Palinode: What Would Glyphosate Awareness Do with $10,000?

As regular readers know, a palinode is something written to retract something one wrote previously. Not enough palinodes are written these days. This one is long enough to have subheadings.

1. Simple Apology

Actually two things I wrote, or tweeted, yesterday need retraction.

One was a simple, stupid grammar mistake produced by trying to get too much content into too little space. Addressing the world at large, I visualized a typical American nuclear family--three people, three common-to-the-point-of-being-stereotypical glyphosate reactions. Perhaps influenced by the fact that I was retweeting something that had a male-type name attached to it, I addressed the husband rather than the wife in this hypothetical family. That was wrong; it made the tweet sound as if I knew the Twit whose tweet I was sharing, personally, and as if he had a wife with an inflamed digestive tract and a child with autism. I don't know the Twit. I have no idea whether the Twit has ever been married or had children, or is even male in real life--lots of people blur their identities by using a screen name and picture that suggests the opposite sex. The implication that I had that kind of information about the Twit, or would have been the first to publicize it if I had, is incorrect and also, when I think about it, rude.

I apologize for the way this tweet came out:

"

Priscilla King

@5PriscillaKing

When we do coast to a full stop on #glyphosate ... Will your hands span your wife's waist again? Will your #autistic child learn to read? Will your blood pressure (!) be easier to manage? How much better will we all feel? #GlyphosateAwareness

Quote Tweet

David Young

@David__Young__

· Jul 28

Replying to @GMWatch

this POISON is in nearly every food we eat today! it must be banned, full-stop! #glyphosate

2:19 PM · Jul 28, 2020
"

I don't apologize for the questions; I do apologize for failing to address them to something like "Gentle (Married Male) Readers of the World," which was whom I meant them to be addressed to. All I meant to say to or about the Twit known as @David_Young_ was that I agree with what he said.

2. Long Explanation, Part 1: What I Got Wrong

Now the more important retraction...

Someone wanted to get into a "direct message" conversation on Twitter. I hate those. Some conversations with e-friends, especially among people who might be old acquaintances in real life or between writers, reviewers, editors and publishers, do not need to be published to the whole Twittersphere...even so, Twitter's direct message system has never worked very well on any device I've used. 

This Twit appeared to be a stranger, and the message request was something about paying off credit card debt. Red flags popped up everywhere. Offers to pay off a stranger's credit card debt in cyberspace are like invitations to go for a ride with a man who has some candy for you, in his car, when you were in primary school. There is a very remote chance that someone has good intentions and doesn't realize that person is sounding exactly like a lot of people with evil intentions, but you start backing away at once.

I told the stranger that I have no credit card debt. Nobody at the Cat Sanctuary has had anything to do with credit cards since 1969, and I'm not the one who found out how un-liberating they were, back then.

On what I've earned by writing online and selling books, handcrafts, and junk in the Friday Market--what, three Fridays this year?--it's not been easy to pay for groceries, electricity, property taxes, and the following personal expenses: one shopping bag of discounted books (to restock my display and sell at a profit), one dress ($2 at a charity store), and six candles (over which I do indoor cooking). It's not been easy, but I have done it. I just might be the only native-born U.S. citizen whose frugality impresses people from India.

I added, "But you can always support Glyphosate Awareness with a postal money order," and gave the address that should appear at the bottom of the screen. This is something any and all Gentle Readers are welcome to do. 

I visited the Twit's profile, briefly, and retweeted person's explanation of what person was tweeting about with this answer to the question of what I could do with $10,000: 

"
10K would give my bookstore the physical space it's always wanted...and lots of NEW books by LIVING writers. (I don't do loans: no assurance of being able to pay back.)
"

Then I realized that, in that sequence, I was implying that Glyphosate Awareness solicits donations that go into my personal pocket. This is so wrong.

Glyphosate Awareness is not an organization that solicits donations. It's a movement. Any number can play but I don't endorse any attempt to use the movement for profit. We are not out to get rich; we are out to get well, to heal ourselves and our families from glyphosate-related chronic disease conditions. I have disowned and denounced people who've tried to market unproved remedies or solicit money in the name of Glyphosate Awareness, and so I will continue to do.

