, did you know that I need glasses? Yeah, apparently it’s not normal to only be able to read a streetsign from six feet away. Another indicator- every day I get a little more irritated by how small the print in books is. Donations to the “Eyeglasses for Nearsighted Root Vegetables” fund graciously accepted. Button on the left.

Also, did you know I’m one of the top three finalists for “Best Lesbian Gender-Bender Blog” on The Lesbian Lifestyle? There’s not much gender on my blog, but hey! I like winning things! Voting starts Wednesday!

———————————-
Footnote: I had S’s permission to write the part about the bubble wrap

**I don’t have anything against vegans- on the contrary- I have the most endless, bottomless respect for anyone who can muster the energy to find something not to be apathetic about

Here I go again

I’m leaving North Carolina tomorrow, TOMORROW, via hitch-hiking to Tennessee. Once I’m good and in Tennessee, there’s a freight train, apparently, that will take me all the way to LA. I just have to go to this train yard my friend told me about and hide my pack in the bushes and talk to the yard workers. And they’ll tell me what train and when it leaves and then I just have to wait for it and find a rideable car and climb on, after, of course, I find a store nearby where I can buy a few gallons of water and some cans of beans, and maybe a celebrity tabloid to pass the time. I’m not exactly excited about the trip back- not exactly excited about the cold, the solitude, the walking on windy shoulders, the cloying heat of gas-stations, the endless peanut-butter, the fast-food breakfast sandwiches on stale corn tortillas, the diesel grime in the cracks of my hands, the empty gallon jugs, the sore shoulders from pack-straps, the chance of rain. I’m not excited about the rocky ground, the dusty lungs, the lack of fresh vegetables, people who chain-smoke with the car-windows up. I’m not, after all, even excited about getting back to the west coast- the rain, rain, rain, the grey concrete, the lack of jobs, the sprawling city, the central heating that makes me itch and sneeze and cough.

I kind of wish I lived in a cabin in Vermont- I kind of wish I lived in a cabin in North Carolina- I kind of wish I had someplace to write my book. I kind of wish all of my stuff wasn’t in my car parked in front of my friend’s house on the west coast (everything I own fits in my car)- I wish it was only what was on my back- except maybe my bike, I wish that was here. I’ve been away from my “stuff” for two months now and I don’t even remember what I own. Two hundred flannels of various weights, seventeen thousand pairs of shiny men’s shoes, one cowl-neck sweater in pure virgin wool with a wooden button at the neck. A bolo tie of a jumping salmon, a leather belt tooled with freight trains, a bear bell from my backpacking trip in Alaska. A puffy vest with fake fur trim, a real fox-fur trapper hat from the goodwill, very old. Six-hundred suit-vests altered to fit my shoulders, a tin of brown shoe-polish, a pocket-square with my name embroidered on it. A stuffed carrot, a knitted bear, a brown cap with red silken lining, made myself. Nineteen million half-filled journals, a Silverton man’s love-letters circa 1918, one photo of my mother taken in my grandmother’s kitchen when I was three.

I need nothing. I need three things. I need fifteen things. I need everything.

I need nothing. Everything I have I could get anywhere. Why do I need to go anywhere? Why am I here? Why am I going back to the west coast? Where should I go?

I’m not exactly excited about the trip back, but maybe that’s how I always feel. Truth is, I’m tired of traveling, and everywhere I get I just feel like staying. It’s nice cold winter here in Asheville and there are queer people and even nature- even though it feels not so much like genuine goodness as it feels like a town full of white people clawing all over each other to get at the last bits of unspoiled earth and good clean air. Walking around with their hands over their ears going LALALALALALA pretending they’re not on a microscopic island of forested mountains in a vast ocean of shitty ugly polluted places where most of the people on earth have to live. Like it’s just a choice. Like you could just up and move to Asheville if you wanted, and people just live in gross toxic places because they like it. And if I moved here I’d just make it safer for white people with more money than me to come in and raise property values and push me out, because everyone knows that queers are just the second wave of gentrification, after the poor-as-dirt accordian-playing crusty-punk footsoldiers.

