Tempeh and Me

Last night I went to a local pizzeria and got a deep-dish pie with everything: Mounds of creamy mozzarella, chunks of sausage and slabs of pepperoni, with a few anchovies and black olives strewn around and a ton of grated Parmesan cheese on top. It was to die for.

Just kidding. I didn't do that because it literally would have been to die for. Apparently my days of eating mouth-watering foods are over as I enter the austere, serious and semi-monastic world of vegetarians. When it comes to eating my new test will be: Did it have a mother? If not, it's a go. I am doing this to save my life (only up to a point of course since we all die), and to avoid future heart problems.

Based on my reading and talking to others with similar concerns, it's my only option. The fact is that wherever a plant-based diet is the norm, heart disease simply does not exist. These countries include China, much of Africa, Japan, South Korea, France, Portugal, and many, many others. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), "in the United States, heart disease is the leading cause of death for people of most ethnicities including African Americans, Hispanics, and whites. For American Indians or Alaska Natives and Asians or Pacific Islanders, heart disease is second only to cancer."

I'm ready to commit, but I sure hope I don't turn into one of those vegetarians. You know the type: holier-than-thou (certainly paler-than-thou), the men with long ponytails and bald on top, the women wearing sandals with heavy socks even in winter, all of them loudly lactose-intolerant and proudly gluten-free, loving the environment and hating GMOs, and most especially looking down their noses at all the prehistoric meat-eaters. I intend to just sit quietly and eat my seven different kinds of beans with bowls of kale, carrots, tofu, berries, tempeh (whatever that is), soy milk, whole grains and most especially quinoa salad (which is very "in" these days) and get healthy. Who knows -- one day I might even become a vegan.

Heart Attack Survivor's To-Do List

1. Enjoy life.
2. Stop ruminating about having had a heart attack exactly one month ago today.
3. Take the boatload of prescribed medications so as not to have another heart attack.
4. Exercise for at least 30 minutes to strengthen my heart so it won't have another attack, like the guy Mitch knows who had three of them in 24 hours or my neighbor who had another one six months later.
5. Go to the market and buy food for tonight's dinner guests.
6. Cook and serve dinner and enjoy guests, who are young and healthy, have not had heart attacks and don't even know, or need to know, that I had one exactly one month ago today.
7. Do not assume you are having a heart attack if at any point during the day anything hurts or feels weird, although do not leave the house without those nitroglycerin tablets.
8. Go to sleep and avoid dreams about hospitals, ambulances and especially that episode of Grey's Anatomy where the woman came into the ER with an upset stomach that actually was a mild heart attack only she ended up dying. (It's fiction.)
9. Write a blog post that may be helpful to someone, imploring them to eat better (see illustration), exercise more and stop smoking -- before it's too late!

He Touched Me

Imagine you are an actress nobody ever heard of. You're desperately trying to get yourself noticed in these crazy, actress-ful times. What to do, what to do? Claiming Harvey Weinstein sexually assaulted you is so last week, who cares. And besides, he assaulted stars so much bigger than you. Think, think, there must be something....

Got it! You could say that the former president, George H. W. Bush, well into his dotage and confined to a wheelchair, sexually assaulted you four years ago but you never spoke up until now because A, you thought your career would be further along by now or B, you never knew what happened could be considered sexual assault but since almost everything is these days, it counts! What he did was "touch you from behind" during a photo session, with his wife standing right next to him, and also told you a "dirty joke." That ought to get some traction!

So it did, and it's in the news today, but darned if I know what that girl's name is or what she ever acted in. However I certainly hope she is getting some therapy for what must have been a very traumatic experience.

Life Aboard the Titanic

This morning I attended my first official cardiac rehabilitation session. My classmates, about half male and half female, were all in the same dubious boat as me, but every last one of them --maybe twenty in all -- was grossly overweight and pushing 80. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just that it got me wondering how I ended up in that particular (leaky) boat at this point of my life.

To begin, I put on a heart monitor and attached sensors to three different places on my chest. My first task was to ride an exercise bike for 20 minutes, followed by walking on a treadmill for another 20 minutes, while someone at a computer kept an eye on my various numbers. Every so often someone came over and took my blood pressure and smiled and said, "Good job!" The radio was tuned to an oldies station, which I found quite appropriate, although I had heard Paul Anka under far better circumstances in the past, that's for sure.

At the end of the class we all gathered for a cool-down stretching session. Sitting next to me was a genial fat lady who leaned towards me and whispered, "Today is Thursday, isn't it?" I said no, it's Tuesday. She insisted, in a louder voice, that she was sure it was Thursday. I replied, lowering my voice, that I was certain it was Tuesday. She then shouted, somewhat angrily in fact, "It's Thursday!" This caused everyone to look in our direction. I considered slapping her. Out of options, I yelled, "Listen lady, it's Tuesday and that's that!" She sort of laughed and said, "Well, that's a relief. I thought it was Thursday."

I have to go to 15 more of these classes.