To the extent that anything I endorse in the name of Glyphosate Awareness would ever ask you for money, it would be the Children's Health Defense Fund as led by Robert F. Kennedy, Junior. 

There are legitimate ways money can promote activism. The Glyphosate Awareness movement has not relied on them; my idea of a grassroots movement is one that does not depend on money or connections, that spreads among private people just because a whole lot of diverse individuals who don't even necessarily know each other agree that something is relevant to them. But if you want to think about serious professional-quality lobbying, the Kennedy clan were all born and raised knowing more about how that's done than most of us ever want to learn. That is how RFK-Jr got to be the head of the Fund.

Historically, not only have Republicans admittedly hesitated to bash big corporations, but Democrats who hope to be elected to office have very quietly done just the same. Even other members of the Kennedy clan have scolded RFK-Jr for daring to denounce corporations like Bayer, Lilly, and Merck. Why? Because these corporations donate the maximum legal amount to both major parties and then, when facing anything short of an open-and-shut charge of outright murder, the corporate spokescreeps remind the politicians of "aaall we've done for you," and the politicians usually...well...this web site has published the sort of thing they have to say. We invited a member of Senator Kaine's staff to meet us in a popular cafe and talk to some people about their experiences when I happened to see my whole town react to glyphosate spray vapors. She couldn't fit that into her schedule, but sent us a press release about the Senator's contribution to a successful bill intended to reduce the harm done by "pesticides," generally, several years in the past. That is so typical of mainstream Democrats. The only D politician who's overtly said anything nice about Glyphosate Awareness has been unelectable Bernie Sanders. This is important for D correspondents to know. Yourall's party blames the Republicans for doing this, and then quietly does just the same...

But Glyphosate Awareness is of particularly pressing concern to people of Irish descent, so it's proper and appropriate that those of us who want to support professional-quality lobbying should rally around a Kennedy.

You may have heard the CDF smeared as an "anti-vaccines" group. It's not. It is an anti-protection-for-contaminated-vaccine group, and also an anti-protection-for-other-toxic-chemical-contaminants group. I have received free e-mails from the CDF for more than a year, and sometimes they do sound similar to the pathological anti-vaxxers (because the pathological anti-vaxxers quote the same studies), but they're not. I think we need to take a closer look at the chemical corporations' tactic of trying to smear all criticism by association. This web site, for example, is not anti-vaccine; we're pro-pet, so we urge people to take their pets in for rabies vaccinations, and if an unvaccinated animal were to bite anyone at the Cat Sanctuary we'd rush out for the human vaccination. This web site suggests that we start lumping together material from corporations like Merck, which are known to have continued to use batches of vaccine shown to have been contaminated and hazardous, with material from any lunatic out there who thinks dumping anti-malarial drugs into public water supplies will protect people from coronavirus. Paranoid-schizophrenic disorders are biological and therefore non-partisan.

And so is Glyphosate Awareness. This movement is for Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Libertarians, Independents, and Old-School Hard-Line Soviet Stalinist-Communists if any of them have suffered from glyphosate exposure and would like to stop suffering, too.

Regular readers know my story, and may skip it. Since this post is being shared with new readers I'll repeat my story below...between places where Amazon book links will go in the near future.

2. Long Explanation, Part 2: Autobiography

[Amazon link will go here]

For about thirty years I lived with a sort of chronic low-grade sickness, weakness, vulnerability to every possible infection and adverse reaction to every medication including vitamins, and with constant nagging. Older people who were supposed to know said things like, "There's nothing wrong with you! You just want to stay home from school, not do chores...get attention by sitting out of things! If you'd only try harder," etc. etc. ad nauseaum. The nagging peaked when I had mononucleosis but it neither began nor ended there. It encompassed a lot of things like "If you hadn't gone swimming you wouldn't have that cold" (when I had allergies, not a cold) and "If you hadn't eaten chocolate, I saw you eating chocolate last month, you wouldn't have acne at your age," and worse.