Ten years ago, the neighborhood my friend lives here was all black. Now it’s almost all white and there’s a raw food café down the street. I’m sure those people of color were real happy when white people decided they wanted to live here in the nice clean mountains where all the trees hadn’t been cut down and scruffy woodsquatters played old-time fiddle on every corner, and so they started “investing” in the area and property values went up and suddenly no-one who lived here could afford to pay their property taxes anymore. And I am part of it, I am almost always part of it, as a queer person, as a poor, young, artistic queer person- pushed along in the ebb and flow of gentrification, each of us in our own strata like lines of washed-up kelp at low tide. Tale as old as time.

Everything we touch turns to white.

Basically- the world I want to live in doesn’t exist anymore. No use moving someplace like an island and pretending that’s all there is. Only thing is, I am who I am and therefore I need good clean air and trees and walking and bike lanes and queer people to be happy. So it’s all about finding a balance between maintaining my personal health and not feeling like an asshole.

I don’t know where to go.

I wish I could put an ad on craigslist that said this-

Want to live in a cabin for free. For three months, anywhere in the whole world. Need only one cord dry wood and one electrical outlet for word processing. Walking/biking distance to something other than wilted conventional produce, coffee shop with gluten-free pumpkin muffins. Non-straight young people in the area a plus.

Just kidding about the muffins. I can make those myself.

So- tomorrow I’m off. West! West through the glorious southwest! To California and finally to Portland! I’ll be updating this along the way whenever I can, lonely, drenched, at a public library in a town near you. I’ll try to take lots of train pictures too, and post them. If four of five days go by without a post, be patient! Library time is short and sometimes there are more important things to do, like gather beans and wait for trains, or walk three miles in the wrong direction, lost. Wish me luck, and safe passage through Texas, the Bermuda Triangle of train-riding!

Fish Oil

Exhibit A: The Oil of the Fish.

Earlier this month, Sam and I were sitting in the Hobo Jungle in Cincinnati, waiting for the train. Life was idle time, hours stitched together, an endless quilt. The best kind of quilt, I thought, laying back on the leafy forest floor, watching the sun move through the empty sky. I can keep myself occupied this way, zoning out, staring at the sky/leaves/naked branches, pretty much indefinitely. Hours and hours. Staring off at nothing, dreaming up fantastical stories, my favorite folk songs playing on an endless loop. I have always been this way. As a child I would spend whole afternoons in the dirt with nothing but two sticks, creating whole dramas with my imagination. It’s a useful skill to have, when you ride freight trains. Much of riding freight trains is just that- spacing out for days on end, waiting. I crave this sort of aimless thinking, it feeds me, it charges some sort of battery deep inside. And so I wait in the bushes for days, and I am content.

It was morning in the jungle, and Sam was anxious.

“I get anxious when I travel,” he said. “Especially when I’m alone. I can’t just sit, and wait, and relax. I start to feel really wound up.”

I nodded, thoughtfully, and rummaged in my dusty pack for that familiar bottle of rattling gelcaps. My fish oil. I tapped out a few and handed them to Sam, who held them in his hand, skeptical.

“They’re for your nervous system,” I said. “I pretty much swear by them. I call them my ‘anti-anxiety’ medication. I travel with them, take them every day.”

Sam swallowed them with a drink of water from his battered plastic bottle, shrugging.

“You want to eat a snack with it,” I said. “You want your stomach to be digesting something when you take them, to make sure it breaks through the gelcap.”

The next morning we’re still in the trees, talking about travel again, talking about how it can be so good, how it can be so bad. Sam was out on the west coast earlier this summer, and had a hellish time getting east. It took him nine days to ride a train to Minnesota, which is pretty much obscene.

“It was horrible,” said Sam. “I was so anxious. So sick of being in my head.” I nod, and give Sam another dose of fish oil. We take a walk, we fill up our water, we listen to mr. groundhog rustling around in the leaf litter.

“I don’t feel anxious right now,” says Sam, later in the day. “I feel fine. Heck, I haven’t felt anxious all day!”

And that, people, is the good word of the Fish Oil. Can you tell, yet, that I’m a bit evangelical about this stuff?

