greetings from sleep disorder central

[click image]

.
I was trying to take a picture of myself in my mystically ridiculous first thing outta bed gig this morning, but was messing up something awful... well... or... this really darn substandard built-in camera was messing up... and I was making to snap off the program, scrap the program, when I hit the shutter button instead of the off button. This is me beginning to smirk at my legendary "morning" witlessness again.

Then I got sidetracked by life and emails and the sunny day.

So, anyway, Dave Bath—from clear over there in upside down world—left me this link for my doper friends to contemplate.

Except for a brief stint between ages three and six, I was an anomalously disinclined-to-sugar kid. Pretty big on ice cream when it was around, and pie when it was around, but otherwise relatively impervious to sugar's charms. Not until somewhere in the middle of my world's longest menopause gig did I start to go batshit for sugar again... and THAT was due to my neighbor and dear friend Peggy being a dessert-making fanatic. Between my menopausal screaming freakout chocolate cravings and her virtuosity in the kitchen, holy shit, I was at least as bad as a kid in a candy store. Took me a couple years to get a grip on that, but pretty much went back to the desserts, not so much, thing. THEN when I decided to lose all the dying thyroid gland weight, it was complete ix-nay on the ugar-say for real.

I gained SIX pounds in two weeks of nuke food and milkshakes with Poppa. And bloated up like a blob fish from all the chemicals. THEN couldn't breathe for close to a week from chemicals, and crying, and the antihistamines that allow me to live here starting not to be so effective anymore. Wretched.

I had not gotten more than seven hours of sleep in any night since I left to go see Poppa. This is never a good sign, since I need a rock bottom minimum of eight hours in the best of times, and mostly ten, sometimes even twelve, to get in the kind of sleep necessary to stay amongst the acceptably-patient and marginally-sentient crowd. Well, we fixed THAT. I didn't drop like a stone until two in the morning, but then slept till one thirty this afternoon. I did NOT wake up a blob fish bumping into walls. I woke up 99 bumping into walls. VAAAAAAST improvement... and that is because I have been drinking a lot of water, staying away from sugar, and salt—holding up a cross and a garland of garlic just to mention it—and eating only meat and vegetables and fruits, since I've been home... no chemicals... no lab food... way light on the simple carbohydrates.

So if you feel like total crap all the time, sugar, the gateway drug to cocaine, is PART of yer problem. Older people should stay clear the hell away from it because our digestive systems are lazier, making us vastly prefer to opt for it over the much more work to digest protein, and gut flora more malign. Malign gut flora live on SUGAR. They make you feel depressed, groggy, fuck with yer sinuses, give you MONSTER headaches until you appease them with sugar again, AND eventually you turn into a rack of supremely unhealthy and unmotivated bones due to such poor nutrition. Listen to me. Back off on the sugar, try to limit it to FRUIT, and yer gonna find yourself more alert, less depressed, something akin to functional.

No kidding.
.