And most of this verbal abuse was actually intended in the most helpful, most sympathetic way. Most of it came from the mother, grandmother, and aunt who shared the celiac gene they'd passed on to me. They talked that way to themselves, too. They, too, always felt that they were doing everything in life backward, in high heels, uphill, and carrying a 50-pound backpack. They were three of the strongest, toughest ladies you'd ever want to meet--or avoid meeting. They trained horses and built houses and had their own businesses while living with disabilities. "Tough as nails," Dad and other veterans of that vintage always said about them, admiringly. So they were and so I am, too, but in addition to being tough as nails I've also had the experience of being healthy. Here I stand to testify: healthy is better.

It was probably a glyphosate spraying episode that brought it unmistakably to everyone's attention: I am a celiac. I had celiac sprue, off and on in the early 1990s; by 1995 it was chronic, and in 1997 I took the plunge, went gluten-free, and never looked back. By 1998 the feeling of not being sick, which I remembered as occasional "high" moods from childhood and youth, had become normal. I had built up a lot of strength just by trying to live normally while being ill. For one thing I found that, when I wasn't reacting to wheat gluten, I could lift more than my own weight. Easily. It felt similar to carrying 20 or 30 pounds while having a celiac reaction. Celiac sprue is a gross, obvious, disgusting symptom but the worst part of it is the debilitating, depressing effect, which is less obvious to everyone else and far more obvious to the patient.

It was too late for the aunt and grandmother, but not too late for Mother, to become healthy too.

This web site mentions a group of young people we call The Nephews. Some of these people are the physical offspring of my natural sister. They all share the celiac trait to varying degrees (and there's a bit of planned ambiguity--heavenforbidandfend this web site should ever accurately identify any living child). It was too late for two of these young people to grow up without permanent neurological damage. Yes, the one whose sight and hearing are obviously impaired was exposed to more vaccines than the one who only had to start wearing glasses to attend grade three. Two more of them were brought up gluten-free, and can read without glasses. They all enjoyed some years of gluten-free healthiness. They are beautiful, sensitive, intelligent, goodhearted kids.

Then in 2009 glyphosate began to be marketed generically, competitively. People were encouraged to use more of this toxic chemical in more dangerous ways, including spraying it directly on foods as a "pre-harvest desiccant" allowing farmers to harvest more of a crop at one time. Suddenly all kinds of foods that were gluten-free started making celiacs sick again. Oats always did--celiacs assumed contamination with wheat was the reason, but when manufacturers made the effort to produce gluten-free oatmeal and oat cereals like Cheerios, they still made us sick. Orange juice was another leading problem food. Corn and all corn products were. Soy products were. Beans were. Nuts were.

This web site, and others, helped apply pressure to food manufacturers to keep a few mass-marketed food products relatively safe for us to eat. Only a few favorite manufacturers, at only a certain level of size and autonomy, responded to that pressure. Not all were able to respond consistently, at that. Between 2015 and 2020, in addition to what grows around the Cat Sanctuary (which is a variety of delicious, nutritious, though mostly unconventional fruits and vegetables), I've basically lived on a rotation among just a few name-brand grocery items. All of which I've had to nag; and in order for my nagging to have done any good I know a lot of other celiacs have been nagging these companies too. All of which have gone on and off the safe list in different seasons. For the benefit of other celiacs, I've corresponded about my list and I'll post it here:

* Riviana rice products--Success, Zatarain's, Mahatma (not all of them during every year)

* Planters Cocktail Peanuts (not dry-roasted, unsalted, or "lightly salted," and forget about the fancy flavors)

* Jif peanut butter

* M&Ms (no, chocolate does not affect my skin, which is lucky because it's become about the only tidy, ready-made thing I can eat in town)

* Bush's beans (but only the kinds packed with only salt and water added)

* Gwaltney chicken products

* Barbara's Puffins cereal

* The "Appalachian Morning" and "Jamaica Me Crazy" coffee sold at my favorite cafe...but not the decaf

And, ironically, soda pop...because the high-fructose corn syrup it contains is so far from being a natural food that, apparently, the glyphosate has been stripped out of it along with any natural nutrients. If citrus-flavored soda pop contained any actual citrus fruit I probably couldn't have used it all these years, but it doesn't and I have.

