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I recently picked up the book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari. Despite its being recommended by Bill Gates, very much a negative for me, I decided to give it a fair trial, mostly because of hype I had encountered. I have been working on my studies of human cognition since 1954 when I discovered behavioral psychology and Dr. D. F  Skinner in the pages of Psychology Today.

I became curious about how humans came to invent language. The first life appeared on Earth about 4,300,000,000 years ago. Those earliest tiny creatures evolved to survive, becoming increasingly complex because that is a good strategy for survival. Even single celled organisms communicated at least well enough to function as groups, each species benefiting others. The drive to communicate is almost as strong as those for individual and species survival. Yet we didn’t invent language until at least 300,000 years ago, most likely in the period of 70,000 to 30,000 years ago.

Some time around 2012, I decided that we had invented language twice, once for communication and a second time for symbolic reasoning. It had to happen twice because it happened in two very different parts of the brain. If you look at the brain, you find a very ancient core dedicated to survival and a thin layer, the cortex, where experimentation and innovation take place. It was the ancient core that wanted to communicate and that first invented language as a way to convey information to others using words, sounds with associated meanings. That may be what we did 300,000 years ago.

Then we increased our ability to abstract information, usually explained by visualizing two actors on a stage that is divided by a curtain. If our primary actor can see the other, he knows the other is there. But if the other steps to a place where he cannot be seen, the primary behaves as if the other had never existed. If the other once more steps out to where he can be seen, the primary may recognize him because the primary has improved at abstracting information. Another improvement in abstracting would be for the primary to recognize that the other was simply behind the curtain, out of sight. Now suppose that the other, while out of sight behind the curtain, puts on a hat and coat. At a low level of abstraction, the primary might simply recognize that the other is the same person dressed differently. At a much higher level of abstraction, the primary might realize that the other is planning to go out, having dressed in appropriate attire. At an even higher level, while the other is out of sight the primary might realize that the other is changing clothes in order to go out … even though the other is invisible to him. It is when the primary can consider the motivations for unseen actions of an invisible being that the second invention of language takes place. That is when we invent language for symbolic reasoning, when we invent religion, when we can tell stories, and when we begin to rule the world around us. This is what happened 70,000 to 30,000 years ago, most likely 35,000 years back.

But how did this make us masters of the world?

About four decades ago I read a series of books by Carl Sagan. One of them, “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors”, discussed how forming bands of from a few individuals to a few hundred protected us from extinction. Bands of any kind of animals formed patterns of behavior that isolated them from others of the same species and this allowed bands to be sacrificed to disease while protecting the species from extinction. Lacking language, the bands that formed were limited in size to a number of individuals who could know and recognize each other, typically around 200.

There once were two kinds of humans living near one another, Sapiens and Neanderthal, S and N. When S began to thrive, N vanished. Sapiens asked whether S wiped out N or absorbed them. It has long been my belief that if you ask the wrong question, any answer you get is meaningless. I started looking for the right question. The populations of S and N were similar and stable for thousands of years. Let’s assume an area has 200 individuals of each group to begin with. For each individual of one group there should be one of the other group. Let’s see what happens when the S group gets an advantage and expands. When it expands to 2,000 individuals, you will find ten S for each N. When it reaches 20,000 individuals, you will find 100 S for each N. When it explodes to 200,000 individuals, you may not be able to find any more N even though the same number inhabits the area. They, too, may find it difficult to find individuals of their same species, making mating difficult. But even if they manage to continue as before, they will seem to have vanished from the record.

Even a small band has an advantage over individuals. A band typically has an Alpha male, a handful of Beta males waiting for their chance to overthrow and replace the Alpha, an assortment of subservient males, a core of mothers and babies, and mixed juveniles. Specialization is minimal. Most innovation starts with the juveniles and gets adopted and spread by the nurturing females. The males all try to ignore innovation, making themselves unteachable. Businesses and governments all try to adopt the same pattern of behavior.