I wanted to write for you all that I know about this wonderful oil, but then I realized that my actual technical knowledge on how it works is a bit garbled. So I stumbled around on the interwebs and borrowed things from other people, like this page on Wikipedia, which contains these mind-blowing paragraphs-

“Studies[5][6] were conducted on prisoners in England where the inmates were fed seafood which contains Omega-3 Fatty acids. The higher consumption of these fatty acids corresponded with a drop in the assault rates. Another Finnish study found that prisoners who were convicted of violence had lower levels of omega–3 fatty acids than prisoners convicted of nonviolent offenses. It was suggested that these kinds of fatty acids are responsible for the neuronal growth of the frontal cortex of the brain which, it is further alleged, is the seat of personal behavior.

Recent studies have suggested that fish oil may affect depression, and importantly, suicide risk. One such study,[7] took blood samples of 100 suicide-attempt patients and compared the blood samples to those of controls and found that levels of Eicosapentaenoic acid were significantly lower in the washed red blood cells of the suicide-attempt patients.

A study[8] examining whether omega-3 exerts neuroprotective action in Parkinson’s disease found that it did, using an experimental model, exhibit a protective effect (much like it did for Alzheimer’s disease as well). The scientists exposed mice to either a control or a high omega-3 diet from two to twelve months of age and then treated them with a neurotoxin commonly used as an experimental model for Parkinson’s. The scientists found that high doses of omega-3 given to the experimental group completely prevented the neurotoxin-induced decrease of dopamine that ordinarily occurs. Since Parkinson’s is a disease caused by disruption of the dopamine system, this protective effect exhibited could show promise for future research in the prevention of Parkinson’s disease.

According to a study from Louisiana State University in September 2005, fish oil may help protect the brain from cognitive problems associated with Alzheimer’s disease.[9] A study from the Orygen Research Centre in Melbourne suggests that omega-3 fatty acids could also help delay or prevent the onset of schizophrenia. The researchers enlisted 81 ‘high risk’ young people aged 13 to 24 who had previously suffered brief hallucinations or delusions and gave half of them capsules of fish oil while the other half received fish-tasting dummy substitute. One year on, only three percent of those on fish oil had developed schizophrenia compared to 28 percent from those on the substitute – a very impressive result, but not yet published in a peer reviewed journal. [1]“

Can you believe it? Fish oil is also incredibly anti-inflammatory, which makes it helpful for joint pain and allergies. But wait- you ask- hasn’t the ocean become the world’s trash heap? How can fish oil not be contaminated with every possible pollutant, including heavy metals and PCBs?

That’s a good question. And recently, in Ohio, at Kroger, I discovered a rather disturbing fact- there are actually ultra cheap, “budget” brands of fish oil (Bumble bee fish oil? Sick!), that do not filter any of the pollutants out of their oil, making it a veritable multi-toxin supplement. You’re better off not taking fish oil at all, than taking that cheap, gross crap. And good fish oil is not, after all, expensive. I buy the gigantic 250 softgel bottle of this brand, which filters all the metal and PCBs out of their oil. 250 softgels will give me daily fish oil for about four months, averaging out to a cost of about five dollars a month. That’s a bargain, for something that actually, observably keeps the rustling tinsel of my anxiety at bay.

Here in North Carolina, I’ve been pushing it on everyone I know, per usual. Panic attacks? Take some fish oil every day. Can’t sleep? Take some fish oil every day. I’m excited to see how folks take to it, if it helps to visibly diminish the symptoms of living in an over-toxed, hyper-inflammatory world. And how else are we going to test these things, if drug studies are only funded by big pharmaceutical companies, who turn up their noses at plant-based supplements and things like fish oil, which cannot be patented and regulated, (since anyone can grow a bunch of chamomile or, um, squeeze oil from a fish?) and are therefore not worth the investment.

A good article on the oils we eat and how they are linked to inflammation

The Gut-Bone’s Connected to the Mood-Bone

I haven’t seen Jade in a long time. He’s cut all his hair off. It’s short now and parted severely, flattened with beeswax and curled a bit on his forehead. It looks amazing, like a femme-y 1920s gay man on a date. I immediately want the same hair. As the day wears on, I just cannot stop staring at Jade’s hair.

“That’s the first original short hair style I’ve seen in years,” I say, and I mean it.