Milk products have varied so much that, despite surprising lactase persistence, I've not been able to say that any brand of milk, ice cream, or yogurt has even really tried to offer anything I can eat. I've not made an effort to keep any beef or pork product on the list.

I have wanted to keep fruit and vegetable products on the list--I love salad, and my poor little mother will eat her fruit, vegetables, nuts, and honey if they kill her, which they are now in the process of doing. But nobody, even among the allegedly "organic" fruit and vegetable suppliers, has consistently tried to deliver glyphosate-free fruit and veg. All that can be said is that generally fruits and vegetables with very thick outer layers, like pumpkins, melons, and navel oranges, have been less dangerous if all peels are thrown away; orange peel is now poisonous.

Fish and eggs have generally been safe...but that's it, Gentle Readers. That's all. There was a year when even my own fruit in my own orchard absorbed enough glyphosate vapor, after the utility company had sprayed around the power line, that I couldn't eat it without being sick.

I like cooking and trying new foods. My blog buddy, Grandma Bonnie Peters, intended to do that and make recipes a regular feature for this web site. No points for guessing why that never happened. We cooked. We concocted yummy gluten-free things. First we weren't sure why several of these things left us sick afterward, and then GBP was too "old" and ill to care. One year we actually tested a bunch of recipes, and I wrote and sold a cookbook that's been printed under someone else's name...but we never have been able to publish any substantial number of gluten-free vegan recipes, because fruit and vegetables have become unsafe for celiacs to eat.

We became convinced that this is due primarily, if not entirely, to glyphosate.

And then, around the same time that we pinpointed glyphosate as the common factor in our resurgent illness and the declining health of The Nephews...I just happened to spend a day in an open-air market and watch my townsfolk react to glyphosate vapors in the air. No two had identical reactions. Several blamed a virus, and a virus might actually have been in the air, but it was amazing how people who had got up feeling fine all suddenly came down with the virus at the same time--if there was a virus. (When I'm having a celiac reaction I have very little resistance to any airborne virus, and I didn't get the "cold" others got that day.)

It happened that glyphosate was up for review by Trump's Environmental Protection Agency that summer. I read the EPA's glyphosate docket--a batch of documents admittedly submitted by chemical companies. Amazingly, although you have to read between the lines, the chemical companies were unable to deny what I'd seen in the market. Glyphosate does noticeably harm the majority of all lifeforms exposed to it--fish, fowl, insects, quadrupeds, or humans. It does not produce a consistent pattern of reactions because it produces a bewildering range of reactions, of which it's rare to find two identical reactions in a hundred victims. With time and increasing exposure, however, more individuals will show more overlapping reactions. Individuals who don't show visible reactions, themselves, may become sterile or produce stillborn or deformed offspring.

When I started researching glyphosate I remember being wary about reports from Argentina about its causing birth defects in animals. Like most people--and the chemical companies are still banking on this--I thought "It's hardly possible that one chemical can have all those different effects."

Well. The range of complications produced by living with the celiac disease that occurs when people with the celiac trait eat wheat, also, sounds wildly improbable, but it's true.

The life stories of people who've lived with celiac disease sound wildly improbable, but they're true.

And the lab-produced molecule that's making it impossible for celiacs to enjoy living with our trait, without the disease, once more...also sounds wildly improbable. But it's true.

Glyphosate really exists. So does the mind-boggling range of ways it's harming each and all of us.

