Blog o’ the Humours

2006-05-21T13:26:00.000-07:00

Breath

[The actual humour of the past month has been “Work,” trailed in a photo-finish by “Fatigue.” Hence, the long hiatus between postings, and the fact that I’m just now, on May 21, getting around to keying in and posting the blog entry below, originally scribbled in a notebook on April 25.]

Today, I blew on Calders. It’s my 40th birthday, and it occurred to me while ambling through the “Surreal Calder” exhibit at the SFMOMA that there’d be no better way to celebrate four now-complete decades of drawing breath than to put said breath to some good, honest work.

Not that my usual on-the-job use of breath isn’t honest…. The words I expel on the breath might be deceptive from time to time, in service either to the greater good or the greater convenience, but the breath itself?… Irreproachable.

Which, come to think of it, can’t necessarily be said of the breath I used to blow on the Calders. In fact, I more or less expected to be reproached by the museum guards for anything other than visual interaction with the objets. Which is why I turned my Calder-blowing activity into something of a game, with the guards as my unknowing opponents.

When you blow on a Calder mobile, it doesn’t behave terribly like a tree, despite the wall-cards’ assertion that we should all be intoning “Tree… Tree…” to ourselves while observing the works, as a sort of realistic counterbalance to Calder’s wiry extensions into the unconscious. The Calder reveals its component parts—e.g., black metal rods fastened to colored metal plates—one set at a time when touched by the breath, one unbalanced fulcrum joggling the next, and the next, etc., so that the effect, once your original breath has fully dispersed, is of various independent hands gradually becoming aware of your presence, then waving a friendly “howdy” your way. Your average tree limb, blown upon, is a much more jittery customer, seemingly annoyed at having to deal with a localized humanoid gust in lieu of a proper leaf-shaker from Mother Nature. The tree couldn’t care less about you, in short, but you can rest assured that the Calder is your pal, an ally in harmless mischief.

The same claim, of course, can’t be made of the SFMOMA guards, who, despite their benevolent smiles and nods, their unassuming stature (nary a six-footer among them), their comfily rubber-soled, equanimity-inducing footwear, and their softly bubbling, lulling small-talk among themselves in one or more of the many Philippine dialects, have proven themselves fearsome pen-pouncer-on-ers the moment they hear the tiny plik of a Uni-Ball pen-cap’s removal. (“No pens!” they assert, advancing on you with pencil nubbin extended toward your sternum—whether to offer to you for your sanctioned, graphite-fueled note-taking desires, or with which to run you through, you can never be entirely sure.)

So it was with a rare damn-the-consequences brio, which I can only chalk up to mid-life crisis, that I dared not only to blow on the Calders to my heart’s content (and eyes’ delight), but to do so in as close proximity to one or more SFMOMA guards as possible, even going so far as to engage them in conversation as a subterfuge…

MJC: Good afternoon.
Guard 1: Good afternoon, sir. [Turns to resume conversation with fellow guard.]
MJC: [Whips head toward Calder mobile: Puff…. Puff….]
Calder: Weeee!
MJC: Excuse me.
Guards 1&2: Yes, sir?
MJC: Do you happen to have a pencil I could borrow?
[Guards 1&2 draw sharpened pencil nubbins from the recesses of their blazers.]
MJC: [Aside] Aha, armed to the teeth, just as I suspected! [Accepting Guard 2’s pencil] Thank you very much! [Aside] Well, at least now it’ll be a fair fight… if it comes to that.
[Guards 1&2 resume private conversation]
MJC: [Blow…. Wheeze….]
Calder: Again! Again! Again!
MJC: Here’s your pencil back. Thanks.
Guard 2: [Seeming to notice that MJC has no paper in hand, and perhaps wondering whether MJC has just used the pencil to scratch some untoward place on his person] You’re welcome, sir.
MJC: This sculpture looks a bit like a tree, don't you think?
[Guards 1&2 smile benevolently—not at me, I realize in a moment, but at the two small children across the room who, no doubt following my own bad behavioral example, are attempting (so far ineffectually) to blow on and thereby stir a Calder mobile hanging far above their heads.]