The next morning I sit on the floor of Jade’s bedroom with his little tub of beeswax, and we try to make my hair look like his. Beeswax, now there’s a hair product I could get behind. What if you even got the wax from bees you raised yourselves? Hair product, right from the hive!

My hair’s a little too long, and I end up looking like I have a massive comb-over. I laugh and wash my hair but the beeswax won’t come out, so I just laugh some more and put my hat back on.

On Wednesday we walk to the food-cart village on 12th. It’s august in Portland, so the sidewalks are littered with walnuts and windfall apples. I like picking up these apples and taking a bite out of the good half, then dropping them back on the sidewalk. I like the green ones that are blushed pink on one side, and clefted deeply where they were crowded on the twig. These apples taste like fall to me, and make me think of this time last year, when I was on the Olympic Peninsula, sleeping in a moldy cabin and eating duck eggs. Some friends had rented a cider press, and they stood in the pouring rain and pressed a whole abandoned-orchard’s worth of apples. They put the cider in a massive carafe in the kitchen-cabin, and it changed every week- from juice to mead to the strongest vinegar you could imagine, and then no-one could drink it anymore, except maybe a shot in the morning as a health tonic.

As I toss another apple onto the sidewalk I think- There is nothing more perfect than these apples. It’s a miracle the city makes them at all.

As we walk, Jade and I talk about “how we’re doing”. Ok, not so good, really bad.

“I wish people wouldn’t say- ‘How are you’,” says Jade. “I wish they’d just say- ‘How’s the crazy?”

We laugh- about expectations, about how shitty everyone is always doing, and about how no-one, really, wants to hear you talk about it.

As we talk about moods, Jade tells me he wants to see an intuitive healer. I plug for allergy testing.

“Your gut, it’s connected to your head,” I say. “At least mine is. More than I can believe, sometimes.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh yeah. If I hadn’t stopped eating gluten a few years ago, I would’ve killed myself by now.”

We laugh again. The sun is dropping, and the shadows are long. I wonder if that’s really true. Maybe it is. Who knows. Who knows how many people are out there suffering, trapped under a hundred-pound wet blanket of depression, moods changing faster than the new Portland weather, and all for a little gluten allergy?

Your gut-bone’s connected to your mood-bone…

Even if it is just an allergy, or the long wet winter, or lack of exercise. Or a buildup of environmental toxins in your system. Or all of these things combined. It’s not like you can just rationalize it away. It’s hard to have hope, when you feel heavier than lead. When it feels like the very center of the earth is trying to reclaim you.

For the last two weeks I’ve had this stomach bug. It’s actually clearing up a little now, on it’s own, and I’m starting to feel a little livelier. But DAMN. Did that thing make me feel depressed! The feeling would come in waves, after I ate. Sadness washing over me like a summer thunderstorm. I cried a lot on my bike, pedaling across town in the hot sunshine. It felt good, crying on my bike. Sobbing and wondering if anyone would notice. Meanwhile, my stomach was doing all sorts of crazy shit, gurgling and feeling nauseous and being in pain. It was like food was poison. Every food. What a nightmare, I thought. What if it was like this all the time? What if I was allergic to EVERYTHING?

The last few days I’ve been feeling better, and little flowers have started to come up in the springtime of my psyche.

(That’s the cheesiest metaphor I have ever written. Ever.)

Whenever I start to feel like shit for some new reason, when I get depressed, anxious or tired, I often wish I could just pop my hood, pull the bad thing out like jammed paper in a copier. But it’s never that easy- no matter how many books I read, no matter how much I regulate the food I eat, no matter how much control I have over the environment I live in. It’s hard to keep up- impossible, really. There’s too much already, and there’s more of it every day. Too much against us, against our physical, animal bodies, the ones still living in the past- and now everything’s changing- new poisons coming out faster than we can adapt to them. It’s here, people. And we’ve got it the worst, my generation and folks younger. We grew up waist-deep in it, we didn’t even know what we were swimming in. And now it’s kicking us in the face, chronic this-and-that like a trust fund we never knew we had. Sometimes I look at the older folks in my life and feel jealous. Where will my generation will be, I wonder, when we’re in our sixties? Fifties, even? Will we live that long?

