My insides were able to repair themselves and resume functioning--this time--though they're not quite back to normal yet.
The damage was done by spinach. Vegetables are the staff of life, when they're not full of glyphosate. I saw things online about how the natural phytochemicals in vegetables may help the body recover from glyphosate poisoning. Grandma Bonnie Peters affirmed that she was sticking to her beloved vegetables, and she was still walking about. I was sticking to my resolution to eat only plants that grew on my own property, and some of those were tainted by glyphosate vapor drift too. I was tainted by glyphosate vapor drift whether I ate anything or not. And then I was walking down the road, and I came to a whole sack of canned vegetables that had been dumped out along with a card notifying the dumpers when they could get another load of food from the local food bank. As this web site observed a few years ago, rural communities are lavishly supplied with fresh vegetables in August. People whose neighbors are likely to leave sacks of fresh new potatoes on their steps at night don't even want to bother carrying in canned potatoes. So I left the cans of potatoes where they were, but I took home a can of spinach--a name brand I used to like--and ate it. I like spinach. And did that can of spinach ever "bite back." In fifty years of celiac life I've never been so sick before.
Lesson learned: We need to be vigilant about the fact that what we've always thought of as healthier eating has flipflopped, in the last few years, into being dangerous eating. This summer I've talked to someone who had no reason to distort the facts, who said that when his children worried about his not eating enough fruit and vegetables, and brought him some tempting juicy apples, he ate two apples and was "sick as a dog." I've watched someone drink a nice healthy V8 and have to run out and get rid of it within minutes. And one little can of spinach has all but literally tied me in knots for most of this month. Do not eat fruit or vegetables you did not personally raise in a place separated by at least a half-mile of trees from poison-sprayed areas, such as public roads, Gentle Readers.
Anyway I kept working, on the principle that if you are going to die next week you might as well get as much as possible done this week. This is a useful thought for celiacs because most of us are going to survive a few life-threatening crises, and it pays to keep working through them. I wrote most of a book for one e-friend, and proofread the manuscript of another one for another e-friend, and agreed to write a nice review of a book by a friend of an e-friend whose judgment I trusted...
Ulp. I don't trust that e-friend's judgment so much any more.
It is a superbly well written book. It took me right into the consciousness of a character who, at the time when I was born, would have been certified insane. During the years when I was growing up, part of the definition of a Real Liberal was someone who defended the right of characters like this one, who aren't violent and can usually do some sort of job, to live as normally as they choose to live and not be certified insane. And it left me feeling that, in fact, the character is insane.
I think a free society should have room for books--not necessarily in public libraries where children might find them--that fully express the consciousness of people who are definitely different from most of us, or from anyone we'd want to know. I think the danger in a book like The Turner Diaries, which also expresses that kind of viewpoint, is that such books can confuse or frighten the very young, not that they'll "convert" any normal mind to thinking the way characters like Turner think. I think it's good for educated adults to read things that help us understand the way these people think. Who knows whether, if German libraries had stocked copies of The Turner Diaries
, the German people would have recognized that putting Adolf Hitler in charge of anything more momentous than the perspective on one of his paintings was a Very Bad Idea, and how much good a Very Bad Novel might thus have accomplished, or how much good a different but also Very Bad Novel might accomplish today.[For those who don't remember: The Turner Diaries is the one with the neo-Nazi narrator who writes, among other things, about going for a Sunday afternoon walk in the park with friends, meeting a neighbor family, and opening fire: "I got one of them, my pal got two, my girlfriend got the mother and baby, but the old grandfather ran away." The world needs to know that that kind of consciousness exists, but yurgh.]
I just feel very, very squirmy from the cognitive dissonance...of recognizing...that people like the friend's friend exist, and have a right to write about the way they think...but for most purposes they probably really are what I'd have to call insane.
It reminds me of the experience of reading The Turner Diaries, or of reading Surfacing, only in a different way from either of those.
Surfacing ticked me off, on the first reading, because as the nameless narrator's guilt reaction builds up to its explosion point she starts babbling about "Americans" as the embodiment of all that is evil in the beautiful Laurentian forests. Theoretically this particular hang-up was chosen, like the character's temporary anorexia in The Edible Woman, as an obvious index of the character's loss of contact with reality, because nobody really hated the United States all that much. (Prozac Dementia has since added a whole new dimension to hate in both the United States and Canada; Surfacing was first published in 1972.) Reading in 1992, I could very easily imagine people (like Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein, back then) hating the United States all that much; I was not amused.
