Quiet

It is dark and cold this morning. The house is quiet. My dog is curled up sleeping on my bed. It’s quarter past five in the morning and I have a cup of tea to get me going for the day.

I was down to 206 pounds this morning. It is supposed to be a beautiful sunny day today. Maybe I will get some exercise today and get going on the yard work. I have a lot to clean up in the yard and a lot of branches came down from the trees in the wind we had last week. I’m not really feeling all that up to doing labor, but hell, you got to do something.

I am typing this up in the Chrome browser. Firefox has been crashing a lot on this machine, and it is slow as hell. Chrome at least seems to work. I haven’t been doing much writing lately. I am on a long slow journey to lose weight. This blog? It may evaporate. Just a cloud in the passing summer breeze.

Progress

This morning I weighed myself. I was down to 207 pounds. This is the lowest I have been since 2016 when I went off my meds. Five years lost. The only thing that has been letting me drop weight and still maintain good regularity is my high fiber raw fruit and veggies diet with added protein from legumes and grains.

Invega Gut

Darkness Falls

It is nine PM now and the night is upon me. It was a damp and cloudy day. A misty rain fell that left the ground damp. I took my dog for five walks today in the back yard and we must have covered a couple of miles going around the track I have worn in the lawn. He is sleeping now on my bed.

I am listening to a collection of Fairy songs on YouTube now that just dropped from a user called Daniella. It’s odd, but I feel a deep connection to the hidden world that exists parallel to our own. I guess it goes back to my reading some of the prose works of William Butler Yeats back when I was in college at the University of Michigan. The Grad Library was my hangout then where I did my homework and studied some of their arcane books.

I tried to write this post with the WordPress editor, but hit the wrong hot key and deleted the first paragraph. I hate writing with the editor on the post page, so I brought up Notepad++ and am composing in a nice compact unformatted text file. I can’t tell you how many times this crazy shit has happened to me while trying to write something in the editor window. WordPress, get your shit together and write better code and leave the bells and whistles for FakeBook.

FakeBook, what a crock of shit that social network is. I friended my girl and soon all her African friends started sending me friend requests. After approving the first thousand or so african boys posing as sexy women I gave up. Still they come, still I ignore them. I must have had ten thousand friend requests over the last month if I have had one. God damned fake accounts from the jungle spamming me with their fake messages too telling me how cute I am. Bullshit. I’m a fat, ugly old man. I am about to delete that account and forget about Mark Suckerberg and his scam network.

I have some places to go tomorrow. In the morning I am going to the organic market, Fresh Thyme, and see if they have some deals on fruit and vegetables. Then I am going into Ann Arbor and picking up my thyroid meds. I might visit a shop there as well that sells interesting herbs. They have a lot of herbal shops in Ann Arbor, some of which might even sell ingredients for ayhuasca. I am finding that herbs are really good for my health and sense of well-being. I am also studying to be an herbalist, something which requires no license in Michigan and which violates no stupid law like they have in South Carolina.

I ordered some seeds today for Carolina Reaper peppers. I am going to try and grow some of those evil things this year. I also ordered a bottle of Reaper Squeezins direct from Smokin’ Ed Currie of Puckerbutt Pepper Company. That guy is some kind of evil genius when it comes to breeding hot peppers. I did up some Insanity Sauce in my beans and my tomato shakes this afternoon, but it didn’t help much with the pain in my knee from the last Invega shot they gave me. Why are doctors always giving me pain? Because they want to make work for more doctors and turn me into more of a drug addict. Doctors treat symptoms, not causes. They make work for each other with their bogus treatments. Aside from trauma, for which they have never done anything useful for me aside from putting in a few stitches, doctors in the MD path are useless.

That’s all for now. The Fairy songs are almost over. It’s 9:30 and getting near time for me to try my home-brewed Fairy nectar. Good night, morning, afternoon, or evening, whatever it is where you are.

My Morning

I woke up this morning at six AM after a night of annoying dreams. I fixed myself a cup of Lipton black tea and watched some horrible video on YouTube about the coming war. Then I listened to a Cranberries song that made me sad. Junior got up early and looked out the window while it was still dark. I read for a while about herbs and tried to find some useful information online about healthy plant based diets, all to no avail.

I haven’t had any meat dairy or eggs all April. This is day 14 for me without alcohol. I might make some home brew hard cider this morning. In fact, I think I will do that now. Nothing wrong with a few swigs of some live cultures. I have lost a little weight this month, but nothing major. Today so far I have had ten ounces of cabbage, a cup and a half of pea soup, and a handful of walnuts blended up into walnut milk for my omega-3s.