Before the second invention of language with its ability to invent and believe stories, large groups were impossible. Groups might have 200 members who knew each other. But what if you could form groups — call them tribes — based on believing the same stories. How much more powerful would a nation — Chinese, Indian, African, Russian, British — be than an isolated band of 200? How many Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Wiccans or Pagans can combine to form a tribe? All of the Sapiens believing their origin story could unite into a single tribe and rule the world. Lots of Republicans and Democrats can make it look as if there were no Libertarians or Greens.

The stories don’t have to be reasonable to be believed. Some pretty unbelievable stories get adopted to unite tribes. As belief defines tribal membership, members of a tribe tend to accept any of the tribe’s beliefs as true without any troublesome thinking involved. Thus we get Neo-Nazis, Flat Earthers, unions, fraternities and sororities, those who favor Trump and those bitterly opposed to Trump, and tales of Santa Clause, the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, extraterrestrials wandering about in flying saucers, and Cthulhu. And we belong to multiple tribes. Just imagine a French Republican Rastafarian who believes in immortality. He may have a tribe.

I believe it likely that the formation of tribes based on shared beliefs led to the explosion of Sapiens that we have seen. Tribal groups exceeding the limit of 200 would gain power by uniting in ways never before possible. That ceiling, once broken, will never again be adequate to restrict groups to only those known personally by each member. Breaking the ceiling has allowed Sapiens to expand to nearly eight billion. It has allowed specialization that has allowed Sapiens to walk on the surface of the moon and may soon allow us to visit Mars and, eventually, elsewhere. It has allowed us to fill libraries with wondrous works of fiction, of philosophy, of history, of hope and joy — or the opposite.

All because we invented language that broke limits and gave us power in unification.

 

From Whence

Half a billion years ago, the stage was set. Tiny creatures developed the body plan that created humans when they formed a bony shell around a cord of nerves. At one end was a brain. The brain had four main parts: brainstem, midbrain (cerebellum) and two forebrains. The fish, the dragon, the two monkeys. There are other structures, too, but I don’t have cute names for them. Much of our behavior was invented at that time, too. And evolution taught us the value of communication: it helps keep us alive, allowing us to win battles without engaging in physical combat. Our gut, sex organs, hands and feet were there, too, sometimes in different locations.

We were once these tiny fish creatures. The act of conception creates a single cell, the fertilized egg, that divides into a blob that reproduces that ancient fish of half a billion years ago. Half a billion years of evolution play out each time one of us is created, play out in about nine years, most of the first year in the womb. The first three quarters of a year make us viable but our ability to escape is limited by the size of our heads. Too big a head means either mother or baby will die in the birthing process. That forces us to develop without the nurturing shelter of the womb.

If you look at a newborn, its head seems small but it has to go through a small opening. It is a difficult process and painful to the mother. The brain may be pliable, being soft and squishy, but the protective shell around it doesn’t flex well. Compare the newborn’s head to that of an adult. The adult head is larger and harder, the shell completely enclosing the brain with no soft spots.

In his first eighteen months, the infant develops the base for language: recognizing sounds and producing sounds. By three years, most of what the toddler says should be understandable. By five, he should appreciate stories and can possibly be reasoned with. By six he should be able to communicate socially and intelligibly. Over the next couple of years these skills will be refined enough that he can begin to read and write.

That summary makes it sound like a single, continuous process. It is a number of small processes that may not come in order. Learning a new skill may temporarily cause old skills to be forgotten. Different regions of the brain develop new skills independent of other regions. The skills may languish while becoming coordinated into a single skill complex.

I had forgotten that stage of coordination. When I remembered it, I realized humans invented language twice. That was my big breakthrough: that the skill of communication and the skill of abstracting information were not a single process. We have been working at becoming more and more sophisticated at communication for half a billion years, ever since we were little fishes. We invented language for communication between 100,000 and 300,000 years ago. We integrated language with abstracting information to invent language for symbolic reasoning between 30,000 and 70,000 years ago, when we invented religion. This is based on artifacts our ancestors left behind when they departed their lives. I like to say that religion is a side effect of our invention of language for symbolic reasoning.

There are many things wrong with this picture. Even 70,000 years is far too short a period for this process to become so firmly embedded in our development. We could not evolve that rapidly. And everybody seems to be able to think, to reason with language. There should be more failures or there should have been greater environmental trauma to drive so rapid an integration.