Yeah, we’re pretty much fucked.

And that’s what I want this blog to be about. Not about how we’re fucked, but about what we’re doing to cope. To make it through day to day. And if we’re doing pretty well in spite of everything, I want to talk about what it’s like to watch our friends go down around us, to watch our best friends struggle like salmon in a gillnet.

It’s not that I have hope. I don’t. But while a lot of us feel like shit a lot of the time, we’re not dead. And since we’re not dead, we might as well talk about our problems, right? We don’t have much to lose.

Thursday Jade and I biked to Oaks Park. It was the most obscene summer day, and all the world’s children had turned out to ride the mini-train and eat soft-serve ice-cream cones. In line for chicken strips, Jade talked about the inherent racism of disney world. A girl in front of us turned around to listen.

“I like disney world,” she said, staring up at us with a sort of fierce look. “Have you ridden the ___ ride?”

“No,” said Jade, smiling. “But I have ridden the ____ ride.” The girl turned back around to order her onion rings. On the back of her shirt, in six-inch letters, were the words “I Love My Two Moms”.

“Only in Portland,” I whispered to Jade. “ONLY in PORTLAND.”

No Comment?

Friends, strangers, the curious-

as the little counter at the bottom of this page spins faster and faster, I wonder-

why no comments?

Am I posting too much, too fast? Not enough time to mull it over? If you saw me today and said, a little sheepishly, “Hey, I read your blog!” then you are now required to comment. At least once! Tell me you like something, or just say hi! You don’t have to be a blogger to comment. You don’t even have to talk about the post.

I’m on a stage here, and the bright lights keep me from seeing the audience. You came for the show, at least whistle or throw something at me!

In other news, I Have Been Bitten By A Poisonous Spider. It’s been a fun year people, and it just keeps getting better! Saturday morning I woke up in my tent, in my friend’s backyard, and found a half-dollar sized welt on my thigh, with a little bite-hole in the middle. I went to the zine symposium, and as the day went on, the red circle grew. It got sore, and hard, and grew and grew! I looked on the internet, and the only likely culprit for this act seems to be-

The Hobo Spider.
I know, the irony is killing me.

The Hobo Spider, (Tegenaria agrestis) apparently LOVES the pacific northwest. It also LOVES backyards and gardens, and although bites are uncommon, the most likely time to get bit is August. The bites are reported to be less severe than those of the brown recluse, and less likely to be necrotic (that’s where your flesh rots away).

This morning, the bite was still there. In fact, the red circle had gotten bigger. No streaks yet, no bulls-eye, nothing weird like that. But it was hot to the touch. I went to the second day of the zine symposium, and had a fun time showing it to people throughout the day.

“Look at my spider bite!” (pulls up short)

“UGGGGGGGHHHH!” (satisfying response from friend)

After the symposium I sped to the Herb Shoppe (which is now on Hawthorne), because I knew that they would, unlike “real doctors”, or even the internet (except for this guy, but Hydrangea doesn’t grow out here) have all the answers I needed. The red circle now covered most of the front of my thigh.

I walked into the shop, immediately reassured by the long shelves of glass jars. Plants! Any plant I need! Herbalism for the lazy man! I walked up the the counter.

“Yes?” asked the woman behind it.

“I have a spider bite- look! What plants should I use?” I pulled up the leg of my shorts.

“UGGGGGGHHHH!” It was not the response I was looking for, this time. “You should see a doctor! Right away! I mean, you should really see a doctor for that!”

“I mean, I know I could go to a doctor,” I said. “But I’m sure there are plants for this.”

Because, you know what? There have been spiders a lot longer than there have been antibiotics.

“Oh. Ok. Hold on, I’ll ask…” And she disappeared behind a curtain.

And then this nice woman came out, who’s name I can’t remember, but I think she’s the owner. I used to see her there alot when the shop was on Burnside, and I had herb school classes there.

This woman pulled me in back, into a little room like a doctor’s office, and had me show her the bite. Right away she touched it with her hand, and I immediately felt better. To have someone who might be able to help you, to have them put their hand on the place that hurts and say, see look right there, no streaking, it’s not infected- sometimes it feels like that is all I need. Like that could fix whatever is wrong with me.

