E

Have you noticed how life is a series of options? Take parentage; you are, like it or not, 50% of the equation, but....pregnant? Run or stay? Cohabit or marry? The options go on forever; my personal choice was to stay, and I did, with a woman who had travelled to one hundred and forty two countries; great! I could dig that, I love travel, but.... her option was to not travel again...... while my job needed me to cover the country; you know, two cars, nice house, dinner parties with her dull choice of friends.... holidays in all the right places... it costs, so my option was to stay in the job; till I'd had enough, that is, and my option was to work from home, when I discovered my other half was exercising her option to talk on the phone for six hours average a day, and my option was to leave. Then one discovers where the options end; Statistically, children cared for by a single parent don't do well, in all the studies I can find, but all the children cared for by a single MALE parent do BETTER THAN THE NORM FOR EVEN TWO PARENT FAMILIES. Yeah, dude, where do you find a government department who isn't statitistically driven? Yet where do you find a society where the male is given possibly an even chance with the female to be principal caregiver? When I failed twice, at enormous expense, to have custody of my children, I hired a court clerk to research why I lost the case. First fact; choose a lawyer with absolutely no scholastic associations to the lawyer of the other party, or, if that must be the case, choose a lawyer higher up the pecking order (Yes.) than the other party. Second fact; IF I had won my case, I would have been the first male in 2008 custody cases in my court, to have won..... and the reason I have laid out all this stuff is that the parents of my generation, who were married before and during the second world war, MIGHT have had those options, but generally didn't exercise them; for better or for worse they stayed together, and looked after us in their own, unique, inimitable ways. And I think of my friends, and their parents, and right or wrong, good or bad, they were usually there, for their kids. Now most of those souls are gone, and a new generation is now dealing with the elderly. I have already voiced my distaste for demographics, but there is a huge demand for care of the elderly, and a new generation of suits are being hired by principally religious institutions to ramp up the game of care of the elderly. This varies across various countries, but my partner is French, and back home there are 17,500 people over ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF AGE. They have some crazy deals going there; the best is when a person buys the house of an elderly person, and allows them to live there till they die, when the buyer then takes title to the property, and can move in or whatever. France's oldest woman, at 122, was such a lucky person; she had outlived the buyer..... and seemed pretty chirpy about it. But if you live in a place too big, or too remote for contact with a far flung family, moving into residential care is the dreadfullest thing you can do for yourself, even the glossiest of brochures never telling you the thing that will kill you; My parents moved, against my wishes, to such a 'nice' place. The catastrophe just got bigger and bigger; the removal company, an international outfit of 'repute,' lost most of their posessions, and the insurance documents were so complex they'd insured only the things they didn't value..... and the building, a modern chipboard box, had long term leaks from the modern plumbing practices, which put formaldehyde into the air especially near the kitchen, causing vertigo and sudden falling down in two of the healthiest oldies one could wish for. Dad died real quick; I'd exercised my option to stay and care for them, which is why I know so much about sick buildings, and I moved mother to another box with no leaks, but still sick, while the management stripped out and repaired the original killer box. Mother didn't go back there; she was too ill, but died a magnificently lingering death, where every aspect of the 'elderly care' nonsense could be examined closely and found totally wanting, from the 'angel of death' nurses with their pint bottles of morphine, the 'patient alert' gadget with the button to call help, on a chain, slipped behind the fallen patient who waited four hours for me to find her (I'd been absent five hours, and could find none of my six nearby family members to stand in) to the undertaker, who, I would have imagined, would have been able to assess the length and depth of a corpse and get a box that fitted, but no; they all got it wrong. The only bit they got right was the money, every time on the button, heaps and heaps of it, from my parents' pocket to theirs, and my parents' 'investment' dragged down to nothing by a group of Presbyterians who continue to this day to 'care for the elderly'. So I have been coaching my partner through the process of losing her favourite grandparents, and watching just a small variation of this 'elderly care' taking its toll on two people my lady values very highly, and when it is your turn, will you have changed anything? We all know where to start. We all know where it ends. I don't plan to be in any of the options available this day. Nuff said.

D

Are you a hunter gatherer? Do you know what that means? do you believe man has evolved so much that he's a far cry from what he was 15,000 years ago? Our differences from primitive man have only been happening in the last two hundred years. That we use toothbrushes and deodorant is irrelevant. That we trace our physiological evolution via our blood characteristics is probably nearer the truth. Is Ghengis Khan charging around in your bloodstream? Is there evidence in your blood that you were a plague survivor? Does polynesian ancestry assure you there wasn't a chinese encounter six hundred years ago? Our labs are closing in on a fast DNA analysis, MRI is picking over our bloodlines thanks to the Human Genome Project, and one fine day when this world has got your wellbeing a subject of immediate analysis and help, we may be able to get 'wellness' where and when we want it.......but for the meantime, you are what you eat. And hunter gatherers, the 0 bloodgroup of homo sapiens, 46% of us, are designed to eat a meal we found, chased down, cooked or tenderised or just tore apart and wolfed as we found it, depending on our circumstances, which could be the subject of a great deal of speculation, but hopefully I wasn't chased by wolves much, and I was able to snare a bird, wrap it in mud and bake it in a comforting fire, maybe even have enough to bring it home to the cave and share with my kin, tribe, woman; whatever society I was able to coexist with..... My Group A friends are all meant to be vegetarians; they built huts and kept their animals to milk, shear, and generally build into an agrarian society; I've always watched with interest my A friends; they are all losing their mothers to Cancer, and those mothers are, 100%, meat eaters. Some of my A friends tear into meat the way I'm meant to have torn into my prey those thousands of years ago, and I watch them now, and their fragile daughters with interest, wondering when and how they will go, and, if we are indeed what we eat, what is that incompatibility with mother's notion of 'good' that is getting us so firmly into our graves with the big C that, strangely has evolved with our last two hundred years of toothbrushes and deodorants....? (Have you read 'Our Stolen Future'?) I cannot put out of my mind the cries of achievement of the farmers who manage to get a bigger crop, grow a hardier apple, reap a double harvest from a season, and otherwise stretch the natural process of things to get what???? I like Spelt flour, from the original, single row wheat grass. On my European supermarket shelves I can get two, sometimes three varieties of it, and I add a little Rye, and make myself a loaf of bread once a week. Since I got to like this product, I've lost any tendency to have a cold. No mucus. No common or garden white flour. No pizza, unless I make it myself. And a croissant is still just a croissant, and cannot be considered a pleasure if, in eating a product made from Durum wheat, one loads oneself with the wallpaper glue that bakers seek to produce those lighter more glamorous confections, and is the sole reason one would seek a hybrid grain, to facilitate a more facile product. But there is a sector of our community who see to it that our interests and wellbeing come AFTER their interests and wellbeing, which is largely fiscal, and immoveable, if we believe the masses of media targeting our wellness. Wellness is a subtractive process. Achieve by removing from one's diet. Don't need; un-need. The best and biggest lie is that you can harm yourself by not eating. I can do that for 18 days. Always I meet up with someone who invites me to have sushi and I can't resist. I could easily go longer. It is interesting, fifteen days on water alone, to examine what is important in nutrition. Nothing really, once you can stand off from that impulse; It's a bit like smoking... quit that and then quit eating; you'll get an extra three hours to DO STUFF that you just waste with eating. And your energy goes UP, till you are (dare I say it?) superhuman.... try it, rather than a diet. Diet? Nuff said.