Month: September 2007

Hog Heaven

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Americans are getting really, really fat. Over in Italy, when an American walks by they say, There goes another big butt.  In Italian of course.  But screw them.  What do they know?  Damn Europeans.

But even some Americans say we have the fattest Army on Earth.

If the American people are getting fat (and personally I think that is the case) the reason is clear.  We have a really, really lot of food to eat, and we have people who sit around, called advertisers and merchants, who do all they can to figure out how to get more food down our throats.

Say what you will about people being responsible for their own eating habits.  Like nobody put a gun to your head and forced you to eat a Big Mac.  True, but human beings are animals like any others; if there’s a lot of food around they will eat as much as they can of it.

And Americans have an awful lot of food around.  In fact, the food industry produces about twice as many calories a day a person as a person can eat.  So if you eat 2000 calories a day, there are still 2000 calories a day out there for you if you want them.  In other words, there’s a dramatic surplus of calories and the food industry has had to figure out ways to get us to eat it so they can make money.

Whether or not people get all bloated and sickly and have a hard time moving around is of complete indifference to these people because they just want to make money.

This is America.  We are consumers.  If we didn’t consume our economy would just die like that.  So it is patriotic to consume and eat yourself into a state of high and listless hog-hood.

We have people who are paid a lot to sit in rooms to figure out how to sell sugar to children.  Personally, I believe such people should be punished.  Severely.  They should have a gun held to their heads and be forced to eat many, many sugary treats.

So some wise guy—and there is actually a history to this—came up with the super sizing gimmick.  For a few cents more, hey man, you can get yourself about 25% more calories.  They can do this and make money because given that twice as many calories are produced as can be eaten, calories are damn cheap.  So to get business, they threw in more calories for a few pennies more and still they could make money on the deal.

The CDC has a really interesting slide show that shows the growth of fat in this country since 1985.  It’s amazing to click through these slides and see the different states in the union get fatter and fatter and fatter.  So now a whole heap of states have 20% of their populations overweight or obese.  I use this slide show when I teach a writing class with the consumer society as its theme.  It’s really convincing.  We really are a nation of consumers in the most elementary sense.

So go to this site.  And click in the upper right corner on the power point presentation.

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End of mini-lecture.  I must be gearing up to go back into the classroom. 

Say Cheese!

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So I don’t know when it was, maybe six or seven years back.  Somewhere in there, I wake up at about 1 in the morning with like a totally urgent need to go, if you know what I mean; so I make for the facilities, seat myself, and when nothing is immediately forth coming I give an assist.  And man nothing happens, but it hurts. It’s like something is stuck just on the other side of the exit.  I mean I have been known to evacuate but nothing of this proportion.  So I give another assist and it hurts even more.  I swear it’s like that horrible creature in Alien has decided to take an alternative route.

So I go back to bed and lie on my side in a fetal position.  Like waiting, and eventually I break a little wind though hardly worth its salt, and eventually the pain subsides and I slip off into sleep, and that’s that.  The hell you say! And you would be right because—I don’t know when exactly—but sometime after the first time, the second time occurs.  I wake up; it’s about one in the morning and it feels like the Alien is trying to take that alternative route again.

So I mention it to Carol, and I say like, I don’t know what it is.  But man twice lately I’ve had, I don’t know, these “hard farts.”  They are like farts but they won’t come out.  And we discuss it a bit, and I have recently had a physical and my blood checked out OK, my PSA, I mean.  The thing they check the prostate with.  So it’s probably not that, though the hurt extends down into that region. And there was no blood in the stool.

 

beachwaves

 

 

Then the third time comes along and for some reason I decide to chew some of those Tums, I think they are called, though they are not Tums since we get the generic kind.  Anyway, I chew these and what do you know, but pretty quickly, like the pain goes away.  Now I have a treatment, at least, though not a cure, because I have no idea what there is to cure.

I go on like that waking up now and then, not every week, or not even every month, but every so often with this pain and plenty of generic Tums on hand.  When bingo! I start to exercise my inductive powers—I think they are called—as opposed to deductive, and I begin to put two and two together.  During the time I have suffered these hard farts, I have also frequently of an afternoon had really noxious gas.  Usually this gas occurs in my office when I am at work and it’s so overwhelming I have to keep my door closed and hope nobody knocks while I turn on my little fan and open the window.  