She hurried me out into the front of the shop, and started pulling glass jars off the shelf, handing them to me.

“We’ll need plantain,” she said, “to pull out the poison. And comfrey. Echinacea, too.”

At the counter she unscrewed each jar, and picked up a scoop.

“Make a herb cake, you know how to make an herb cake?”

“No,” I said.

“You take a spoonful of powder, you mix it with a little boiling water.” she was talking rapidly, tossing the herbs together in a bag. “You put a circle of the paste on the bite, cover it with a hot towel.” she sealed the baggie, shook it up. “You do it three times a day, as often as possible.”

“There you go.” She put the bag on the scale. “Four dollars.”

I left the shop smiling, my little baggie in my backpack. I had had a feeling plantain would be the herb for me. I could’ve saved myself the trouble and picked it from the backyard, made my own poultice. But why do any of that when you’re in Portland, and you can go to a magical place like the Herb Shoppe? Where they look carefully at your bite, mix up a special blend for you, tell you how to use it, and then charge you next to nothing?

Plantain is the real deal, people.

Once upon a time, a friend of mine (Hi M.!) rode a train by herself to Eugene, from Portland. She was being a bit sketch, and trying to get into a boxcar that was moving too fast. Well, she fell, and scratched the hell out of her knee on the ballast, making a gnarly, bloody wound. Unperturbed, she got right back up and tried again, this time making it into the car. Her knee bled some and stained her pants, but she ignored it and rode to Eugene.

Arriving in Eugene, she realized that the blood had dried, and her pants had stuck to the wound. So she peeled them off, and her knee was swollen and a bit infected. So she cleaned it and went about her business, a day or two later getting on another train, and riding back to portland.

This friend got back to the house we were living at in Portland, and boy, was her knee infected! I don’t remember the details, but I think it was gnarly- swollen and pussy and stuff. Now, she could’ve gone to the doctor and gotten anti-biotics, but instead, one of our housemates knew just the thing-

“Plantain,” he said. “Pick some plantain, chew it up, (the enzymes in your saliva activate something or other) and make a poultice. Change the poultice as often as you can. The plantain will pull the infection out.” My friend followed his instructions, and sure enough, in a matter of days the knee was no longer infected, and it went on to heal normally.

So now, dear reader, we will see how well this plant works for the bite of the tent-dwelling hobo spider!

WiFi Is Bad For You

No, Seriously. Ever since reading this article in the March issue of The Ecologist, I can’t stop thinking about electromagnetic radiation and how it effects us. It’s a terrifying and fascinating subject to ponder, because not only is this technology very new and fairly un-regulated, but it’s becoming so widespread that it’s almost impossible to escape it. There aren’t many places you can go these days, aside from the middle of a cornfield or deep in the woods (and even at my last job in the woods, we had satellite Wifi) where you aren’t being constantly radiated with these pulsing electromagnetic beams. And the crazy thing is, half the time the technology is entirely unnecessary! It’s not the internet that’s radiating you, it’s the wireless technology! All one has to do to eliminate electromagnetic radiation from their school, home, or business, is switch back to wired internet! You can still have the same high-speed youtube bullshit, alone in your dark bedroom, just run a wire down the hallway!

Here’s the deal. Having a wireless router in your home, (or for that matter, being in range or your neighbor’s router) is basically the same as holding a turned-on cellphone up next to your head, 24 hours a day. While you sleep, while you eat, while you shower, always. And that exposure leads to all sorts of well-documented, if frequently unpublished, side-effects. For example- (these studies pulled from the Ecologist article, down near the bottom)

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All studies listed below have found adverse health effects from microwaves at levels similar to those emitted by Wi-Fi equipment:

Santini et al, 2002: 530 people living near mobile phone masts reported more symptoms of headache, sleep disturbance, discomfort, irritability, depression, memory loss and concentration problems the closer they lived to the mast.

Oberfeld et al, 2004: 97 people living near mobile phone masts reported more symptoms of fatigue, irritability, headaches, nausea, loss of memory, visual disorder, dizziness and cardiovascular problems the higher their level of microwave exposure.

Eger et al, 2004: A three-fold increase in the incidence of malignant tumours was found after five years’ exposure in people living 400 metres from a mobile phone mast.