In case you’re wondering, here’s how I make hard cider: I take a clean glass pitcher, add one can of Kroger 100% apple juice concentrate and three cans of water from the hot water tap. Then I stir until dissolved, add one tablespoon of fast-acting dry bread yeast, stir until dispersed, and then cover with plastic wrap. Place in a dark closet for 24 hours, and bingo, hard cider. After two days it starts going sour, so if you leave it for a while you will have home made apple cider vinegar, which is also healthy.

People get all hung up on sterilizing their fermentation shit, but this never happened in the old days and they made perfectly fine booze. Hell, I read in a book on self sufficiency some years ago that I checked out of the library that they used to make beer in a bucket and filter it through clean straw. If you watch any videos on making beer now they would make you think you need thousands of dollars worth of equipment and chemicals to make a god damned ale. Not true. If your batch goes bad you pour it out. I have seen moonshiners on TV make their booze in big metal septic tanks.

Two weeks with no alcohol. 12 days with no animal foods. Down about four pounds. Dog curled up and sleeping on my bed. That’s just about what’s happening in my life. If anyone in my family cared enough about me to look me up online I would probably catch hell from them for what I post here, but seriously, they don’t like me anyway. I have to get my Dad going for the day and make him some tea. Then I have to do the grocery shopping. I haven’t left the property in four days now and it’s time to go out and see how things are going in the clown world that is COVID crazy as hell.

Information

I have been reading Kindle books for a while this year. Yesterday I installed an update for my Kindle PC reader and the thing just stopped working. No shit, and I have just spent like $60 on new Kindle books. I spent two hours trying to get the thing working again, but the updates killed it. I am not buying any more Kindle books. Thankfully, the cloud reader still works, but that requires me to be online for it to operate.

I have been trying to look up information today on self sufficiency and organic gardening. There is nothing useful online. I tried to read a print book this morning, but after half an hour with print my eyes started going wobbley. I can read on the monitor OK, but print does bad things to my vision. Also, I could not find decent material on anything related to providing for yourself. I think Ice Age Farmer on YouTube is right, governments want people to be a dependent bunch of toddler-level creatures cared for by the state.

Last night I downloaded a program called Calibre that reads ebooks that don’t have DRM on them. Now I am looking for free ebooks online, but the only decent place I have found with quality goods is Project Gutenberg. These books are all old or otherwise public domain. I am giving up on the videos for the time being. Online videos are all idiotic. YouTube is a bigger waste of time than TV.

I like this blog. I think I am going to work on it every day from now on. I think I am going to do some work offline and post it here. What I don’t like about blogs is that they are always trying to sell you shit. I may subscribe to Mother Earth News today. That’s about the only publication I know with content dealing with a self sufficient back to the land lifestyle.

A New Life

This is the 11th day in a row for me without alcohol. This is day nine on a plant based diet. I have found a new interest in learning. I am studying a lot of things with my PC Kindle reader and books from Amazon. I am reading a book on medical herbalism. I am reading books on biochemistry and dog psychology. I have found a new interest in science and life.

I don’t know what I have been doing for the greater part of my life pissing away my energy on alcohol and drugs. Certain drugs the doctors have me on to help control my mind. I take herbs now for my liver and my hormones. I get my nutrition and some medical benefit from fresh raw foods liquified in a blender. I get exercise walking my dog and doing yard work. My social life is home and grocery shopping. I no longer sleep 12 hours a day. I feel like I have started on a new life.

So far this month I have dropped seven pounds as measured in the morning on a digital scale. I research the health benefits of food online and read books on my Kindle. I have resisted the urge to buy cannabis, even though it is legal here in Michigan. I don’t hang out with toxic people. Yesterday I planted a flower on my Mother’s grave.

Addiction is slavery. That is the original meaning of the word addict, a person who sold themselves into slavery. I was a nicotine addict for a couple months recently, and for years in my past. I was an alcoholic for years. I was a food junkie for a long time. I smoked weed until it burned out my brain. Now, I am recovering and starting a new life.

How to Lose Fat

I am overweight. Technically I am obese. I have had weight problems ever since the doctors put me on antipsychotic medications. The one time I managed to lose the weight on these drugs was when I was basically eating out of vending machines and limiting my calories to 1500 a day. At that time I managed to get my weight down from 245 to 175 pounds, but it took me about eight months.