Our minds and bodies are tricky. Being tricky is a survival skill that has been evolving for that half billion year period I keep mentioning. If you lack the appropriate skill, you fake it. You mimic those who have the skill. It is behavioral protective coloration. There are failures, many of them. Those who failed mimicked those who didn’t well enough that neither they nor we can tell the difference.

And socialization or education are not limited to the slow pace followed by evolution, nor do they pay the price. The price of evolution is death: many are born who do not survive. The price of poor or improper education is that you seem like a doofus. That penalty is far less harsh than death. Of course, education is fragile, having to be taught to each new generation.

Education is made slightly less fragile by our ability to record our thoughts and ideas. We have improved that process from scratches on stones, marks on lumps of clay, stains on papyrus or other kinds of paper, to electronic patterns inside of machines.

And now some fear we are about to create new life forms, better than humans, who might, in their innocence, bring about our extinction.

Is it possible for our machines to bring about our extinction? Certainly. On the other hand, we did not finish mapping the human genome until about 2005. We don’t understand our genome, nor those of bacteria, insects, spiders, fish, amphibians, reptiles, or mammals, not in any complete, functional sense. Yet companies are modifying the genome of plants to increase their profits despite profound ignorance of what those modifications could be doing to us when we consume or co-exist with those genetically modified organisms. That is far likelier to bring about our extinction than were the atomic threat, disease, gigantic meteors striking out home world or the sun going nova, which it is likely to do some time within the next billion years or so. I’m not going to worry about any of that.

Language has helped us become something different than we were. We have not yet fully evolved to use language but we have learned that we have been taking short cuts. Epigenesis is one of those short cuts. Genetic modification is another, riskier short cut, particularly at our present skill level. There are others.

A few centuries ago, people were unaware that the continents of North and South America existed. Once discovered, both were quickly colonized. We have built livable devices that can carry us into space and to the surface of the moon. We can visit Mars, too. We can and should establish colonies in space, on the moon, and on Mars. That will make our survival possible if we manage to destroy this planet where we evolved.

 

The Source of All Things

I spent much of my childhood alone. It was my choice. My mother was generally busy with my sister or cleaning house or cooking or gardening. We had a large enough property, nearly two acres. About an acre and a half was covered with avocado trees. There were citrus trees, the chicken pen and housing, the house and the garage. There were neighbors who I avoided because I thought they were stupid or mean. So I played alone under the trees, quite happy.

Then I started going to school. While waiting for the bus, we would pass the time throwing cobblestones at rattlesnakes, real or imaginary, in the gully. Then there were hours of tedious confinement, listening to the teacher or attempting the meaningless busywork projects. I learned the art of daydreaming. As long as I wasn’t raising hell, the teacher let me be. Then, after the bus ride home, I could retreat to the trees.

We moved. The dry, seemingly lifeless landscape was replaced by a moist, cloudy landscape full of slender trees and wild things. I tried to be as wild. There were blackberry patches as big as a house. Others would pick the berries they could reach at the outer limits of the patches. I would burrow into the patches and gorge on the really good juicy fruit at the center, emerging stained black and red. Black from the berry juice, red from my own blood. And sometimes we went fishing. There were junk fish at the docks, salmon in the Sound, trout in the rivers and streams.

We returned to the land of dry. I endured middle school downtown. I had been bullied before, but the new flock of bullies here was more intense, more determined. I put up with them, doing my best to ignore them. My best worked well enough. We built a house.

Middle school was different. There were five classes, five teachers. Or maybe there were six of each. The students in each class were different. There were too many to remember, so I forgot them all. I discovered a talent for science. I wanted to play the trumpet so my parents got me a violin. I learned a bit about music but was never enthusiastic enough to practice a lot.

I started high school during the summer session. I learned touch typing and played the bagpipes. I was chubby, so they put me on a diet. Always prone to taking a different path, rather than gaining or losing weight I grew seven inches taller. It was a suburban school, so the bullying was less intense. I became The Great Stone Face. I hung out with people who made thermite bombs and brass cannons. I walked a lot. My talent and interest in science bought me several trips, twice to Cal Tech. I listened to Linus Pauling lecturing from the third row.