Postscript: I backtracked through the exhibit and looked once again at a figurative wire sculpture of two acrobats, and thought, “It’s like a pen-and-ink drawing on air,” and, after duly chastising myself for taking pride in an aesthetic observation that probably dates back to five seconds after the piece’s initial public unveiling, I mentally congratulated Mr. Calder on both his creative whimsy and his transgressive spirit—the latter because, of course, pen and ink are absolutely, sternly, irrevocably forbidden within the SFMOMA galleries.

2006-04-18T23:42:00.001-07:00

Chitin

As I was biting into a particularly mammoth prawn tonight, shell and all, my thoughts turned, as they seldom do at the dinner table, to force protection. All this time in Iraq, I thought, and before that Afghanistan, and maybe by the time you’re reading this, Iran, and we’re still hearing and reading news stories on American troops who’re waiting to be issued proper body armor—or, if their friends and relations have smashed through the ceramic armor of enough piggy banks in their behalf, to be sent some from the homefront. (Though, as of this month, the Army has banned such care packages from home¹—because no body armor’s better than non-Defense-contracted body armor, apparently.) Trying once again to achieve clarity, as I savored the peculiar potato-chips-’n’-neoprene sensation that is the shell-on prawn-chewing experience, when confronted with the ever-opaque logic of a Dept of Defense that fails to budget for the basic super-cutaneous defense of its own employees, I realized that the answer to the problem was on my plate and in my mouth: chitin, body armorer to the crustacean world.

Eureka! Instead of waiting for Mom or Uncle Sam to provide armor, the troops of the 21st century could simply grow their own, just like any self-respecting prawn, crab, or crawdad. And since this scribble is being transcribed to the Internet, where every idea one could have has not only already been had, but posted, stolen, and virally re-posted elsewhere, I take comfort in the knowledge that, drawing on the wonders of genome mapping, stem cell research, advanced crustacean morphological study, and Executive Branch Scripture-fueled faith in the intimidation value of really nasty sea-beasties, top-secret plans must surely be underway for the development and deployment of that most organically force-protected of all imaginable forces: The Crustacean Army.

Beyond mere force protection, however, the emergence onto the field of battle of Homochitinus bellicosus will have a wide range of tactical and organizational ramifications, and so, for the heretofore uninitiated, this

SHORTLIST OF PRINCIPAL STRENGTHS, WEAKNESSES, OPPORTUNITIES, AND THREATS OF THE MODERN AUTO-CHITINOUS CRUSTACEAN ARMY:

• Universal, custom-fitted, self-regenerating body armor (obviously)
• Abbreviated natural lifespan on the negative side, balanced on the plus side by ability to multiply astronomically in short order
• Levels of bravery in the field that are the sole preserve of those possessing 3-5 nerve ganglia for a brain
• Combat nomenclature challenge: potential morale-lowering double meaning of “shelling”
• Replacement of costly USO troop-entertainment programs (singers, rappers, Playboy Playmates, stand-up comedians, etc.) with a few tubs of carrion scattered across a stage
• Replacement of complex food-and-drink supply lines with a few divisions of enemy carrion scattered across a battlefield
• Psy-Ops shock-and-awe value of thousands of serrated claws clicking in unison to seductive tango beat
• Basic-training challenge: As any experienced drill sergeant will attest, getting prawns to march in unison is a lot like herding cats, except much, much, slower
• No more “No Blood for Oil!” peacenik chants to confront, because hey, no blood!
• Ground forces in intellectual synch with drone aircraft
• And when we bring all the troops home, victorious… bouillabaisse for every American!