The basic method of losing weight is to consume less food than your body needs in a day so that you start to metabolize the stores of fat you have built up over the years. To do this you will need to know how many calories you need on a given day. This is what is called the basal metabolic rate. There are online calculators, such as this one: https://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html , you can access to help estimate your needs based on age, weight, and activity level. I used one of these calculators a while ago and came up with about 2700 calories a day for my BMR. To lose a pound of fat a week, which has 3500 calories, I would need to limit my food to 2200 calories a day.

Of course it makes no sense to try to limit your calories if you don’t know how much you are eating. I don’t eat packaged or fast food, so I have to look up the foods I eat and estimate quantity. Perhaps a better approach would be to eliminate some of the foods that are high in fats and carbohydrates, like whole milk. Back when I was 245 pounds I got that fat by drinking a lot of soda pops every day. These days I drink too much alcohol, which is even worse than pop. Starting tomorrow I will be eliminating alcohol from my diet. It is a total waste of money and time, and it causes your body to store fat.

Starting tomorrow I will be keeping a food journal again. The act of writing down what you eat and the amount of calories in your food is something to make you more aware of what you are putting in your body every day. As part of the food journal I will be recording my body weight and the exercise I do every day. I really have to get my weight under control, and no doctor is going to fix my problem by prescribing something like Metformin that will affect my liver even more. The last time I asked a doctor about losing weight she wanted to refer me to a nutritionist, which seemed like passing the buck to me, but hey, they know it is their drugs which caused my weight gain and they are not going to admit responsibility.

It’s not complicated to get your weight under control, but it takes some effort. You can not do enough exercise to burn the excess calories that you can consume in any given day. Exercise makes you hungry as well, so this just adds to the problem. You need to do some exercise though to build some muscle mass. Sitting around all day eating and drinking is not going to get you anything but obese. Limit your food intake, make sure you get your vitamins, mostly from food, and have a decent amount of physical activity, even if it is only walking around your house. Keep a journal of what you eat. Eat healthy foods and limit fat. Don’t drink alcohol, pop, or juice. Get a hobby or a job to take your mind off of eating all the time, and take care of your body. When the weight finally starts to come off take steps to continue on your journey, and be careful to get enough protein to keep your muscles supplied with amino acids so they can grow. You don’t want to end up underweight, so when you reach your ideal body weight, up your food intake to maintain the new and improved you.

Dreams

I just woke up from some intense dreams. I had a truck. I had a girl. I loaded the truck with hay. I got my girl and we drove through some mud. I lost the hay. I lost the girl. I drove the truck down the road. They were tunneling out in the back field and putting in big wells. They turned the entire area into a big greenhouse operation. People were growing flowers, and genetically-modified cauliflower that tasted like bananas. I parked the truck. I got out and talked to the workers. They gave me a bag of weed and hash. I started to smoke. The overseer came. She confiscated the truck. She tried to get me to stop smoking. I sang Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry and kept smoking. I walked off into the greenhouse. The workers gathered around me. I gave a lecture on eating good food for health. I turned into an Indian man. I got a following. I came back the next day. I started to lecture again. Another Indian who looked a bit like me started to lecture and drew my following away. He was an imposter. The people didn’t like the message the imposter gave and came back to follow me. Meanwhile the workers had taken all the flowers out of the greenhouse. I went to the back of the greenhouse. There were three girls. I pulled out a pack of Newports and lit one up. The girls wanted cigarettes. I gave them my last smokes. They cuddled with me, and I woke up.

My dreams are strange, but they give me hope. It was odd that I had followers in my dream. I have followers on this blog, but I don’t even know if they read my work. Sometimes I feel like a spammer for posting so often. I should start posting some better articles than just my bizarre dreams. Oh well, another day begins.

Wet Morning

It rained last night. It’s 7:30 this morning and still fairly dark outside. I have a cup of herb tea steeping in the kitchen. Yesterday I did up some ribs and baked potatoes on the grill. They turned out good enough, but I probably let them go too long. You can’t believe everything you see on YouTube.

Junior is just waking up now. I got Dad going so he can get to church this morning. I will have to make him some breakfast in a while when he finally gets out of bed. I don’t know where I am going with this blog. I don’t know why I had to drink yesterday.

Today is the start of the rest of my life. Today I get through life without being drunk. Today I look at myself and try to get into better shape. It’s a nice day to start again.