salt « Vichy Water – Author's Blog

July 12, 2011

Fat is Cannabis Addictive? Synchronistic Headache. More Asbury Park and Jersey Shore Jetty (habit or hobbit?) Bashful. Sedona. Playing Chicken with a Newark Bus. July 12, 2011

Filed under: November 2009 — Tags: johnny, lyrics, salt, southside, wallpaper — earthood @ 1:42 pm

At 3:08 AM, Monday I finished watching ESPN’s replay coverage of USA Women’s Soccer(World Cup) vs Brazil. I knew the outcome but a high school buddy told me at a Sunday night oldies concert and fireworks display, that it was a must see. This great band, ‘Bronx Wanderers’ was doing a ‘Jersey Boys’ medley; we got up to dance with no shame, perhaps because we were among the youngest of the lawn chair seated audience. When we gyrated close to each other, he yelled into my congested ear, that I should see the soccer match replay.

you tube game tying goal. a must see

Abby Wambach after scoring game tying goal

When Abby Wambach headed that shot in, it was the same rush of excited disbelief as when Boston’s Bill Buckner let the ball roll through his legs during Game 6 of the 1986 World Series or when Al Michaels, with eleven seconds left in the 1980 Olympic Hockey game, USA vs Russia, proclaimed, “Do you believe in miracles?” Good stuff on a strange weekend. Saturday morning, I drifted out of body. If I explained in any depth now, I’d worry about losing readership. Maybe it’s like Sam Harris’s analogy about the hair dryer. Someone talks/prays to God through a hair dryer as if a microphone; it’s enough for a one-way trip to a ward at Bellevue. The same person prays out loud without the hairdryer and all is perfect mainstream acceptable.

Saturday night my wife and I were back in Asbury Park for dinner, a board walk, music, and a diet ice cream kiosk in Long Branch. Strange ice cream. Not many calories. You keep eating endlessly; it’s cold, sort of sweet but your tongue taste buds are not satisfied. Something is missing. I knew there was a paucity of fat; the stuff tastes good and is actually addicting. Really is.

addictive fat french fries

Fats in foods like potato chips and French fries make them nearly irresistible because they trigger natural marijuana-like chemicals in the body called, endocannabinoids, researchers at the University of California, Irvine have found. So dig this (my son probably thinks I sound like a dreaded hipster now). The researchers discovered that when rats tasted something fatty, cells in their upper gut started producing endocannabinoids, while sugars and proteins did not have this effect. McDonalds (Big Mac people) must’ve known about this compound for a long time. The adventure starts on the tongue, where fats in food generate a signal that travels to your brain first and then to your intestines. There, the signal stimulates the production of endocannabinoids, which initiates a surge in cellular signaling that prompts you to totally pig out — probably by initiating the release of digestive chemicals linked to hunger and not being full that compel us to eat more. And that leads to obesity, diabetes and cancer. Last weeks blog, I mentioned that 347 million people world-wide have diabetes now and more on the way. Funny thing; I don’t care anymore about legalizing marijuana. It’s not personal Sonny. Actually it is.

saturday night asbury park boardwalk

Back to a strange weekend: I finished a 1/2 cup of chocolate pudding flavored soft ice cream and was not satiated, so I threw the rest away. I want fat in my ice cream. Then (11 PM) something possessed me to drive around the block to an old account’s optical store in a small strip mall. For 25 years, I sold them eye glasses. The store was gone, replaced by a shiny white tiled, neon bright pizza place. Sure, it’s been three years since I saw them, but I was devastated; where and why have they gone. Later that night, Google told me they moved and I was relieved. Nobody likes change.

Back in the days of the wild-west and Grafton’s Merchantile Sundries and Saloon (a hangout in the movie ‘Shane;’ a western but one of the best movies ever and I can’t get my son to watch it. ‘Animal House,’ sure, 100 times) I once took a four day course in how to deal with ‘change.’ The following morning, my wife and I were back in our refurbished Conestoga wagon, on our way to a beach at the Jersey shore, up the road a spell from Asbury Park. After the wood bench, that I directed our team of horses from, gave me a splinter through my chaps, we hitched up and made it to the beach, depositing a $14.00 beach fee with a cigar-smoking rugged sheriff type character. Two hours of Ipod music later, I was on my jetty for a meditative session.

my mindful jetty sunday. no clouds on the horizon either.

