and it's not just big purchases that make me take refuge in che

I can't help but dwell on him when capitalism gets to me, but I also feel him lacing through my inner space when this health gig gets too entirely vexing. He was a doctor. He was a doctor, a revolutionary, a hero, a real man, and those are the ones I turn to in my heart when things are scary or sore.

The doctor's office called me this morning to gripe that my LDL cholesterol has shot up from 105 to 165 in the space of three months, even though my good cholesterol is way good and balancing the excess, and they are probably going to want me on a statin drug.... What!?! Fuck! She flies out of bed in a total snit.

I've been googling around and found that crash diets can make your cholesterol fly up like that.

Fine.

I'm on a crash diet because I have obstructive sleep apnea and the damn machine is so beyond the pale not doable for me. I do not want to die in my sleep, but that machine is going to kill me before the apnea does, and everybody says losing weight eases the apnea problem. Even though I'm not what anyone would call "obese", I could definitely lose weight. So part one of apnea easing program is this diet.

But part two is the allergy gig. Turns out I'm so seriously allergic to where I live it's not funny. All these ear infections and most of that snarting and snurkling that wakes me back up when I doze off, and other unlovely manifestations have been about there is something here that fucks me up really badly. This is part of the freakish problem with using that machine, waking me up three feet off my bed, ripping the mask off. That and it being mandatory to sleep with my face ground into my pillow. I keep going down to the Bay Area to complain about, well, complain about everything, but particularly about this pain in my glands and ears. It goddam keeps getting mystically better when I go there. This last trip was the clincher. Two days after returning home there was an ice pick in an ear the ENT had just proclaimed darn fine. I started the steroid nasal spray and the cetirzine and the damn problem got seriously better, and when I forget them, it gets instantly worse. This represents DIAGNOSIS. Ka-fucking-zaaaaaart.

So I have lost twelve pounds in just under a month and been eating nothing but seriously healthy low fat food, and taking the great supplements and keeping my smoking down to four measly cigarettes a day and discovering the miraculous effects of apple cider vinegar on pissed off skin and hair and helping my airway with spray and antihistamine and not forgetting any pills, not forgetting any of this stuff... proudly improving the living snot out of the degenerating old broad, here, and they goddam call me up with THIS! How could they?

Che!