I graduated into a work-study program for talented engineers, mixing study with practice. I did analyses of Sputnik telemetry and I helped unload instruments from the tiny sheds used in atomic testing, my contribution to science being the discovery that adhesives retain radioactivity better than ordinary substances. I progressed from psychology through sociology to anthropology while earning my degree in Mathematics. Summers I worked and played with engineers in advanced projects, the rest of the year hanging out with a group of loners, some of them decent musicians. I tried a variety of instruments: guitar, mandolin, flute, squeezebox, settling on whistles like recorders (the bagpipe chanter uses a double reed; whistles were easier to maintain).

Computers were relatively new. Some people feared or resented them, others just mostly ignored them. The year I graduated college only one school in the country started offering degree programs in computers. COBOL was just being born. FORTRAN had shown the power of computer languages and new ones were being invented. Microsoft didn’t yet exist. Naturally I went into computers. In my spare time, I examined the world through the often confused eyes of an anthropologist and physical scientist.

Language.

I had seen the invention of computer languages from machine code to assembly to increasingly sophisticated constructs of increasing levels of abstraction. I had watched a pair of lists become a sophisticated tool for building computer languages, LISP. I had seen how a language called C became a family of languages by adding the idea of objects. I had studied how anthropologists learned new languages, first learning the sounds, then the paragraphs and word components, stitching them together into dictionaries then working hard to not just translate but to communicate with a living language. I learned how the traditional linguists differed from the anthropologists attacking a new primitive language.

And I wondered where language came from.

 

Energy and Belief

I have devoted a lot of time to thinking about language and how humans came to develop it. I had another blog on the topic before this one. The older blog died because of my health problems. This one languished because I became to shy to write something that would be shared on social media — and, to me, social media means Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. So today I cut the links that automatically shared what I write … elsewhere. Most bloggers want their material read, while I find it stresses me out.

It has been about nine months since I have written here. I’ve had some new breakthroughs in the past few months, so it is time to summarize. A few years ago I realized that we humans invented language twice, once for communication and once for symbolic reasoning. Communication has been part of our evolving skill set since the time of the first little fishes, as coordination among members of a species helps that species survive. Communication makes use of a variety of media, including gestures, postures, chemical clues. noises, and synchronous behavior, such as all of one species producing eggs and sperm at the same time each year, often at the full moon. Attempts to communicate are ancient, hundreds of millions of years old, and verbal communication is just one more technique added to an ancient repertoire.

Symbolic reasoning is much more recent. Thinking uses a lot of energy, which is reflected in our large heads expanding each time we developed new food technology, such as when we started scavenging meat or when we began systematically using fire to cook foods to make them easier to digest. Bigger brains and heads had a price: a more difficult birth process, particularly the need to be born at an earlier stage of development, which led to prolonged childhoods.

Symbolic reasoning repurposed communications tools, specifically language, to aid in thinking. It required an increased ability to abstract information but it decreased the amount of energy required while expanding the scope of our ideas. Language for communication may date back a few hundreds of thousands of years but symbolic reasoning is much more recent, a few tens of thousands of years, a very short period for evolutionary effects to appear.

We did evolve, though, because having two purposes for language created a conflict. We could devise stories. We had the option to blindly accept our stories as true, belief, or to examine them in detail, doubt. Belief used small amounts of energy in ancient parts of the brain; doubt uses massive amounts of energy all through the brain, particularly in new regions that are more flexible, more prone to change and evolve.

Doubt is learned. Like exercise, it becomes easier the more you do it. But it takes a certain amount of stress to provoke us into the kind of reasoning necessary for doubt. Not everybody is capable of the kind of reasoning necessary to doubt. Some simply fake it, mimicking the doubters. Their mimicry has been successful because few deep thinkers have been required for race survival so far, despite our producing an ever more complex world to live in. Mimicry is an ancient skill, involved in racial survival since before the tiny fishes evolved. As such, it is powerful, energy efficient and difficult to see or consider. In particular, our leaders, who need Alpha and Beta charisma, rarely have the energy to spare for rational thought or behavior, getting by better by mimicking those skills.