¹ “Army Bans Privately Bought Body Armor,” The New York Times, April 1, 2006

2006-04-06T01:19:00.000-07:00

Opium

“Great Role Reversals in Drug History” Dept.:
• 1839: In the first of the “Opium Wars,” British gunships attack several Chinese port cities in an effort to compel the importation of opium into China. (China concedes.)
• 2001: In the (first of the?…) U.S.–Afghanistan War(s), Britain beseeches the U.S. to bomb 20+ drug labs in an effort to curtail the export of Afghan opium into Britain. (The U.S. refuses.)

Now, Great Britain is a nation that knows a thing or two about opium. In addition to spending a total of eleven years and two wars fighting the Chinese over the resin from the pods of Papaver somniferum L. (i.e., the “sleep-inducing poppy”), along with some similar 19th-c. adventures in Burma, the Brits have a proud opio-literary history that includes classics like Coleridge’s 1797 poem “Kubla Khan” (supposedly composed in mid–laudanum trip) and DeQuincey’s 1822 book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (the Million Little Pieces of its day, except that Mr. DeQuincey published his book as a novel, in light of the made-up bits, whereas Mr. Frey, uh, forgot to, or was, like, stoned at the time, or something….). More recently on the British storytelling landscape, the BBC’s 1989 TV miniseries Traffik schooled households throughout the British Isles in the intricacies of the flood of Pakistani and Afghan opium and heroin into the U.K. (The subsequent Hollywood film, of course, changed the title’s “k” to a “c” and the drug-in-question from “H” to “C”—dovetailing more conveniently with U.S. narco-geography.) So, in sum, you’d think any nation with a lick of sense would lend an ear to British beseechings when it comes to opium.

That said, the U.S. knows how to spin a good druggy yarn too, of course. Remember the “War on Drugs”? That is to say, the loosely and conveniently elusively defined, never-winnable thus always-fundable straw-man/bogey-man war before the “War on Terror”? That was a good tale that had a good long run. As late as May 24, 2001, The New York Times was reporting our government’s delight with the Taliban for their ban against growing opium poppies as “a sin against the teachings of Islam,” with Colin Powell announcing a $43 million grant to benefit “those farmers who have felt the ban on poppy cultivation, a decision by the Taliban that we welcome.”¹ That it took the Taliban such a very long time to reach their particular religious epiphany vis-à-vis opium was beside the point, apparently, as was the fact that we were dropping this money in the laps of the Burqa Fashion Police. Mullah Omar had just said no, and that’s what counted—then.

But fast-forward to just after 9/11, when the millions we dropped in the Taliban’s laps came in the form of explosives. The Brits, still mindful of the Taliban’s ongoing role in opium processing and trafficking (and that cessation of growing poppies for a spell had driven up the street price of heroin nicely, it turns out), thought it might be a good idea, since we were (bombing) in the neighborhood anyway, to take out upwards of 25 Taliban-supported Afghan drug labs. As N.Y. Times reporter James Risen (he of the "Warrantless Wiretapping" scoop) described the scenario in his recent book State of War, quoting one of his sources inside the C.I.A., “‘On the day after 9/11, that target list was ready to go, and the military and NSC threw it out the window,’ said the CIA source. ‘We had tracked these targets for years. The drug targets were big places, almost like small towns that did nothing but produce heroin. The British were screaming for us to bomb those targets, because most of the heroin in Britain comes from Afghanistan. But they refused.’ If the United States had bombed those facilities, the CIA source added, ‘it would have slowed down drug production in Afghanistan for a year or more.’”²

But, of course, there was a new administration- and budget-defining “War” on the horizon, so Drugs took a backseat to Terror, just as bin Laden would soon take a back seat to Saddam.