We all have valid claims for damages from the Monsanto Chemical Corporation, recently purchased by Bayer. And yes, it's true...if your main health concern has been having a leg bitten off by a shark, glyphosate didn't cause that, but glyphosate probably did aggravate the pain you felt. And, since glyphosate affects both cognitive and emotional functions in the human brain, it's not altogether wrong to say that glyphosate may be a factor in divorce too, although the position of this web site is that people of sense and spirit ought to be able to detach and be mindful of their glyphosate reactions so that those reactions won't cause them to seek a divorce. I actually try to use this web site to help people do that.

4. Long Explanation, Part 4: How Glyphosate Awareness Could Actually Use $10,000 

In my own name, as a struggling writer and bookseller, I do ask readers of this web site for money. It's simple. If you liked a magazine enough to read it regularly, in the United States you'd pay about $5 per issue. If you like this web site enough to read it regularly, although Blogspot doesn't support "paywall" technology and I don't like the sites that use it, you should send us $5 every so often. In some seasons I've blogged about extreme financial hardships, in some not, but that's not the point. The point is that if you read what people write, you should pay those people or, if they decline payment, you should send money to their favorite charities.

Or you can buy a book: daily book reviews will be returning soon, after the long hiatus caused by my laptop being too old to work with Amazon, and each of those contains instructions for buying books from this web site. Or, if you're in my little town, you can just buy a physical book directly from me.

Or you can commission blog posts about any topic of your choice, at your site or mine. (I've done guest posts, in a detached research-writerly way, about all kinds of things--window shades, washing machines, the wildlife on an island I'll never visit...someone commissioned "Beards, Fashion, and Fiction," which was meant to sound like me, and someone commissioned the series of diaper backpack reviews, which was not.) I'm available for either writing or collaboration on e-books, too, and I have collaborated on full-length books that were printed on real paper.

I could use commissions to put my current stock of books in a nice, spacious, climate-controlled, wheelchair-accessible place where people could sit down and flip through them. They would look lonely in there--just one shelving unit's worth of books that I can haul around to flea markets. I could use commissions to add e-friends's new books to them. People who don't read e-books could read real printed copies of the e-books I've read. I've been working toward that goal for years.

But that's my goal, not the goal of Glyphosate Awareness. Heretofore, Glyphosate Awareness has never asked readers for money. In linking, sharing, summarizing what's been learned about glyphosate and that incredible range of ways it does harm to different people, I want to motivate you to do your own research and activism, in your own way. I want you as a reader to use your money to print your own documents and share them with your own friends, neighbors, elected officials.

I've designed some Glyphosate Awareness swag you can see on Zazzle if you look for it. Don't like it? Design your own. Zazzle is free for anybody to use to design anything. Use your own flower, bird, butterfly or whatever kind of images. Make Glyphosate Awareness postcards, stationery, coffee mugs, T-shirts or napkins that will blow mine away. Most people who use the Internet have better digital cameras than I have and ought to be able to design better Zazzle print-on-demand swag. I'll tweet about it and, if I can scrape up the e-money, I'll even buy it.

Glyphosate Awareness ought to be much bigger and better than any individual's contribution to it, even if that individual created the hashtag, has written the e-book, has hosted the live chat and caught the hate, and can reasonably accept the title of Queen of it. Any random reader of this post might be able to do more on behalf of Glyphosate Awareness than I've done. Go for it, random reader. Glyphosate Awareness is not about me.

I have applied for Awesome Foundation grants, which are for one thousand dollars, to cover specific projects I've wanted to do. Specifically, since Awesome Foundation pages tend to be localized, to cover local targeted mailings. With a little help to cover printing and postage I could've been sending people place-specific mailings about the harm glyphosate is doing in their own business or area, and what they--these chosen business, government, or community leaders--could do about it. At my own expense I've been sending newsletters to people who, when I've met them, have turned out to be mostly great-grandparents who wailed, "Now I know this, but what can I do?" I'd like to be sending information to people who can do what the retirees can't. But so far I've not been awarded an Awesome Foundation grant.

But with $10,000, Glyphosate Awareness could do better than that.

I got into an e-conversation about this yesterday, and I'd like to put this idea Out There.