I started investigating psychology, the behavior and illnesses of human brains, while in high school. I took a brief look at sociology, the dynamics of human groups that considers the individual less, my first year in college. Then I discovered anthropology, the science of everything human, with a particular focus on linguistics. I have been doing anthropological studies ever since, as a hobby, not professionally. I tend to think in terms of long periods of time and am a meliorist, a believer that things tend to improve over time. I have worked and played with computers since leaving high school. I have always written stories, most now lost, and have completed several novels, never published, that may also have been lost.

When I am healthy, it frustrates me to not write. When I have an idea, it takes hold of my brain, depriving me of restful sleep, giving me nightmares and other vivid dreams unless I capture it in writing. I am gradually becoming healthy again and being driven to write.

 

Surviving Leaving Africa

Humans have been leaving Africa for hundreds of thousands of years. Most of those who left failed to survive. They weren’t ready to adapt to a variety of different environments. The few colonies they founded died out.

North-Eastern Africa was a stable, forgiving environment for a long, long time. Human brains were able to evolve enough to begin using language for communication. Eighty thousand to fifty thousand years ago, the brain improved to the point that we could use language for symbolic reasoning. Those who left Africa began to succeed, to establish permanent colonies.

Actually, one of the older groups managed to survive their departure from Africa, a group we call the Neanderthals. They survived by adapting to the harshest possible environment, northern Europa and Asia during the Ice Ages. Their numbers declined when the climate became warmer and more hospitable. There were still colonies and scattered individuals when Cro-Magnon man arrived. The last known individual of their race may have been Enkidu, mentioned in the epic of Gilgamesh, just a few thousand years ago.

The ability to abstract knowledge allowed humans to use language for symbolic reasoning. Thinking is expensive. It uses lots of energy. Several times in our history, our brain capacity increased greatly. One of those times was when we invented fire. Symbolic reasoning requires less energy than thinking. It has its flaws, but once we started using it, we couldn’t reverse the process. Everything human was centered on language and symbolic reasoning. Symbolic reasoning made humans more versatile, able to tell stories that preserved knowledge. Stories became hardened, less prone to disappearing, able to continue to help us, when we learned how to record those stories in clay and on paper. Having stories available to guide us helped us survive new situations. When memory failed, we could turn to knowledge accumulated as stories.

We had the tool set necessary to survive the coming and going of ice ages, to spread out and found viable colonies over all the face of the Earth, in something we now take for granted, stories.

Tales of ancient victories have led us to newer and bigger victories.

Leaving the shelter of Africa was a big step to our conquest of the world. It didn’t happen overnight. The first attempts didn’t quite pan out. We sputtered before we caught fire and could blaze up. Other near-human races had died out within Africa. Abandoning a constant environment is hard and full of risks. Even moving to a nurturing environment is risky if that environment can change in a few centuries. We learn to survive in the conditions we were born into, survival becoming more difficult when conditions change.

Now humans live everywhere on the planet’s surface and we have made gestures towards being able to depart Earth and live elsewhere, including in deep space. We did it because we learned a shortcut to thinking in symbols.

Space is vast. Time is passing. There are signs that our sun is about to change how it radiates, now that half its expected ten billion year lifetime has passed. There are sure to be many changes as the sun’s life plays out.

We are close to the best time to make another exodus.

An exodus is a process, not an isolated event. We may have many failures as we set out.

But we really should become independent of our planet and our star, just as we became independent of Africa.

 

Blogging

Facebook, Google+, Twitter and email take up most of my time. I have guests in the house, including an attention-seeking toddler, and I am subject to frequent, usually unwanted, interruptions. It is hard enough to post something original to Twitter or Facebook, much less write something meaningful as a blog.

I started with blogging. It was what became available first. Before I found blogging, I would write an annual letter summarizing the events of the year on a single printed page and mail that page to some of my friends as the end of the year approached. Summarizing the year was fairly easy; reducing it to a single page took a lot more work. When I was introduced to blogging, through a scam, my creative energy went into producing a page full of ideas five or six times a week. I stopped producing my annual letter.

