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110 pounds and low blood sugar
Wednesday, March 13 2019
The diphenhydramine dream this morning had me at some hotel in some indistinct part of the world. I jumped into a swimming pool, forgetting to first remove the phone from my pocket. It was immediately drenched, so I took it apart as best I could (the model I use right now does not have a removable battery, but I nevertheless was able to remove it. Because of the delay all of this caused, the other people in my party (which did not seem to include Gretchen) went on without me, and I said I would catch up. But I didn't really know where they were going and now my phone didn't work, so how would I ever catch up with them? And that was where my dream left me when it ended.
It being a Wednesday, Ramona came with me to work. She was mostly a good girl, though she get away from me at one point to explore the grounds of an adjacent business, which is a sprawling warren of buildings and loading docks (and occasional cats and probably woodchucks as well).
Yet again, just after getting home, I equipped myself with lightweight non-work clothing, backpack, and chainsaw, and headed south down the Stick Trail. I veered off it to the east just at the top of the steep part of the trail (about 150 feet south of the Chamomile) to look for previously-overlooked dead standing trees. Sure enough, I found several right away. These were mostly red oaks, but they were the size I was looking for: small enough that bucked pieces could be plausibly burned without requiring any splitting. I wanted to continue with my recent pattern of bringing backpack loads directly into the living room, where I could weigh them as a way of (for the time being) "keeping score."
The FM transmitter for the laboratory's radio station (which broadcasts the audio from Woodchuck, my main computer) has had trouble broadcasting as far as it used to into the forest, and I've been finding I lose the signal even as close to the house as my favorite firewood harvesting grounds. So I've been tuning into the next radio station I find nearby, which is a listener-supported Christian station. There's something about the unquestioningly Christian mindset that I find fascinating, mostly because of how alien it is from my own, so I listen. Most of the material being broadcast is music, so I pay attention to the lyrics. The lyrics in Christian music must always be clear and unambiguous, because the point of its existence is largely non-musical.
There was a song about the long wait that precedes meeting up with Jesus, whereupon everything would be glorious and perfect. But, wait a minute, what's really being said is that life is unpleasant and meaningless and death is awesome. Stripped to its essentials, Christianity is a death cult.
There's something inherently icky and medieval about the relationship Christians want to have with both God and Jesus. They sing about praising them constantly and about how very powerful and glorious they are, and they also seem to think a busy all-powerful deity appreciates all this endless praising. Seen from the outside, it has all the earmarks of an abusive relationship (right down to the constant unpredictable stream of rewards and punishments). In one song I heard, an earnest gentleman sings about how everyone will "bow their knee." Who vets this stuff? Are the people who create and listen to this music so unfamiliar with the archaic rituals they reference that they don't know that people bow but knees bend? [Oh, it's from Philippians 2:10; evidently knees did bow back in King James' time. It makes it an especially bad Bible verse to quote for a contemporary audience.]
Wallking the load of firewood back to the house, I could feel that my blood sugar levels had crashed. I was feeling weak and dysphoric, but I was determined to make it home. Not only did I make it into the living room with the load, but I was able to weigh it before setting it down. It came to 110 pounds, and that was without one of the pieces (which had fallen off somewhere along the Stick Trail). Back at the house, I ate two peanutbutter sandwiches a quickly felt better. That would be my only dinner.
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