Glyphosate is excreted from the body fairly quickly after exposure. It's relatively easy to find in nice, clean hair samples, except that, so far, what hair studies seem to be showing is that all of us are exposed to a lot more glyphosate than is good for us, all the time. Glyphosate is also easy to find in urine samples, except, well, ditto.

Celiac sprue produces another kind of samples, which this web site's contract probably forbids us to describe. The celiac reaction consists of bleeding ulcers that form all along the digestive tract from the mouth downward. There are distinct stages to this reaction as gluten (or glyphosate or, presumably, AMPA) proceed through the body; the final stage is the one where visible streaks of bright, fresh, liquid blood appear in the toilet.

If, as Bayer spokesghouls are still trying to claim, glyphosate does not cause this reaction, then Cologuard would show similar levels of glyphosate in that kind of samples when visible blood was present and when it was not.

If, as everyone associated with this web site is now convinced, glyphosate does cause celiac sprue in individuals who have it, then Cologuard samples would show substantially higher levels of glyphosate in when blood was visible than when it was not.

As a gluten-free celiac who has sprue only after exposure to glyphosate vapors and/or consumption of glyphosate-poisoned food, I can feel each stage of a reaction. I would expect other celiacs can, too.

Other laboratories may offer better deals, and legal counsel might direct us to a different one, but a laboratory that's been part of the Glyphosate Awareness chat for a long time offered to test six Cologuard samples for approximately two thousand dollars per celiac.

So, if someone sent us $10,000, which is not something I'm actually expecting, that's what Glyphosate Awareness could do with it: test Cologuard samples for five relatively healthy celiacs.

That would leave positions open for two celiacs who are not close relatives of mine. I'd want to find out more about these individuals than I'd ask anyone to reveal online, or than I'd reveal online.

In cyberspace I am The Celiactivist--out, loud, and proud--partly because neither "Priscilla" nor "King" has anything to do with my individual name. People who know me as an individual know that I don't talk about my medical history or anyone else's, in real life. I tend, and the people who know me well also tend, to avoid people who do talk about their medical history.

My guess would be that most celiacs, even if they also suffer from extroversion, and even if they run on about headaches or rheumatism, have learned that celiac sprue is just too much of a gross-out for most social relationships to bear.

If Glyphosate Awareness were to receive this kind of money, naturally the identity of the celiacs involved would not be revealed unless, and until, it was reported as part of a lawsuit.

Before trial, ongoing lawsuits are another thing it's best not to discuss online.

I'd like to blame the long siege of hot, damp weather for yesterday's two gaffes, and add that at least my brain wasn't so heatstruck as to start spewing inarticulate but probably unprintable words at co-workers in public...but, even in Code Red weather, I do remember not to talk about some things.

Whether anybody picks up this idea, and who they are if they do, will be one of those things.

Tortie Tuesday: Silver Learns Quickly

With a name like Silver, obviously the cat featured this week is not a three-colored "Tortie." But her mother, Ruling Queen Cat Serena, is a beautiful three-colored "Calico." (Regular readers know the difference. Calico cats are mostly white, usually with discrete patches of orange to buff and black to gray fur. "Torties" are mostly black, usually with large sections of orange and black fur mottled together like a tortoise's shell, sometimes without visible white spots. Serena's mother, Samantha, was a Tortie.)

Anyway, here's another Cat Sanctuary Interview, with the cats' "comments" generated from observed facts and cats' nonverbal communication:

PK: Humans have some very good news to report, although I personally have just heard that a friend has liver cancer and expects to have only a year or two left to live, so I'm not actually feeling as good as the progress of global Glyphosate Awareness might lead people to expect. Cats, can you take over and share some good news with our readers this week?

Serena: Well, if the stuff that's causing this week's bad news has been taken off the market, that's very, very good news! Even if your human government has been negligent in allowing people to use up their existing supplies along public roads, so everybody has been "under the weather" again...

PK: Yesterday was another day when, although quite productive at home, I didn't dare to go out in public. I definitely would have looked ill enough, and felt sick enough, to trigger coronavirus panic.