Fast-forward to late 2003, when the war in Afghanistan was as forgotten as yesterday’s turd: Once again, the American military was made aware of wide-open drug trafficking in Afghanistan, and once again, the easy targets were ignored, because, as Risen quotes Bobby Charles, former head of the State Department’s Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, “‘Rumsfeld didn’t want drugs to become a core mission.’”³ (The Brits took things in their own hands this time, it turns out, when a U.K. special forces team called in a U.S. air strike on just one Afghan drug lab in January of 2004, driving the price of heroin up 15% in a single stroke—as if further proof were needed of the connection between Afghanistan and international drug trafficking.)

And furthermore, per Risen: “Charles asked the CIA to analyze where the drug money was going in Afghanistan. The answer was chilling. The agency told Charles that it was probable that some of the drug profits were being funneled into the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an al Qaeda–related group; the Hezb-i-Islami Group, controlled by an anti-American renegade, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar; the Taliban; and possibly al Qaeda itself.”⁴

And so our two recent national-fairytale nemeses come together in the end—Drugs coming to the rescue of Terror, with the “War” on neither doing much to stop either. And what somniferous yarn will the Spinner-in-Chief spin next?….

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.⁵

¹ “At Heroin’s Source, Taliban Do What ‘Just Say No’ Could Not” by Barry Bearak, The New York Times, May 24, 2001
² State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration by James Risen, p. 154
³ Risen, p. 158
⁴ Risen, p. 159
⁵ From “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

2006-03-09T00:18:00.000-08:00

Omega-3 Fatty Acids

They whisk. Down inside the toughest neighborhoods on your arterial map, where the killers congregate. Like Eliot Ness, mopping up the mob in old Chicago, or Travis Bickle, delivering on his promise of “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets” with a bloodletting chez “Sport” the pimp, they wipe away the undesirables with forthright purpose, and without remorse.

Of course, by name, they sound like they have much more nefarious ends in mind, these Omega-3 Fatty Acids—something from the plot of a never-filmed ’50s Sci-Fi movie: A pair of teen sweethearts—he letterman-sweatered and safety-coiffed, she bobby-soxed and pony-tailed—wander in the post-crepuscular end-of-season gloom toward the obscure end of the boardwalk, past the B.B. shooting galleries and cotton-candy stands that are winding up both the evening and the summer, most of their customers already en route to warmer, indoor entertainments, when the young couple—perhaps looking for a secluded spot to foster some inner warmth of their own, or maybe to close the shutters on their seasonal fling—notice an aluminum-sided snack shack that, somehow, they had not come across before throughout a whole long summer of strolling these boards. “Cheeseburgers,” the sign across the top of the shack reads, so dimly footlit that passing moths won’t deign to orbit it, “Deep Fried. Tasty.” Intrigued and more than a bit appetized, they order two of these novel delicacies—she a single, he a double-patty-with-double-cheese—from the squat, be-head-scarved, just perceptibly smiling woman (or man?) of obviously foreign extraction (Slavic? South American? Chinese? So hard to tell, since the same few Angeleno actors tend to play all the non-Anglo parts in these old B-movies) and are fascinated and, if the truth be told, aroused by the hot, crispy, golden, undulating-lumpen masses presented to them in wax-paper pockets. They nod to the now-overtly-smiling Xeno-American shack-keeper, turn, and exit the meek pool of light for the truly dark and certified romantic end of the boardwalk, savoring their first-ever bites of deep-fried tasty cheeseburger as they walk, touching elbows along the way as new lovers need to to remind themselves of their intimacy. But wait, what’s this? This sensation in their toes… tingly—no wait… painful! Excruciating! They want to cry out, but can’t. [Cue the theramins!] The deep-fried “cheeseburgers” seem to’ve glued their mouths shut. And their feet can no longer lift from the boardwalk. In fact, as they gape down at their feet, they see that the flesh there is liquefying, spilling over their shoe-tops, running off onto the boards, and disappearing from sight into the gaps and knot-holes. [Now the ondes Martenots!] Those self-same knot-holes are now growing larger to their eyes [and to ours, thanks to a shift to the POV camera], and, horrified, they/we realize that they are slowly but surely dissolving from the bottom up, sinking into and spreading across the boardwalk, hands now fused into the suddenly luminous deep-fried cheesy-meaty masses, elbows now flapping in mad frenzy like chicken wings on a newly headless body, reciprocally knocking and funny-boning (though, because this is the ’50s, there’s nothing “funny” implied here). Now the camera swings off to the side and sinks down, down, below the boardwalk, to reveal a vast aluminum-sided hopper into which the lovers’ bodies are dripping, merged now as never before, and as the camera continues to pan down and then abruptly draws back, we see that both the hopper and the under-luminated snack-shack are mere protuberant accessories of [Brass! Strings! Tutti, damn you Maestro, tutti!] a giant aluminum space ship—shaped like, oh, let’s say, a cigar thrust through a donut—emblazoned with the insignia “Ω-3.”

