11/12/07

Jumping Jacks = Corkscrew Drill

Yesterday, somebody from Schenectady visited my blog after searching for "looby schenectady" on yahoo. This is in the running for "best thing to happen to me this weekend."

The other day, I went to a pharmacy and checked my blood pressure on one of those little blood pressure checkers, and it was sort of high. Not high, but in that place that alarmists tell you is "pre-hypertension." Being myself something of an inveterate alarmist, this has got me chronicling my salt-intake like each tiny grain were a medieval knight of noble lineage. (That was a pretty Geek-fantastic simile, even for me.) Mind you, I haven't actually changed my salt intake. But, have you ever tried to eat the kind of food you normally eat in a day, and not at least scrape the underbelly of 100% of your daily recommended sodium intake? Fucking raisin bran has 18% salt. And who, in the history of time and space, has ever eaten the recommended serving size of cereal? It's never been done. It's like 3/4 cup. 3/4 cup! And, I'm no expert, but it's not like that much salt actually makes raisin bran taste better.

This is especially tricksy for somebody like me. Because I love salt.
Anecdote for context: As a yea-high boy, I forced my mom to buy me a salt lick. The kind of thing you hang from twine so that deer and, you know, bears and shit can lick salt, if they so choose. The salt that they use in salt licks isn't what you or I think of when we think of salt. It contains "trace minerals." When you're dealing with trace minerals at a large enough ratio, they cease being trace minerals and just start being dirt in your food. It's salt of roughly this quality.

But I put the salt lick on the headboard of my bed, and every day I would lick a little more of that salt lick, and it was salty and that was all I was after. And before you knew it, the salt lick was no more. It was salinizing my sweat and shocking my kidneys, and I was glad, see? Glad!

So it's hard for someone like me to cut the salt out.

Maybe I should just go for a run?

Oh, wait, I'll get shivved in the liver and beaten around the head and neck with a giant dead fish. Possibly a live fish. (Crime report on my neighborhood to follow shortly).

I have, on the other hand, been doing jumping jacks, which is an odd thing to do when you have floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall windows that face a number of other buildings that themselves have giant windows, mostly because I'm always somewhere leftwards on the naked-to-clothed continuum. I must look like I'm practicing to become a corkscrew.

Think about it.

Kanye West's moms died. This has got me sad.

I'm projecting warm feelings. I don't think it will work, but it's the only thing I can do.

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