Swimmer: What is this "coronavirus" twaddle all about, anyway?

PK: Coronavirus has been floating through the air for years, Gentle Readers. I just happened to flip through an old news magazine that had been stored in the barn for more than thirty years. It mentioned that coronavirus had been identified as different from "the common cold," or rhinovirus, before 1987...and that, of the two, coronavirus is generally less of a nuisance to healthy people. Neither one normally causes noticeable symptoms in healthy adults. COVID-19 is a new, more virulent mutation of coronavirus that has killed a lot of people...but very few of them had been healthy. Nor has COVID-19 killed more people than cold and flu virus normally do every year. It's just another way natural selection culls out the weaker members of the human population. I'm not trying to suggest that some of these people are not dearly loved and sorely missed, or even that maintaining a healthy social distance as we go about our jobs wouldn't have been an excellent idea many years ago...but there is really no reason to panic. Coronavirus is just another kind of head and chest cold. Most of us will eventually get it and, as with polio--which killed a lot of children by slow torture--most adults won't even realize they've got it until, for some reason, they have a blood test that shows they have.

Silver: Well, at least it's given you more time at home to play with us, anyway.

PK: Yes, and the weather has been incredibly good to us. A few white violets are still blooming in the not-a-lawn at the Cat Sanctuary today, even after last week's first ninety-degree afternoons. I've seen magnolias and violets blooming on the same day...not something I expected to see in nature, but yes, like the snow on the fourth of July a hundred years ago, it's happened.

Serena: Have you noticed I'm using "cuddle time" as a reward to improve your game?

PK: I have. You're a smart cat, worthy of your awesome ancestors, Serena ni Burr mac Irene ni Candice ni Bisquit ni Polly ni Patchnose.

Silver: Well I am too. I caught a bird...

PK and Serena: Bad idea! Very bad! Any bird a cat can catch, once its feathers have grown in, is a sick bird. At best it'll make you sick. Depending on what was wrong with the bird, it might kill you. Best not to touch a bird at all, even if you find it dead on the ground.

Silver: Well, I found it twitching feebly on the ground, so I put it out of its misery. But I didn't eat it. I brought it to the human.

Swimmer: Who immediately put it in the trash barrel, then kept a fire going until you couldn't find any trace of bird bones in the ashes.

PK: Because bird bones are brittle and splintery and might choke any cat or possum who tried chewing on them.

Silver: Yes. But then as a reward for bringing something that was unfit for us cats to eat for human inspection, rather than eating it and being sick, the human gave us a tin of chicken! Hurrah! Clever me!

PK: Whenever glyphosate has been sprayed you will usually find songbirds on the ground, afterward. I hate when that happens. This one was a native song sparrow. It showed no sign of the greenish mold that's usually visible between the feathers of dead songbirds I find on the ground in between glyphosate poisoning episodes. Apart from the broken neck its outer surface was completely undamaged.

The Bible tells us that God notices the sparrow's fall...I only wish that were more literally true. I believe that that sparrow was worth more to this world than the fools who sprayed glyphosate along Route 23.

My friend with cancer...I don't want to share any potentially identifying details yet, but this person had glyphosate reactions, predictably, whenever I did. For years. Hers were different from mine, but occurred on exactly the same schedule; that was one of the factors that convinced me that what was making me sick had to be glyphosate. And I warned her that plant-based food, basically any plant-based food grown on a commercial farm in North America since 2009, was part of the problem. And she wanted to be a vegetarian anyway...and she loved her vegetables...and her symptoms became chronic, and finally they became disabling, and a few different doctors ran different tests, and now it's liver cancer. Which glyphosate may not directly cause, but most definitely does promote. And like virtually everyone I'd describe as a friend this person is over age 55, but I blame glyphosate for the way she's suffered before she died.