Social media, as they now call it, did much the same thing. I started with Facebook and nearly stopped blogging, even though I had been spreading my ideas through five or six different blogging sites (each with its own theme).

Blogging sites have come and gone. One that I had been using heavily moved and then vanished. Others, neglected, just were no longer there the next time I tried to post. I still have Xanga although everybody I communicated with there has vanished, they sold themselves to another company, and I have had little reason to even look there. LiveJournal seems to be surviving without me although few people seem to use it any more. Blogger is still there but is now part of the Google empire. I think Tripod is still there but I’m not sure; I still have a link to it. I remain aware of WordPress because they keep sending me mail about their improved services.

So here I am, posting a blog on WordPress.

When personal computers first arrived, I got a KIM-1, a single board computer roughly the size of a page of paper. I didn’t have to worry about operating systems because none existed. No keyboard, no mouse, no display. I spent hours writing programs in machine language, loading them an instruction at a time. I couldn’t do much.

I upgraded to a Timex/Sinclair computer, slightly smaller than the KIM-1, having a keyboard and displaying on channel 2 or 3 of a standard television. Its operating system was tokenized BASIC. I was able to whip out programs. I upgraded again, to a series of Atari machines. That was the age of floppy disks. The 5.25 inch floppies really were floppy; the 3.5 inch floppies that followed weren’t. IBM came out with their personal computer and I eventually got one, back when the IBM PC ran PC-DOS as its operating system.

Several flavors of DOS gave way to something called Windows, initially version 3.1. I disliked it. I got an early version of Linux, long before it reached version 1.0, and have used some kind of Linux, off and on, ever since. I wasn’t able to escape Windows until long after Apple produced their OS X, which I am now trying to escape. Until recently, to use Linux meant I had to build my own computer. Now I can run Linux on my Raspberry Pi 3, my C.H.I.P, my Pine64, even on a tiny thing that is supposed to be an OpenWRT router. I only need one of them, attached by wireless, to have a hard drive which the rest can share. Lots of my storage is on somebody else’s server in the Cloud. I have a one terabyte cloud of my own.

I am dissatisfied with the social media. Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, by themselves, each are inadequate. They don’t play well together. Each has its master, who sets the rules, and I like to make my own rules. I don’t want to devote any extra energy to learning three sets of rules that change every time some bozo decides to change them.

There are more operating systems now. Linux-based Android started on tablets and is expanding. I use lots of tablets and not a few smart phones that function as tinier tablets. Linux-based Chrome started as a browser and grew up. I am writing this under a Chrome application.

The big weakness of my collection of blogging sites is that they don’t work together. Each site has its own community. I would like to have a single master site that allows me to tie the other sites, with their communities, together into a nearly unified whole.

I am a writer. I’ve been saving stories written over the past twenty-five years. Apple erased them all. Any future writing will have to take place under Linux, either Android or Chrome — or both — to avoid such problems happening again.

Blogging is an adjunct to my writing. I have a novel I’ve been planning to write for years. If I am going to write a novel, I will have to start blogging again. That’s how I work.

Here I am.

 

Oh, Heavens

I am getting better. Less than a year has passed since my last entry.

My health is slowly changing. I still have ulcers on my legs but they don’t leak as badly as before, they are shrinking, and fewer new ulcers are appearing. Standing brings pain more quickly. Walking becomes painful in a much shorter time. However, the painful spasms to my legs, mostly concentrated near the ulcers, have diminished. I have stopped taking supplements but I don’t know why; it was not a rational decision.

My body tells me I have to leave. I’ll still count this as an entry. Perhaps I’ll do another one soon.

 

Dark Urine

Dark urine is usually a sign that you need to hydrate. It can also simply be a sign of stress. Stress may have other signs, such as pain or discomfort, weight gain, and high blood sugar levels.

Yesterday, in preparation for an upcoming visit to my diabetes doctor, I had laboratory work done while fasting. My blood sugar level was already high from stress; it didn’t change. My body temperature remained roughly the same. But that afternoon and today my pain levels increased, I have become less able to maintain my balance, I feel cold, and my weight went from 320.8 to 329.6. I have been keeping hydrated but my urine turned dark.