Love the One You're With

"After Your Heart Event," MaineHealth, 2015

Since suffering a heart attack almost a month ago I have immersed myself in literature about the conditions that might lead to such an event and how to avoid another. In all my reading, including bestsellers by pop doctors and leading nutritionists as well as more scholarly tomes published by cardiology treatment centers, I have come across one particular statement repeatedly: "You can't change your gender."

The preceding true fact is somehow swept under the rug by all those people who call themselves "transgender" after they've cut off their breasts or installed fake ones, ingested hormones either to grow beards or eliminate them, done various unknowable things to their more private body parts, and voila -- Playboy's November Playmate of the Month is a man-turned-woman, posing fully nude! (That should invigorate the magazine's flagging sales.) But does the new "she" have ovaries? How about menstrual cramps? Because if it's no and no, it's not a female. Conversely, all those transgendered men out there sporting scruffy beards, work boots and vaginas are barely fooling themselves.

Embarrassing but true, America still leads the pack in cosmetic surgery. The most recent statistics from 2016 show that surgeons performed 4.2 million procedures meant to enhance a person's beauty, including facelifts, liposuction and breast enlargements, which suggest we also lead the pack in superficiality. Brazil is next with 2.5 million procedures in that same time period, while Japan had 1.1 million procedures, 10% of those being eyelid surgeries. The popular procedure for women (most notably in South Korea and Taiwan) is called East Asian blepharoplasty. The double-eyelid surgery creates a crease in the upper eyelid, ostensibly to give the eyes "a more energetic look." Most  patients deny they are trying to look "white" and instead want to just look prettier and improve their employment options.

Everyone knows that change is good, but loving who you are is the greatest gift you can give yourself, and the only path to true happiness. After all, if you won't be you, who will?

Money Makes You Crazy

The only logical explanation for Donald Trump's psychotic behavior is that having lots of money drives people crazy. Trump aside, most rich folks can't seem to figure out what to do with their money besides spend it on themselves. My jaundiced eye into this zany world is The Wall Street Journal, which we get home delivered because it reports the straight news without that annoying leftward slant of the New York Times that gives you a neck ache when you read it, and is printed with much less inky ink. (The Times gets all over everything.)

In today's WSJ I saw an ad for a pair of pajamas that cost almost $500. (Top, $228, Pants, $268) Now these are not sexy pajamas intended to seduce a rich man and ultimately marry him and then be rich yourself. These are ordinary striped PJ's just like I have, and you might too, that cost maybe 50 bucks, even less if you shop at Walmart. I mean you are wearing them in the dark, lying in a bed all night getting them crumpled and wrinkled, with nobody seeing you, or them, so WTF?

Yesterday in the paper's modestly named MANSION section, I read about Candy Spelling, widow of TV producer Aaron Spelling, who lives in an 18,000-square-foot duplex penthouse condo in Los Angeles. She is 72, so I am guessing she has no kids living at home with her. Maybe she has a revolving door of young lovers, but how can one person live in such a big place, and why? Even weirder, in March of 2013 Candy sued the developers after she claimed they failed to add a restaurant to the building as promised. What, there's no kitchen in her duplex penthouse?

These folks literally have money to burn, so why don't they give some away to all the needy in the world? They could fly their private jets straight to Puerto Rico and drop down some food and water and medical supplies, and even a few hundred pairs of fancy pajamas.

There's Aways A Monster Under the Bed

Did you hear the latest about Harvey Weinstein? He drew the unlucky number and was stoned to death by that ever-increasing crowd of smug, self-satisfied Hollywood hypocrites who knew all along he was a scumbag but never said a word until they got the signal from someone on high (Anderson Cooper?) that it was okay to come forward and tell their stories, and the more the merrier. Now every woman who ever brushed shoulders with the man at a cocktail party is claiming sexual harassment of the most heinous kind.

This phenomenon, which I call "The Lottery Effect," after the brilliant short story by Shirley Jackson (The Lottery) that explains the dark side of human nature in just eleven pages, happens all the time, albeit usually without as much fanfare as the Weinstein debacle. For example, just this week I watched it happen to a man who works in a large organization run by a close friend of mine.

It all started when one female executive didn't like the guy, mostly because he knew too much and made her feel embarrassingly inept in meetings. She called him out as "abrasive and insensitive." Soon another employee voiced a similar complaint, and before you could say "severance pay," the whole damn office had decided that this one guy, a smart and diligent worker with a crummy personality and an aversion to chit-chat, was the whole problem with everything! He was the reason the company (of over 200 people) was struggling! He was the reason behind all the missed deadlines and falling revenue! He simply had to go!

So they fired him the old-fashioned way, stripping him of his manhood in front of his boss and the HR lady, but in their minds they were pelting him with stones in the middle of the parking lot, then carting away his lifeless body, relieved that the Evil One had been dealt with. Just like they had done about a year ago, when it was a woman who talked too much and distracted everyone and caused things to be late and nobody liked and just had to go.