After giving myself a year or two or three, I found myself accepting that the character in Surfacing becomes hysterical about "Americans" (by which she means greedheads) and flees into the woods in a crazy fantasy of becoming a pure-souled Canadian bear, or whatever, because she's racked by guilt about having let herself be bullied into "choosing" abortion. All of us American literary critics accept that, in print. Funnily enough, in real life I've never talked to a U.S. literary critic who was really comfortable with Surfacing. We'll grant that, Canada being part of the American continents too, the character's temporary phobia of "Americans" is an acceptable way of fictionalizing what might in real life have been a phobia of men or germs or food or who knows what; that the rest of her mental breakdown narrative is credible enough to convince us that Atwood observed a real woman having a real mental breakdown; that her spiral into real temporary insanity is something that might be caused by guilt about having "chosen" abortion...Ouch. We want to believe that people who might consider "choosing" abortion are sane enough to be respectfully left alone with their horrible "choice." We don't like the ramifications of a beautifully written novel convincing us that "choosing" abortion might be either a symptom or a cause of what may be nonviolent, or temporary, but is certainly insanity while it lasts.
So this friend of a friend has written another brilliantly horrible, horribly brilliant novel, and now I've promised to think of a tactful, tasteful way of introducing it to American book lovers...and that task leaves me feeling wan and inclined to wail, "But I've been sick." Cognitive dissonance bites.
Can I procrastinate a little more with a quick phenology note? So far this week I've seen a beautiful red-tailed hawk, the usual butterflies (Tiger Swallowtails, Red-Spotted Purples, Wood Nymphs), a relatively small (only five inches, not six) Carolina Mantis, the usual flowers (Queen of the Meadow, dayflowers, Ladies' Bedstraw (the perfumy kind), myrtle, chicory, jewelweed), one of the usual caterpillars (Anisota senatoria, the Orange-Striped Oakworm, in its next to last skin where the stripes are mostly yellow) for late August--and one unusual thing: a small but ripe pawpaw fruit. Those usually start forming on the trees in late August but don't ripen and fall before mid-September.
And peaches, of course...I have a little feral peach tree, an unplanned descendant of some less hardy Elberta peach trees that snowstorms broke down long ago. It survived last winter's Big Snow; without even being braced back into position, it grew back to a reasonably upright angle. It is bearing like mad. Its fruits are about half the size of the ones sold in supermarkets, at best, and tend to fall off while green, but this year it has an excuse for dropping so many underripe peaches. It can hardly hold its branches off the ground under the weight of the bigger, riper ones. Most years having a peach tree in Virginia is pure self-indulgence: the flowers are pretty in spring, and some people like the look of the trees, but if you want to pick a bushel of peaches you have to drive further south. I have heard that it's either one year out of ten, or one out of twelve, when a peach tree is worth propping up after it collapses under snow. Either way, this is the year.
Human behavior does and doesn't qualify as phenology...Tuesday morning, a little before 3 a.m., I woke up sneezing. "Drat and blast, they must've sprayed glyphosate on the railroad again." Then the situation got worse--I smelled smoke. I got up and checked that it wasn't coming from any electrical wires inside the house before I found the source of the smoke. It was that college kid from down the road. Likely the kid woke up sneezing or feeling sick too, and sneaked out to be sick privately without disturbing his parents. Well, the kid's wandering up and down the private road is no problem, and even his dog is all right as long as the dog stays with the kid, but I hate the smell of marijuana.
And then, for once, the local weather did the most convenient thing it could have done in this situation. It poured rain. The kid got a nice cold shower as he hurried home, and the poison along the railroad soaked in, leaving lots of browned-out privately owned gardens near the railroad but nice clean air to breathe, and I continued to recover from the last bout with poisonous vapors rather than getting worse.
Yesterday I heard some good news: a busload of tourists had asked the travel agency, particularly, to stop at the cafe in Gate City. Our fame is spreading. "They'll probably want to talk to you, or some of them will," someone idly speculated. It was not as if that was part of the tour. It was not as if any visitors who wanted to talk to me, in particular, wouldn't have been able to e-mail or tweet about it.
"Hmm. How big is this bus?" If it had been the size of the last tour bus I saw--ten or twelve people--I would have wanted to come in and watch the tourists' reactions to my picturesque little town.
"Thirty-five or forty people."
The cafe seats thirty-six. The table where I like to plug in the laptop will seat two people, but the laptop takes up more than half of the table.
"I think I'll come in late," I said, "so all the tourists can sit down and sip their coffee."
So I did. I didn't see any tourists when I strolled in, about 11 a.m. I did see a beautiful reduction in the stack of souvenir T-shirts, though, and I hope the tourists are enjoying their new shirts and other souvenirs.
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