I obviously — obvious to me, anyway — no longer can tolerate the stress of fasting, not even for a few hours.

The stress is beginning to diminish. I have been peeing frequently, with the urine clear. Hopefully my weight will also go down again. It usually takes from a few days to over a week for such stress-related weight gain to disappear.

I am going to have to tell my doctor that I can no longer tolerate fasting laboratory work. At least, not until my stress response improves. I’ve told him I cannot give urine for laboratory tests, but he puts microalbumin on the test order each time anyway. I wonder if he will still order fasting laboratory tests.

I need to lose weight. I would like to lose 100 pounds eventually but just getting rid of twenty pounds will help. The lower weight will place less stress on my body, especially on my damaged right knee. That will allow me to get more exercise without suffering additional stress damage to drive the weight up again.

I can’t do much more exercise at the moment because even moderate exercise stresses me too much. Hell, even mild exercise leaves me hurting for two or three days. I can’t reduce my caloric intake much because even a moderate reduction causes stress that elevates my weight. I don’t want to undergo surgery to remove excess abdominal fat because stress keeps me from healing well. Witness the ulcers I have on both legs that refuse to heal. My right knee is damaged, the cartilage ruptured and the tendons on both sides strained. On the other hand, I am fortunate in having a family that helps me avoid stress instead of increasing my stress and frustration.

In a month, provided I last that long, I will be 75 years old. I would like to enjoy the time I have left. My father, who was born in March of 1894, died of heart problems in June of 1969 at the magical age of 75. His father died much younger but I don’t know how old he was, nor the cause of his death (although it has been suggested that violence was involved). I want to set the bar higher for my son and my grandson.

It doesn’t help that I was poisoned by consuming toxic levels of aluminum while living in Panama. Perhaps it was the aluminum poisoning that led me to develop diabetes when I left Panama. I rather doubt it. I suspect that gluten intake, which is toxic to me and has caused great damage to my intestines, led to both my sensitivity to aluminum and my diabetes. My diet definitively contributed to my current condition.

I had a typical “healthy” diet, low in fat without being particularly high in sugar, using whole grains, not consuming alcohol to excess, eating more good food than fast food. But what was considered healthy then is sorely lacking now. Gluten is a long chain of proteins that the human digestive system cannot break apart. When gluten sits trapped in the villi of the small intestine, bacteria work at taking it apart, damaging the villi in the process, and the breakdown of the intestine leads to other problems, mostly due to loss of the ability to absorb necessary nutrients but also due to toxic materials passing directly into the blood stream. The worst part of this is that my immune system has started attacking my body, especially my thyroid and my brain. That my brain has been damaged is obvious to me — some people will say it has always been damaged — particularly in my loss of balance from what they call gluten ataxia.

Nobody really knew about how the human body works. The human genome was incompletely recorded until the year 2005. The genomes of the bacteria that inhabit our bodies is still mostly unknown. We have roughly ten times as many bacteria living in our guts as we have cells in our bodies. Some of the bacteria benefit us, others harm us. They weigh somewhere around 3.5 to 5 pounds. Our intestines have an intelligence of their own, the enteric brain, estimated as being about as intelligent on its own as a cat. Yet we wipe out entire populations of bacteria by our misuse of antibiotics.

I used to make wine, a fermented beverage high in alcohol. Despite the alcohol, I suspect that my wines were good for my health. I have started using water kefir, another fermented beverage. The wine is fermented by yeasts, the water kefir by a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeasts, a scoby. I want to start practicing lactofermentation, the anaerobic fermentation of foods by members of the lactobacteria family. This is done using either a brine or raw honey. I want to start by fermenting a quantity of garlic in honey. I want the bacteria in my gut to be healthy and happy so they can keep me healthy and happy.

Although my urine now flows clear, not dark, my body still hurts, particularly my back from my neck to my butt. I am still suffering from my brief fast of yesterday. I will probably start to once more shed weight tomorrow. Or the following day. And the pain will diminish.

But the dark urine was a warning that my body will not endure the stress of fasting.