Last year Bill Cosby was the monster. Now it's Harvey Weinstein. I wonder who's next?

The Good News Is the Bad News

Many things sound the death knell for intelligent life on planet Earth, or at least here in America since I suspect other cultures are much smarter, which is why we always end up way down on the list of global surveys regarding student scores, general happiness of the citizenry and good health. But one that irks me quite a bit is the fact that cursive is no longer taught in our public schools, having been deemed a waste of time now that everyone uses computers to write everything. I suppose printing the alphabet will stick around so kids can text their moronic message like LOL, ROFL, SMH, BTW, TMI and ATROTBS. (I just made that last one up and it means All The Rest Of That Bullshit, but I bet if lots of you start using it it will become part of the texting lexicon.) Writing cursive is fun, not to mention beautiful, and has long been used in police work as offering a peek into someone's psyche.

Also on the wane is simple math, like 2 +2 = 4. My own son, having attended a decent university and approaching 30, besides being one of the smartest people I know, who reads books on subjects I barely comprehend just for fun and quotes authors whose names I couldn't spell correctly given all the time in the world (Kieerkegaard? Kirkegaard?), unabashedly struggles with the basics of math, shrugging his shoulders like it's no big deal. His defense, being that if you've got a calculator on your iPhone what difference does it make, holds water.

So how dumb will people get? The sky's the limit! BTW, that expression  originated at a time of optimism and progress in the USA, just before WWI. The earliest citation is from the New York newspaper The Syracuse Herald, in September of 1911: "Then good luck, and remember the sky's the limit." Despite that, many people still wrongly attribute it to the writer Cervantes.

See that? Google has made it possible to know everything while actually knowing nothing. This is either really good or really bad news; only time will tell.

Pushing a Rock

The real woman behind the fake Flo.

My son, a serious chap who hates wasting a second of life, often wonders what he should "do with it" so as not to squander what he regards as a precious commodity. I admire this trait in him although I don't really share it, having personally never wondered what to do with my life as much as how to get through it.

Still, I have chosen my pursuits wisely, not counting the acid trips, and waste no time extricating myself from situations I deem worthless, be they friendships, jobs or that one ill-fated marriage. So I am more than a little mystified when I see people who stagnate in unfulfilling jobs offering no growth for thirty years or more, or celebrate anniversaries with spouses they abhor year after year. This brings to mind "Flo," the obnoxious spokeswoman for Progressive Insurance.

How does she do it ? How can she wake up each morning knowing that she's got to put on that heavy makeup and get her hair done in that weird way, and wear the ugly outfits and say the dumb lines again and again and again? She's been at it since 2008, and if this woman is not a modern-day Sisyphus then nobody is.

I did a little research and learned that "Flo" is portrayed by 47-year-old Stephanie Courtney, who is actually quite pretty underneath all the gunk. She earns about half a million per commercial, and I guess that's enough for her to keep doing it. But really, one wonders if playing a ditzy sales clerk in all sorts of ridiculous situations, just to sell insurance, is what she envisioned when she said in an interview, "I was never tortured over whether I wanted to become an actress. There was never another option in my mind."

Hillary's Foot

Another mystery surrounds the beleaguered almost-first-female-POTUS, as if losing to Trump wasn't enough. The way I heard it on the radio, Hillary Clinton was running down the stairs in high heels, carrying a cup of coffee and turning around to talk to someone behind her, when she slipped and fell backwards and broke her toe.

Then I arrived home and read online that she didn't break her toe, she twisted her ankle. Which makes more sense because I can't imagine Hillary Clinton running anywhere, unless it was to dodge sniper fire at an airport in Bosnia that turned out to be a little girl reading her a poem. (I know I always confuse those two things.) Oh how I miss Hillary and her madcap stories! Imagine what fun it would be if she had won. (Almost as good as what we got.)

Smiley Face

Summer meets Fall.

You know what? I am sick of bad news. Sick of it! The world is in flames, people are dying everywhere, and there is not one damn thing I can do about it, so why am I hearing about it and reading about it 24/7?

Rubbernecking, that's why. Nothing raises media ratings more than a bloody, gory sob story we hear about other people's lives, usually as we are sitting in our comfy living room with a cat on our lap or hunched over the morning paper and a delicious breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast and coffee. (It's a metaphor; I don't eat bacon, not since my heart attack two weeks ago which compared to the stories coming out of the California wildfires, like the one about the woman who ran back inside her burning house to rescue her blind dog and was later found by her son, her remains clutching the dog's remains, was a day at Disneyland.)

In the interest of self-preservation I will simply stop taking in the trash. No longer will the horror stories of how Trump did this and Harvey Weinstein did that, and 200 people died here and another 600 died there enter my soul's container, poisoning my organs and tainting my blood, accomplishing absolutely nothing of merit. Instead I will listen to lovely music and walk in nature's glory, counting how many different colors of red and orange I can find in the newly fallen leaves.

Have a nice day! 😄😄😄