I have been wondering why I have this gas, and I figure out it must have to do with the damn lunch I eat.  I am trying to eat healthfully and a little more lightly.  And I have been eating granny smith apples and string cheese.  Not a bad combination really, but with horrific effects in my case.  Because I induce—if that is a word—that I must be lactose intolerant.  I have read about this, but I never thought it would happen to me!

So now I have an hypothesis.  No cheese, no hard farts.  So I stop eating cheese completely, which is pretty hard actually, and what do you know, but no more “hard farts.”  So, what do you know but I diagnosed my complaint through my own powers of induction.

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At one point yesterday, as the sun went down, the waves were a metallic green.  I don’t think I captured that in the pic. 

Rice Goop

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The grieving process is complicated.  Yesterday I started thinking about the things the departed Joan used to cook.  I would qualify her as a poor to middling cook.  I mean usually the stuff was not burned but she showed little imagination and didn’t take any real pleasure, that I could tell, in the preparation.  Though perhaps that was due to money restrictions as well as limitations imposed by WB’s particular and limited tastes—involving most especially things that had been fried.

beachbefore 

Among the things I remember Joan cooking:

Rice goop as we affectionately called it.  This was a non-fried meal, involving rice, a couple of cans of chicken of mushroom soup, hamburger, all mixed together, and put in the oven and made into a casserole.  This was OK with butter melted on top, and I would put butter on bread and make a rice goop sandwich.

Also I recollect the notorious catsup stew which involved one of the lesser cuts of beef, rather flat, though wide, as I recollect and well fibered with fat, which was placed in a pan and covered with a whole bottle of catsup and then bake in the oven causing the meat to break down into chewable form and producing also a little sort of catsup stew gravy to be poured over rice.  I liked this too, though there never seemed to be enough of it.

I would list these among Joan’s specialiaties; not every body cooked them or would want to for that matter.  The rest—though I am probably forgetting something—was rather common fare: pork chops (once a week maybe) with rice; fried chicken (once a week maybe) with rice; a meatloaf (so called) with some form of potatoes, I think; an occasional tuna fish casserole, with a can of tuna or two dumped in a casserole bowl along with some noodles and more chicken of mushroom soup; also ham, fried of course, sometimes with fried or more precisely clumped potatoes, usually burn on one side and sort of congealed together. 

beachfog 

And of course for WB those damn black eyed peas to be covered with some sort of tomato sauce that had a lot of pepper and maybe two cups of sugar mixed into it.  I know I am forgetting stuff.  Oh, chicken fried steak with rice, of course, occasionally.  And on Friday evenings for some reason, WB would stop and buy a barbequed chicken at the local grocery.  These were always scrawny birds and not enough of it, so I would butter a couple of pieces of break, stick some chicken meat in between and have a white bread, butter, and chicken sandwich.

I have a strange food related memory.  Once we had fried ham, fried potatoes, and cabbage and as we ate a fire truck came up the hill, maybe because somebody had lit a trashcan at the elementary school on fire.  And the next time we had that—a couple of weeks, maybe a month later—the same thing happened.  A fire truck came up the hill.  The third time we had that I thought, hey, a fire truck is going to come up the hill.  But it didn’t.

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We had a bit of a heat wave for a couple of weeks with temps down where Steve lives near a hundred and up here in the 90’s.  But it broke yesterday.  Above find "before heat wave snapped" and "heat wave snapping" pics. 

Chicken Livers Continued

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Since thinking of fried chicken livers yesterday, I must say I thought an inordinate amount about chicken livers yesterday.  But I don’t think I will yield to the craving any time soon.  I have put too much time, energy, and will power into changing my diet to renege on it any time soon.

Anyway, when I saw I had reached 202, I decided we were going to shift to salads.  I do the cooking, if you can call it that, and Carol was OK with the salad idea in any case.  So I got out these big bowls and threw a bunch of green material into them, along with onions, tomatoes and avocadoes.  And at Costco I found these cans of chicken and beef meat, and I would throw half a can of that into each bowl, not so much for the meat, because there wasn’t much of that but so that I would have to think I was going meatless.  A terrible thought.