It was a perfect ten day; blue sky, vitamin D absorption, heat, and gentle ocean. (I decided not to wear a bathing suit). I walked along the ocean, dodging cockles, empty mussel shells (some muscles too) and balls (beach). The walk took me south past places of beach privatization; just before that, the world went dark then nova bright. Thousands of people were huddled underneath umbrellas and sprawled on blankets and light weight chairs when suddenly, I saw the couple whose store I looked for the night before, strolling on the beach. My life is haunted with strange synchronicity; we hugged and reminisced. I recanted the night before. I had a new Facebook friend and more importantly, a curious buzzing headache which lasted all day.

idyllic beach unbrella scene

My mind was firing which is what I’m going to do in this blog; to give substance why I feel like I’m seeing and writing through a hair dryer. Please don’t tell on me. I hate second floor rooms with faded wall paper. Now I dislike Rupert Murdoch just as much. Can any of us imagine what he had his British tabloid do to violate human privacy and decency; for one, to hack the phone of a dead thirteen year old girl. This scandal will grow like a metastasis. I’m not surprised. Some companies do kill; their products and policies kill. Actuaries advise how to keep killing to make money like delaying a recall of dangerous products(cars, RX drugs). Humans are the cheapest renewable resource.

When was the last time someone called me bashful? Maybe it was Aunt Lillian. She was always comparing me to her son; arch rivals in a changing world and he looked like a young Lex Luthor. A small plane is flying overhead, pulling a banner, advertising ‘Reidel,’ a wine glass company. Is there such a demand? A man with a biceps tattoo, a few feet away on a blanket, lit a cigarette and gave one to his underage daughter (with a tattoo on her stomach). Cardiac cockles warmed to see true American family togetherness. I saw a commercial where just one lung cell, damaged from smoking, can start the cancer ball rolling. A phone call came from a Russian nurse (who looked like a blonde tennis player), watching my Uncle Joe (nearly four years ago). He had just passed and I needed to get there and sign papers. I knew Joe for sixty years and the image I’m stuck with was his diapered fetal position and cool skin to a parting touch.

The Da Nang River. and I do hear "A Whiter Shade of Pale"

I know where mental firing comes from. A funny silly comedy movie with surprising nudity was ‘Blame It On Rio,’ starring favorites Joe Bologna and Michael Caine. I blame my hair dryer mind on ‘Sedona, Arizona,’ not Rio. Twelve times over the years, I’ve been in Sedona; my first time, around seventeen years ago, with the family, driving up from Scottsdale, on a break from a national sales meeting. After two hours of driving, red mountains jumped out of nowhere and the world went breath silent. A red pile of dirt on the road side just past the Sedona 4500 feet elevation sign caused my rented white Cadillac to stop. In that pile of dirt, I rubbed red soil all over my tan arms. If there was magic in them hills, I wanted some. I got what I wanted (for life); permanent affectation. The best thing about being twelve and working for Meyer Kravitz, the grocer, was washing out the empty cole slaw tray. Small fingers picked out soggy cabbage remnants from opaque rivulets of watery mayonnaise and sugary vinegar. A loud EPA helicopter passed overhead. The earth moved. I saw the Da Nang River and heard ‘Whiter Shade of Pale;’ the power in those blades and in thinking under an umbrella. I don’t like sun on my body.

Walking up Columbus Avenue in Manhattan, past a Paris like side-walk cafe, I thought I saw Ann Coulter and Rachel Maddow having dinner together, wearing sunglasses but I still knew them. A side effect to Sedona intoxication is déjà-vu and hair dryer moments, perhaps too frequent. Wallpaper and flowers do sooth a soul. A man with a heavy southern accent phoned, offering to impregnate a young stabled girl for a fee. One day I woke up and knew I’d spend a Christmas Eve in Montana but in a snow storm. An hour went by and I stood motionless near the summit of a red vortex mountain off of Sedona’s Airport Road.

on a sedona mountain vortex. the sun was on my face.