But it’s quite the opposite, really. These Omega-3s are the good guys of the fatty realm, delivered not by deep-fried cheeseburger of celestial or Slavic origin, but by the salmon sashimi and spicy tuna roll at Miyabi Sushi in SF, whisking away the ever-threatening LDLs and triglycerides from my genetically challenged arteries even as I chew, and freeing my mind for the entertainment of… healthier thoughts.

2006-02-26T23:59:00.000-08:00

Grey

I thought today’s humour was going to be Barbital, a lethal dose of which was used just after noon to put our dear little self-adoptive, semi-feral family member, Simon, a.k.a. Best Cat, “to sleep.” But Simon’s dying in my arms at the vet’s, following several days of surprisingly overwhelming grief after his terminal diagnosis earlier in the week, had a barbiturate effect of its own—I dropped onto the bed next to L. following a sad walk through a beautiful false-spring afternoon, and the next thing I knew, it was fifteen hours later. So “today” was now “tomorrow,” or vice versa, so a new humour was called for. But apart from the fact that I’ve already expected the ghost cat to appear at the back door, making his ghost “top of the morning” chirrup in passing en route to either the food cupboard or the bed (whichever struck his a.m. fancy more on a given day); and the fact that, in a year in which a lot has gone wrong or at least been very, very difficult for me and those around me, Simon’s care was one of the few things that had seemed to be going right; I really can’t find any more words to add to the literature of grief, or even the literature of pet grief (check it out—24,000 Google matches).

So I’m just going to proclaim “Grey” the Humour of the Day—not as metaphor of my mood, or even because the sky’s taken on that color in the 24 hours since Simon’s death (grey and rainy all day here in Berkeley), but simply because Simon himself was greyer-than-grey, from nose-tip to tail-tip. And in his honor, in lieu of more words, a photo-essay on grey, collected in tonight’s rain (of which he would certainly not have approved).

Simon
a.k.a. "Best Cat"

2006-02-24T00:33:00.000-08:00

Iron Pyrite

As far as the gods of cruel irony go (and you know they’re out there…), it’s probably akin to waving a red cape before their faces to begin this new project with “fool’s gold.” But for better or worse, iron pyrite is, in fact, the Humour du jour.

If you take a moment to scan the Wikipedia page linked to above, you, like I, might discover some surprising facts about pyrite—namely that, despite the name, there can actually be real gold in fool’s gold. So who’s the greater fool, in the end—the credulous naïf, or the cranky scoffer?

Curious factoid number two is that, like so much associated with the romanticized Gold Rush, iron pyrite can be destructive in the environment. Per Wikipedia: “Pyrite exposed to the environment during mining and excavation can react with oxygen and water to form acid mine drainage in the form of sulfuric acid.” Thus suggesting, along with the better-known environmental effects of the mercury used in gold mining, that a better ultimate name for the whole endeavor might be “Fool’s Gold Rush.”

So who am I to take potshots at the founding industry of the Great State of California? Well, simply put, I’m a descendant of folks who did all that rushing 150 years or so ago.