Wolf & Wolf, 2004: A four-fold increase in the incidence of cancer among residents living near a mobile phone mast for between three and seven years was detected.

REFLEX, 2004: A four-year study on human cells found that, after exposure to lowpower microwaves, they showed signs of DN A damage and mutations that were passed on to the next generation.

Abdel-Rassoul, 2007: Residents living beneath and opposite a long-established mobile phone mast in Egypt reported significantly higher occurrences of headaches, memory changes, dizziness, tremors, depressive symptoms and sleep disturbance than a control group.

Bortkiewicz et al, 2004: Residents close to mobile phone masts reported more incidences of circulatory problems, sleep disturbances, irritability, depression, blurred vision and concentration difficulties the nearer they lived to the mast.

Hutter et al, 2006: 365 people living near mobile phone masts reported higher incidences of headaches the closer they lived to the masts.

Stewart report, 2000: Research conducted by HPA chief William Stewart advised the main beam of a mobile phone mast should not be allowed to fall on any part of a school’s grounds.

Hecht & Balzer, 1997: A huge review of studies concluded a vast array of health effects, including insomnia, brainwave changes, cardiovascular problems and increased susceptibility to infections.

Carpenter & Sage, 2007: Concluded that an maximum outdoor exposure limit of 0.6 V/ m should be set, and that Wi-Fi systems should be replaced with wired alternatives.

ECOLOG-Institut, 2000: Found evidence for increases in immune and central nervous system damage, and reduced cognitive function. Recommended an exposure limit 1,000 times lower than current guidelines.

Kolodynski & Kolodynska, 1999: School children living near a radio location station in Latvia suffered reduced motor function, memory and attention spans.

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I know it’s really long, but you folks should read the whole article. It’s fucking intense. And in the meantime, if you’re not the type to trust ‘studies’ and online articles for this type of information, how about listening to what your own body has to say-

The Carrot Quinn “Sit With Your Wireless Router” Experiment

-First, go for a walk. Get some nice fresh air. If you can, go to someplace that feels like the country, like along a river or through a forest. Take nice deep breaths. How do you feel? Do you feel anxious? Nervous? Grounded? At peace?

-Next, go home. When you walk in the door, take a few deep breaths and check in with yourself again. How do you feel now? What are your thoughts doing? How does your heart feel (like, is it racing?)

-Now, pull up a chair and sit as close to your wireless router as possible. Just take a seat. Close your eyes. Sit there for a few minutes. How do you feel now? What are you thinking about? What is your heart doing? If you have metal fillings in your teeth, how do they feel? How does your head feel, right behind your eyes?

Seriously people. I’d love your feedback on this, if any of you actually do it. Extra points if you live in the boonies and have satellite wifi. We had one of those satellite routers at my last job, and that shit was CRAZY. I actually showed it to one of the camp interns once, pulled her into the dark closet where the router was kept.

Do you feel it? I asked. Do you feel it?

Yeah, she said. Yeah.

OBAMA WHY?! DEAR GOD NO!!

Obama said today that we should open more of the “oil reserves” in Alaska, as a way to reduce dependence on foreign oil!

They want to do more drilling on the north slope, which is the most pristine part of one of the most pristine places on earth, and also the place where about a zillion caribou go to calve every year on their yearly migration. They HAVE to calve up there, because during that part of the summer the black flies get REALLY REALLY BAD, and they crawl under the caribou’s skin and lay eggs, and the only place to escape them is in the nice strong sea breezes, on the coast of the Bering sea, right on top of all the oil. And if the caribou can’t escape the flies that swarm the tundra during those few summer weeks, THE CARIBOU DIE. And do you know what happens when an oil company buys a big piece of land (besides all the petroleum leaking into the ground)? FENCES. LOTS AND LOTS OF FENCES. FENCES STRETCHING FOR HUNDREDS, AND HUNDREDS, AND HUNDREDS OF MILES.

I don’t remember the exact statistic, but I read once that the amount of oil under the north slope would supply the US with petroleum for like five days or something.

FIVE FUCKING DAYS.

Excuse me, I am going to go U-lock my neck to some caribou