Later my son and I took a Pink Jeep tour and when we got back to our car and did ignition, the clock read 4:44. I can’t forget that. Stephen Hawking said recently there is no spirit or God. And this morning, I read that preliminary research indicates that 8-10 glasses of water a day could significantly ease your back and joint pain for up to 80% of sufferers. I’m going to finish my novel one day disputing, refuting Mr. Hawking; maybe before that, physically levitating myself. A large obese teen, a few blankets over, un-wrapped a sub sandwich; long and soggy, it almost gave way from the middle. He caught it in time, spoiling my amusement. Minutes later, it all disappeared into a distended intestine. One Sedona trip, I drove passed Oak Creek Canyon and saw Native Americans on a mountain top, selling jewelry and silver artifacts. I stared at faces of endurance, warmth and compassion more than I did at what they sold. Native music of Incan Pan Pipes and Native American Flute has been part of me a long time.(Coyote Oldman’s ‘Tear of the Moon’) Why the attraction, I wonder. It’s a pulling and an inexplicable need to be there. A few months ago, my friend Ruth, a psychic, told me I was a Native American and I happily accepted.

Chief Seattle

video. you tube Tear of the Moon excerpt

father and son. belmar. truman president. jetty in background

On my refrigerator is a picture of my father and me (I was four) on the beach just a few miles away from my multi-colored umbrella. He was hugging me. In a shadow of my mind, I called the picture, ‘The Last Hug;’ it was black and white, obviously, just like the movie ‘The Last Picture Show.’ When I need oblivion fix and to feel desolate abandon, like sagebrush blowing down the main street, I watch that movie. It took me a long time to visit Texas. Last summer I visited my Uncle Joe’s best friend, cousin Stuart in Dallas.

What would I say to an old college girlfriend Ronnie, after nearly forty-two years, if I found her? Facebook helped me find her sister but she wasn’t her sister’s Facebook friend and she smoked a lot of ‘Newport’ cigarettes. A party fishing boat was chugging by just off shore. When I turned thirteen, my mother gave permission for me to spend the day with Uncle Herman (he wasn’t a real uncle) on a fishing boat. She warned me about sea sickness and my inexperienced legs (whatever that was). An hour into the sail, I realized how wise mother was. How can you throw-up for two straight hours? Can I be such a naive independent voter? President Clinton left office with a huge budget surplus. Eight Bush years later we were buried in debt. Politics is paradox, paradigm and parasailing off a Caribbean island when the tether breaks and you drift to Cuba. Would they believe me?

Einstein said the world was a dangerous place to live not because of people who are evil but because people don’t do anything about it. When I’m near this ocean in summer, I think about the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. Why didn’t I go? I was old enough (18). Dr. Prinz from Newark gave a speech just before Dr. King and said the most tragic thing about mankind is silence.

Pix to the right: Civil Rights Leaders before March on Washington August 28, 1963 with President Kennedy.

Summer of 1966, I was in Jersey City studying German on the second floor of a building off Journal Square rented by Rutgers; best college grades ever; straight A’s and I can’t remember what happened to that paisley shirt I wore all the time. My professor asked me if I wanted to study in Germany next semester. Politely, I declined. Another airplane was flying overhead pulling a banner. Bob Dylan is soon coming back to Asbury Park. Two years ago my son and I made it through the fifth song. Coca-Cola’s goal is for all bottles to be ‘PlantBottles’ by 2020. Bottles that I see now in the sand will still be here in six hundred years.

Chapel of the Holy Cross, Sedona

A small parking lot was filled as I walked up to the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona. Looking out at Cathedral Rock and Bell Rock through the window of my mind was wondrously ethereal. What a place to get married. Somewhere I heard that Senator Barry Goldwater helped get the chapel built. And I owe the Senator something. During his Presidential campaign, a bunch of us New Yorkers (implied easterners) didn’t let him get a quiet word in during his campaign speech in the Field House. Time Magazine said his Toledo appearance may’ve been the most disruptive of the campaign. Kids were worried if he got his hands on a bomb as Vietnam was becoming a war. A composite picture of some of those kids is right in front of me. The Republican administration of the college changed admitting policies the following year so no more New Yorkers. Warm diet peach tea quenched my dry mouth. Sun is setting. Tractors were beginning rounds to wipe out foot prints in the sand; time to pack up your sorrows. My head was still spinning with synchronistic thoughts and fragmentary ideas of birthing this blog. I think the most important thing I wanted to remember was the last time somebody said I was bashful. And I did. And I keep hoping that I captured and conveyed. Maybe somebody can piece things together. The name of the fishing boat I was on when I got sick was the ‘Marie S.’ My umbrella didn’t help; arms and face all red (a women’s lawyer?). What an expression; “I’d die of embarrassment.” Maybe I would, if Ronnie found this blog. I wonder what’s going to happen to the debt ceiling on August 2, 2011. Once I pedaled my bike towards a Newark bus, but chickened out a half block away.