And I began to loose some weight.  Come fall and the start of school and I got pneumonia.  You would think pneumonia would be a good way to lose weight.  But it wasn’t.  One of the few things I had the energy to do with pneumonia was eat, and of course with pneumonia I couldn’t exercise. 

That was the other thing I did to lose weight.  I exercised daily.  Of course, I have exercised daily for about 20 years.  But I had slacked off on the time put in.  One summer back in the 90’s probably, I exercised an hour and a half a day, every day for a whole summer.  I wasn’t trying to bulk up or anything.  But I did acquire a little upper body muscle mass.  The people who owned the club made me the exercise guy of the month, and there was a little picture of me in the monthly flier, as the exercise guy of the month, and I think they gave me a coupon for a free dinner, somewhere, that I didn’t use.

Also—since this losing weight stuff was serious business—I bought a scale.  The first one I had ever owned.  I went out looking for one of those scales I had seen in people’s bathrooms, a sort of metal contraption.  I couldn’t find anything like that, and ended up getting a new kind that runs on a battery.  Also it is supposed to check your body fat by sending some sort of electrical charge through you that can be fatal if you have a pace maker installed.

This scale is way too sensitive.  I prefer a more gross measurement.  If it’s not perfectly flat on the floor, it will add or subtract a pound or two, and I swear if you step on it in a way it doesn’t like it will add or subtract a pound or two, and then I found that it will give you a different weight at different times of day.  The old scales were better because they were not sensitive and a sort of gave you an approximation of your weight.  But this one drove me nuts.

I had the same problem with the new digital thermometer that I bought when I had the pneumonia.  With that thing my temperature was all over the place. Some days my temperature was lower than normal all day long, and that freaked me out as much as having it too high.  Some things I would just prefer not to know.

Meat for Desert

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Last summer—let’s see that would be the summer of 2006—anyway last summer in June still just after we returned from burying WB back in SC I clocked in at 202 pounds.  That was the most I have ever weighed.  I guess it was all that Southern cuisine and all the emotional stuff surrounding WB’s death so I was just sort of eating a lot in general.  202 is not so bad for a guy who is six foot.  There are six footers in the NFL who weigh more than that.  But of course, they are all muscle.

But my additional weight was not muscle.  It was fat and fat in my case does not distribute itself evenly but collects right around my middle.  What they call trunk weight, because it’s on your trunk I guess.  Trunk weight is not good weight.  Men tend to get it; women can weigh more because it tends to be evenly distributed. But truck weight is apparently bad for the heart, not to mention the lower back. 

I didn’t like the look of it and before going to SC I had to buy some fat pant jeans at Costco for teaching.  For the first time since I don’t know when I couldn’t get into my traditional size 32 jeans.  Also since I cannot control my smoking, I do whatever else I can to increase my changes of surviving a few years.  That’s one reason I exercise daily, in addition to the exercise jump starting my brain.  So when I looked down at the scale and saw 202 I decided to do something.

I did not—and I emphasize that—go on a diet.  Diets are a crock.  You lose weight and then you gain it back, and usually more.  Though some diets seem to work.  I know people who have done very well with Weight Watchers.  I decided to change my diet and to do it gradually.  So I started cutting back on meat.

But I can say without shame or embarrassment that I love meat.  I mean, it’s true love.  In fact, when I ate meat—say a pork chop—first I would eat my salad because I always eat a salad since I can’t stand vegetables, and then I would eat a load of carbohydrates (mounds of rice) and I would save my piece of meat for last as a kind of desert.  In fact if I could order a pork chop for desert, I would.

I had noticed this tendency to save the piece of meat for desert so as part of changing my diet; I decided to integrate the eating of the meat right along with the eating of the other stuff.  Man, this was tough, and I still have trouble doing it.  But having a piece of meat for desert is not a good idea calorie-wise.  In addition to integrating the eating of meat into the eating of other stuff, I decided to cut back on the eating thereof as much as possible.  Which led to strange meat cravings. 

I am at the grocery store, and I suddenly have an urge to buy a package of chicken livers.  Man, I have not had chicken livers since I don’t know when.  And they are easy to cook.  You just roll them in flour with some salt and pepper and then fling the whole mess into a frying pan with hot oil, and bingo in a couple of minutes you have a mess of chicken livers.

For desert.  Damn, mouth-watering good.