 

Flu

When I was a kid, I managed to get sick each year during Easter week. One year it was chicken pox, another year it was mumps, then measles, and so on. This year it seems to be some variety of flu.

Delia had been talking about a new virus that was going around for a month or so. Several people she knew came down with it. It seemed more potent than run-of-the-mill flu. People were getting sick enough to actually need to stay home, many times in bed, instead of carrying on with life and contributing to the spread of the disease.

I have become isolated. I rarely do any shopping except online. I no longer attend church services or activities. I have gone several years without taking any Oasis classes or classes of any kind. Delia, however, still shops, attends church and goes to classes. Before I conclude that she brought home our current affliction, I must admit I have been seeing a number of doctors:

• my podiatrist,
• my diabetes specialist,
• my eye doctor and, testing the waters,
• a naturopathic doctor that I may well decide to see regularly.

Doctors, hospitals, emergency rooms, pharmacies and other places that sick people go are good places to pick up infections.

Whatever the source, Delia and I became sick together this year. Delia got sicker than I did but she was in better condition initially. In fact, I would say that my illness was mild compared to the problems I’ve heard other people have had. Delia spent one afternoon vomiting while I never even had feelings of discomfort or nausea. I just felt sort of out of sorts until this morning. Today I woke with chills, varying in intensity, that I have been unable to shake. The coldness extends from my hips to my shoulders and my head feels like it is burning. The feeling of a fevered head has diminished greatly. Sometimes it was accompanied by a moderate headache.

My coming down with illness is not exclusive to Easter week. Many years I have felt depressed and anti-social from Halloween into the first week or two of the new year. One doctor claimed that was a sign of depression. Despite my demeanor, I am generally happy. I pause for a few moments each morning to remind myself of my blessings. I prefer a more rational explanation, that I’m simply feeling disgust at the constant bombardment of pitches for sales of inferior products. This year, despite being mostly house-bound, I have not felt my normal disgust with humanity and its foibles. That, I feel certain, is because I have developed an interest in figuring out how I am being lied to in the various commercial and political messages I am confronted with.

Anyway, I have become ill at Easter, as has been my tradition since early childhood.

Knee Problems

Last July or August I probably tore my right ACL (Anterior Cruciate Ligament). At that time I weighed about 335 pounds. I twisted my leg while accidentally hyperextending the knee. I heard a popping sound and immediately felt pain in and around the knee. My lower leg has swollen up since then both frequently and to a great extent. I reported the problem to my doctor, who did nothing and suggested nothing; she ignored the problem.

The knee is not healing. That is typical for ACL, as the tendon has no blood supply to provide nutrients. Bending my knee makes it worse. Walking is painful when I start. Then the pain diminishes until I have walked a couple of hundred yards, when it starts hurting again. I have taken to trying to take frequent short walks followed by long rest periods. That keeps the pain to a minimum and I have shown some signs of improvement. I can sometimes walk comfortably without a cane.

Bending the knee hurts. I have developed a strategy for bending with a minimum of stress: I sit on my bed with the leg fully supported and do the bending slowly or in stages. Some chairs are particularly painful to sit in for long periods, especially my dining room chair. I can sit at the table for meals but the knee begins to hurt after about twenty minutes to half an hour. Getting into or out of a car is particularly painful and seems to cause lasting damage. Trucks, being higher and requiring less bending, cause less damage. The increased swelling and pain from riding in a low car lasts up to about ten days, typically three days.

I went for an appointment with my eye doctor yesterday. That required entering or exiting the car a total of four times. Getting in the first time hurt the most. Getting out the first time was the most difficult. Before starting I was able to walk comfortably without a cane. After returning from the doctor’s office I needed the cane for stability and support. Delia noticed a lot of redness around the knee on the back of my leg (I should have asked her to take some photos).

I would love to avoid surgery. At my age, 74, recovery would be slow. I would probably be immobilized for several weeks. But I do need to consult a doctor who specializes in such injuries.

And we probably need to replace the Nissan Altima and the Chevrolet Malibu with a truck or SUV. I do not plan to drive, so we would only need one vehicle.