Teetotality

I’m doing a Dry April. Observation so far: it’s boring waiting for food to come without enjoying a drink. Don’t tell me to order something non-alcoholic; I hate drinking calories. I think of beer almost like a foodstuff. I like the complexity of wine. Never cared for most cocktails. Not interested in having a root beer or mocktail out of boredom. Also, I think beer and wine complement food, whereas sugary drinks don’t. (Hence not into cocktails.) Will just try harder to make conversation.

All the Things! Kitchen Cupboard Edition

Cupboard #1. Found an unopened bag of popping corn bought from the boy scouts years ago. I never make popcorn. Yet I’m embarrassed to say I’ve been known to buy $7 bags of gourmet organic local pre-popped popcorn in fun flavors. Anyway I said I should really make popcorn some time. Then I said dude it’s Saturday afternoon, make some damn popcorn. I looked up online how to make popcorn. I made it. It was delicious. I mean, addictively delicious. I said, why do I never make popcorn? It takes almost no time. It’s relatively healthy. It’s relatively cheap. I mean it’s effectively free once you’ve bought it from the boy scouts and it’s sitting in your cupboard.

This is just one out of three shelves, representing a little taste of my kitchen:

Cupboard, Food Items

In progress

1

Hannaford diet drink mix, peach tea, unopened

3

Hannaford diet drink mix, raspberry lemonade, packets

1

Crystal Lite, pink lemonade, packet

1

Non-fat dry milk powder, bag, 8 quarts worth

x

1

Dried lentils, bag

1

Dried red kidney beans, bag

1

Dried black-eyed peas, bag

1

Grits, bag

x

1

Popping corn, bag

1

Vitamin C drops, bag

1

Ghirardelli baking chocolate, bar

x

1

Roasted cocoa nibs from Hawaii, bag

x

1

Dried currants, bag

x

1

Xanthan gum, bag

x

Almond flour

x

All-purpose flour

x

Cake flour

x

Vital wheat gluten

x

Elbow macaroni

x

Organic cane sugar

x

Rye flakes

x

 

Home Again Jiggety Jog

Home after 3 days away. Slipping back into my life like a warm bath of oatmeal.

I offered to bring Xopher home some dark chocolate coconut halva, then forgot to go back and pick it up when he said yeah. Oh well he said, they probably ship. I said, they probably sell it here. There’s really not a hell of a lot you can’t get here anymore, but I still always feel the urge to bring Xopher home some little souvenir.

All the Things!

I somehow got it into my head to take an inventory. Of everything. In the house.

I started with the mudroom, probably the most difficult room, as it is partly full of Xopher junk, much of which I can’t identify. I am not inventorying stuff on the counter; I feel that, since it is soon destined for the basement, once my seedling trays take over the counter, it doesn’t count as mudroom inventory.

I’m never doing the basement, or Xopher’s office, as these are his domain. It was hard enough doing the shared space which is the mudroom.

We’ve got about 250 separately enumerated items in that room, that room which didn’t exist a few years ago.

The categories include:

  • cleaning supplies
  • items in daily use
  • outerwear
  • wildlife feeding
  • hardware
  • goat supply
  • goat medicine
  • goat wound care
  • goat shearing equipment
  • vegetation
  • lighting
  • miscellaneous liquids
  • furnishings
  • dye equipment
  • biking
  • stockpiled items
  • uncategorized

Book Corner 2021 Revisit

Drug Use for Grown-ups

by Dr. Carl L. Hart

I did write a review of this last year for Library Things, which I’ve dug up here for your reading pleasure and for contrast with Never Enough.

To describe this book in one word, I’d maybe choose “scandalous.” Dr. Hart uses heroin & has no intention of stopping. It’s a harmless hobby, like having a drink. “Grown-ups” can responsibly take heroin, and opioids, and meth – there is no drug that should be off limits. Now there’s the general libertarian argument for that, which Dr. Hart espouses; but as a tenured professor of psychology at Columbia specializing in neuropharmacology, he’ll also argue authoritatively that none of these drugs will necessarily harm you, if used responsibly – so it’s not simply a matter of “you should be able to legally destroy your life if you choose”. It’s also that, if you’re a “grown-up” about it, you won’t.

Dr. Hart wrote this risky book to come out of the closet, in the hopes others would follow. I think he will likely find himself forever in the minority. I’ve never read any account of someone in such a prestigious station in life coming clean about so much casual, ongoing drug use (he’s tried everything). But now I have – & I guess he’d say that’s the point of the book.