Which brings me to the real reason that iron pyrite is the Humour du jour—my own encounter with the stuff. I’m turning forty in a couple months, and my lower back and neck are celebrating in advance with increasing levels of middle-aged stiffness. So I’ve been reflecting on my father’s turning forty, which I recall well—my mother had black-frosting roses put on his birthday cake—and on how his own range of motion decided to downsize itself right about then.

But in the midst of these musings on immobility, I recalled a vision of my father from a few years later—probably age forty-three—moving more gracefully than I’d ever seen before. We were spending a summer weekend’s vacation in a town (or titular vestige thereof) called Iowa Hill, a former mining town up in red-dirt Northern California gold country, accessible only by a treacherous switchbacking “road” up the side of a river gorge, with a plaque partway up marking the spot where a rattlesnake once spooked the horses pulling a Wells Fargo stagecoach, causing horses, coach driver, passengers, and parcels to go plummeting to their ends down below. (The fate of the snake went unremarked on the plaque, but I have a feeling the little devil got away with it, and perhaps rightly so.) Some family friends owned a cabin up there—one passed down in the family, if memory serves, since the time when some prankster or homesick and forgetful soul decided to name a hill after Iowa.

One day, we all went down to the nearby creek (which we pronounced “krik,” per local custom, just as we referred to the local quartz quarry as “the diggins”), and the folks who owned the cabin pulled some old rusted gold-pans out of the back of their station wagon. We all took turns playing around with them in the shallows of the creek, the kids using them mainly as mud-shovels or water-heavers. But when it got to be my dad’s turn (i.e., when al the kids were thoroughly drenched and mud-covered), he surprised me absolutely by launching into this rhythmic swirling motion with the pan, with perfect crescents of water lopping over the edges of the pan and back into the creek, and with the scoop of creek soil in the pan’s bottom centrifuging itself evenly into concentric circles of relative mass, the lighter chunks shifting to the sides, and the heavier parts—those more worthy of focused attention—remaining sensibly toward the center of things.

And of course, there among the standard bits of grit and gravel and the tiny olive or brick-colored flecks of what our hosts told us were “Indian paint rocks” (mixed with bear grease to make warpaint back in the day, or so we were told), were a few glinting metallic chips that had me shouting “Gold! Gold!” like so many generations of California fools before me.

Incidentally, to a kid, fool’s gold does have one distinct advantage over the real stuff, which is that you can pulverize it between your fingernails, which for me in particular, as a kid given to more than the usual level of omnipotence-related fantasizing and scenario-spinning, was not without its appeal.

But then as now, what impressed me most about our gold-panning diversion, held amid the more standard getaway activities of barbecuing and swimming; of holding bits of rummaged-up asbestos in a butane lighter–flame and watching them, sure enough, not burn (and then chewing on them—lordy!); and, for the adults, of prowling drunkenly around an old Chinese cemetery and non-lethally self-impaling on a pike-topped perimeter fence (but that’s another story…); was my father’s atavistic display of gold-panning talent. On the one level, there was the pure ingrained rhythm of it—and you have to understand here that my own personal bloodline was largely responsible for putting the “white people” in “white people can’t dance.” But on another level, I realize now that I was witnessing both family and Californian/American history coming to life. My dad learned the panning skill from his father, who lived and worked in a company-owned gold-dredging town (long since dredged into its own destruction—the one time I was in the vicinity, nearly twenty years ago now, you could still see the hulks of the abandoned dredgers in the distance, far from any active roads). I can only imagine the gold-panning boogie was in turn handed down to my grandfather from forebears up the line, for whom the pan must have been the meal-ticket equivalent of the personal computer to this present-day language-dredger. My dad still has a gold-pan of his own in his and my mom’s garage, I believe.