Last Ride on Earth

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Last week sometime I got these complicated instructions and sample sheets to assist me apparently in putting together the documentation for the final accounting for the Tingle Family Trust.  I should have known when I saw the word accounting that I was in trouble.  I mean I can add and subtract and I did OK in math in school; usually I would get points for having the right idea (when you had to write your answers out, as they used to say) but I wasn’t very good at the detail part like making sure that one plus one equaled two.

Doing this stuff has given me a slightly better idea about what accountants do and a new found respect for that.  Though I don’t know that I would have much respect for anybody who wanted to be an accountant.  Fiddling with numbers suggested how much a person might fiddle around.  I read somewhere about firms like Enron buying something or other that was projected to produce so and so much income in the coming years, and the accountants would figure what this income was supposed to be (even though they hadn’t gotten it yet) and claim it as part of assets on hand (though they really weren’t on hand at all) and those assets would be figured into the net worth of the company upon which other people based their gambling on the stock market.

Fiddling with these numbers was odd.  Going over Joan’s checking account and finding bills for such things as her last month in the home where she was living, or for having her cremated, or having the dates carved on her tombstone back in SC.  Or one for her last ride on earth—in an ambulance.  It seems to me that they should give you some sort of discount for your last ride on earth.  I think that would be a polite and human thing to do.  Like, hey, that was her last ride on earth; we should give a discount.  But no, we live in a capitalistic society.  If the capitalists knew this was your last ride on earth, they would probably say, hey, this is going to be your last ride on earth, and if you want to take it we are going to charge you double.  And you would probably pay it too, like they would have you over a barrel.

Or maybe you would say, screw it.  I am going to die right here.  I already took my last ride on earth.

Tingles and Tingels

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I have always been amazed when I say my last name how many people say, and how do you spell that?  Jesus.  We must have a nation full of terrible spellers.  How hard can Tingle be to spell?  Or maybe people, having never heard the name before, can’t believe what they are hearing and so ask how to spell it to make sure they are hearing what they think they are hearing.

 evanshouse

In any case, this problem with the spelling of the name, let me to assert a while back in these pages that Google Maps is falsely showing Tingle Road along the edge of Butts County as Teagle Road. Somebody didn’t know how to spell Tingle.  This screw up in spelling set me to wondering some time back if perhaps one of the families portrayed in James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” were Tingles and not Tingels as I had seen reported in one place.

Agee’s book is really hard to read but it’s a kind of report—sometimes in very poetic language–on three white sharecropper families in Hale County, Alabama, I believe, during the great depression.  And it stirred up some controversy at the time for its portrait of abject and desperate poverty.  But the book may be more famous—to the extent that it is famous at all—for the pictures of these families and their surroundings taken by Walker Evans, a photograper whose pictures have become since objects of study.  He is credited with having participated in or having created a particularly “objective” style of photography.  For example, the 50 or so pictures he took of the families just appear scattered rather randomly throughout the text with no captions at all and with no necessary relation between the picture and what is being written about in the text.

They are just there.

Knowing whether one of the families portrayed in the book is a Tingle family is made all the more difficult by the fact that Agee did not use their real names in his book.  But just today, I found on line in an article in Forture about the author’s visit back to Hale County to see if members of the families portrayed by Agee were at the time of the article still living:

At a service station in the town of Akron in northwest Hale County I [the author of the article}  stop to ask where I might find some living members of the Tingle family. I’ve just come from the cemetery at Mount Hebron Baptist Church. There I saw a mound of freshly turned red clay baking in the sun; bright blue-and-yellow plastic flowers spilled from a tipped-over white plastic vase; a flat headstone, Guthrie Tingle, born June 4, 1946, died on his birthday in 2005; and next to Guthrie, Elizabeth Tingle, who was Guthrie’s mother and also, sadly, his sister (she died in 1997). Next to Elizabeth, Frank G. Tingle, the notorious father of both, whom Agee and Evans met that long-ago summer day in front of the county courthouse; born in 1872 and died … when? The date of death on the headstone is blank.

So I was right.  The Tingels are in fact Tingles. In the book, the Tingles are called the Ricketts. I wonder why Frank G. Tingle was considered notorious?

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That’s one of the pictures that appear in Let Us Now….  I don’t know which family lived in that house.