And I know he’ll say that this is more evidence of how badly the book is needed, but hearing him justify his heroin use and explain how NOT an addict he is made me wonder how long it might take for the inevitable shoe to drop – where will Dr. Hart be a year or more from now? Still a happy user insisting he’s not an addict? Will it be true? I believe it to be true of him now. I do believe his accounts and all the evidence he presents; but being brainwashed by our anti-drug society I just can’t help but wonder…

One constant point of his that I appreciate is this: drugs feel good, and that’s reason enough to take them. He gets really uptight around LSD users because they tend to try to justify their drug use as “different” from others – they’re doing it for mind-expanding reasons or whatever, not to get high. “What’s wrong with getting high?” he cuts one guy off mid-sentence. I love that. The right to pleasure… not currently enshrined in the Constitution, but should be, as Tom Lehrer put it decades ago. He was talking about pornography, not drugs, but the principle’s the same –

“Obscenity. I’m for it. Unfortunately the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it owing to the nature of the laws as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on – but we know what’s really involved: dirty books are fun. That’s all there is to it. But you can’t get up in a court and say that I suppose. it’s simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the constitution unfortunately.”

Couplers & Conflict Theorists

I listened to an old Rationally Speaking last night that inadvertently explained to me why there is no discussing things with some people.

Two ways of categorizing people:


a) Mistake Theorists vs. Conflict Theorists

Mistake theorists: “We all want to help the world, but we just disagree on how to
help it.”

Conflict theorists: “Stuff is bad because people have caused these problems, and so we need to defeat those people.”

b) Couplers vs. Decouplers

“In a nutshell, decouplers want to be able to talk about the specific claim,
or the specific disagreement, without context. We should just be able to
isolate these specific, factual questions and figure out who’s right.
And the non-decouplers don’t think that’s feasible or desirable. And they’re
kind of suspicious that the alleged decouplers really are decoupling, as
opposed to just trying to smuggle in a lot of attitudes and implications while
claiming to be decoupling.”

The other day a friend of mine complained about the writer of an editorial being “disingenuous.” I couldn’t understand it. How do you know he’s being disingenuous? Wouldn’t you have to read his mind? Or at least know him a hell of a lot better?

Now I get it – friend is a coupler. The fact is that the editorial writer had a reputation of being against affirmative action based on race. This is a no-no attitude in friend’s worldview. Ergo when the editorial writer tried to make it clear that he was not against affirmative action based on socioeconomic background, friend calls “disingenuous.” From friend’s point of view, editorial writer is just trying to catch you off guard so he can “smuggle in a lot of attitude.”

Needless to say I’m a decoupler and mistake theorist.

If you’re not going to give someone the benefit of the doubt for arguing in good faith, I don’t think you should engage at all.

Book Corner 2022.17

Never Enough

by Judith Grisel

Informative book about addiction by a neuroscientist – and former addict.

Grisel wrote her thesis on the mechanism by which morphine is more addictive in familiar contexts than in novel contexts; a kind of Pavlovian effect triggers an anticipatory process in the brain. This process, dubbed “the b process”, is the brain’s effort to maintain stasis in response to “the a process”, the effects of the drug itself. This is the key to Grisel’s model of addiction, the graph of which she would get tattooed on her body if she ever wanted to get a tattoo. A drug floods the brain with a certain effect, and the brain in response tries to fight back, to counterbalance it. After more and more instances of taking the drug, the “b process” becomes stronger, lasting longer and kicking in sooner. So think of the drug’s effect as “the good feeling”; this means you’re going to get more and more “bad feeling”, sooner, heavier, and lasting longer, until you’ve got a case of classic addiction: you’re no longer taking the drug to feel good. You’re taking it not to feel bad.

The chapters each deal with a different category of drug, based on how it achieves its effects. I read the chapter on alcohol with interest, as I dabble sometimes with the idea of stopping drinking altogether. The more I think about it, the more I feel that regular imbibing is really not such a good idea. Counting alcoholism as one of her past addictions, Grisel is strong in her condemnation of it, and heavy are her lamentations of its ubiquity and heavy advertisement. But I feel she’s remiss in not discussing its central place in so many cultures for so many centuries – people have practically bathed in the stuff, and continue to do so, all over Europe and beyond. Wine accompanies every meal as a matter of course. Is this stuff really so bad for you? Why has it persisted? And she doesn’t discuss its value as a social lubricant. She deals with it merely as a depressive, a downer, and wonders why people want to get depressed and “dimmed” whenever it’s time to celebrate something. But booze is only technically a downer. For me its value is in the way it greases the wheels of interaction with other people. She never mentions this.

Poor Grisel. You really do feel for her… her addiction is still a real living thing. She misses pot so much, and she is so jealous of people who can drink one or two drinks and stop. They absolutely confound her. She sees her husband peruse a menu of microbrews, which lists the alcohol content of each, and can’t understand why it isn’t an easy choice of picking the most alcoholic one. A coworker mentions leaving an event after only two drinks because she has to work in the morning, and Grisel can’t fathom what one thing has to do with the other. I mean, of course she understands these things on an intellectual level, but she can’t make them jibe with her own experience. When she was a drinker, she DRANK.

Meanwhile, I wonder how Dr. Carl L. Hart of Drug Use for Grownups is doing these days…

Funny, I read that book in October of last year, but never posted a review of it. On purpose? Was I afraid of having such a book on my blog?