But alas, though I remember the visual experience, my hands and hips have never been taught the moves. If I ever find myself up in Gold Country with a nipper of my own, however—a decent prospect—I’ll at least be able to relate the tale of how Grandpa boogied by the krik-side one fair day in the ’70s (which will seem as distant as the 1870s of Iowa Hill’s heyday to a 21st-century whelp). And maybe, if there’s a frisbee handy, I’ll at least be able to approximate the moves and come up with a chunk of pyrite—and add another momentary fool to the family tree. And then, in my own atavistic display, I’ll douse the nipper with water scooped into the frisbee—some family traditions just cry out for carrying on.

* * * * *
A parting puzzle:

One of the following images is not fool’s gold. Can you tell which?

2006-02-21T00:07:00.000-08:00

The BotH Manifesto

In these information-challenged times, an era in which it can be so arduous to discover, say, what our friends, our loved ones, or even perfect strangers have eaten on a given day; or which movies, books, or CDs they judge to rule, and which, alas, to suck; or whom they think is cute, or not so very; or what adorable thing the cat did; or exactly which part of one’s body them sumbitches in office may consider themselves free to kiss, and often…. In this day and age, simply put, a weblog is too rare and important a thing to leave either to chance or to newfangled whims.

Thus, the Blog o’ the Humours. Grounded in one of the most illustrious and thoroughly discredited medical theories of antiquity—Hippocrates’ system of the Four Humours—this blog will pinpoint the substance (or “humour”) that has had the most profound influence upon the blog’s author on a given day and offer commentary (read: wild guesses and pitiful excuses) as to why the author believes this to be so.

But lest you think this blog will present no more varied fare than a daily trudge through —as Hippocrates had it—blood, phlegm, and the two biles, yellow and black, please know that Blog o’ the Humours (“BotH,” to its friends), like its author, is an entirely contemporary and semi-permeable membrane, open to invading substances that border on the innumerable (dioxins and furans and pthalates, oh my!)—a condition that will be faithfully reflected in the Humour du Jour. So if the mood herein begins to seem sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic at times (to switch to Galen’s sense of Humours), please rest assured that the polychlorinic, the benzinic, and the heavy metallic are not far behind.

Thanks for stopping by. On with the analysis!

* * * * *

Note: Two inspirations should be acknowledged here at the get-go. One is the somewhat new and more than a little chilling (for its discoveries, not its practice) field of biomonitoring, a.k.a. assessing the Body Burden imposed on you and me by our, ahem, chemically rich modern environments (bear with that linked page, folks, it can be slow to load). To summarize the study that partially inspired this blog, which I became aware of while doing some consulting for Whole Earth Magazine: in 2000, the Environmental Working Group in Washington, D.C., in collaboration with Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, set out to measure the toxic-chemical contamination of nine test subjects—among them the DC-based journalist Bill Moyers and Marin County–based Michael Lerner, the president and founder of Commonweal, a health and environmental research institute. (Why just nine? These tests are very expensive, so they went high-profile on the test subjects to raise awareness.) While it will not, perhaps, strike many readers as odd that the entire test group was chock full o’ toxins, what was surprising to me, at least, was that Lerner, basically your typical tree-huggin’, granola-munchin’, clean-livin’ Marinara, had more toxins in his system than Moyers, the jet-hoppin’, late-night-airport-food-court dinin’, second-hand-smoke-in-public-places-inhalin’ Beltway-dweller. Can you win? No, you can’t win. But do check out the EWG site, if you can get it to load. You can also read more about Body Burden studies here. (I’m not as familiar with this organization, the “Coming Clean Network,” but I see one of the principals is Sharyle Patton, another Body Burden test subject and an expert on chemical transmission in breastmilk—as well as another Commonweal higher-up and Lerner’s wife to boot.)

The second inspiration wasn’t a conscious one at first, but it popped into my head recently, and now it seems pretty obvious: Primo Levi’s great book The Periodic Table, which you can buy from an independent bookseller here. So all props to Primo, and may no readers be so unkind as to compare my poor little blog to his work.