This post goes out particularly to Governor Northam, who claims to be so concerned about protecting people from coronavirus. I'm not sure whom he's protecting. I would like to believe, giving him the benefit of the doubt, that he honestly thinks he's buying time for some dear friend or relative of his to live, and that that may even be true. But even for that person, Governor, glyphosate is doing more harm than coronavirus ever will. You'd do a lot better to forget about the virus and just ban glyphosate.

Three-Colored Lawns as Evidence of Glyphosate Poisoning

Flu has made its rounds during the past three weeks. There was talk of closing the schools. A school in Tennessee really was closed for a day or two as all the teachers and students stayed home to sweat out the virus.

I had it, after what's become my usual fashion in the last ten years. Nobody else would have noticed. I could tell I had the virus because I felt chilly even in a room where people who hadn't been walking briskly outdoors were comfortable, because my eyes got tired easily, because I felt tired by ordinary routine chores or even by eating...you know, that fighting-the-flu feeling. It was not a stomach flu (norovirus is the one that always gives me noticeable symptoms). It did not affect the digestive process.

In my forties I had this feeling for hours, maybe a day, at a time. This winter I noticed it for about ten days. Is that because I'm now in my fifties? I don't think so. Up to about age thirty, as a young undiagnosed celiac, I did not shake off that fighting-the-flu feeling. I came down with the flu. Yes, and as a child, when I was forced to eat everything other people thought I needed to eat and bundle up when other people thought I needed to bundle up and go outside when other people thought I needed to go outside, I didn't even have separate cases of colds and flu during the winter; basically, if it was winter, I had a cold; the question was whether I was sick enough to distract the teacher when I went to school coughing and sneezing at people. Because the law required children to be sent to school on 145 days of the year, even when what they were learning at school was to stay home when they had a cold, and even when they had one...which was why, as a teenager who was a little healthier and finally able to enjoy some of my classes at school, I was still very keen on school choice.

I don't know about you, but when I talk about changes in the quality of my life during the past ten years, I'm old enough to be told "Well, of course, you're getting older." What is getting old, stale, and tired of living is that cliche phrase. We are all getting older. My Nephews are noticing the same sort of changes, and although not all of them have even reached their full height yet, fourteen years old is older than four. However, the changes in the quality of my life (1) correlate pretty precisely with my exposure to glyphosate, and (2) feel to me like being younger. Like aging backward. I was not a healthy person until age 30 so when I feel sick it brings back memories of youth or even childhood. Not the sort of childhood I wanted The Nephews to have.

There are some changes we can all expect to happen just because, after a certain age (it varies, and seems to be determined by genes), the human body's hormone balance changes. In between one range of birthdays we grow taller, then grow heavier, and the texture of our skins changes to allow the skin pores to become bigger, and some of those pores tend to clog up, etc., etc. In between another range of birthdays we start growing more white hair in place of black or brown or whatever it used to be, and the texture of our skins changes again to allow the skin to dry out and form wrinkles more easily, and those of us who don't get enough exercise find ourselves losing weight in the form of calcium from the bones, etc., etc. I am actually starting to grow white hair, although during glyphosate reactions it falls out so it's not showing yet. The other changes normally start later in my family; no doubt they'll come along in due time.

Illness is a separate thing from age. The two things are correlated to some extent because, the older we are, the harder it is for our immune systems to recover from some kinds of illness--notably flu. However, young people can be ill and old people can be healthy.

One thing that definitely cheats some people out of enjoying a healthy old age is confusing age with illness. No symptom of illness is a valid indicator of age, but the belief that low-grade chronic illness is part of "growing older" keeps some people from correcting imbalances in time to avoid more serious illness...and illness definitely makes the body "older," slower to recover, more vulnerable to the next attack on our health.

So I had this dopey-sneezy-sleepy-grumpy-bashful feeling for ten days, and finally shook it off. Then on Wednesday morning I woke up at two o'clock, sneezing and sniffling. Having been well hydrated to help keep off the flu, I didn't dry out enough to go back to sleep until after six. Then my brain kept remembering that six o'clock is time to get up, so I caught three separate ten-minute naps before it was time to go to work, still losing water as I trudged through the drizzle that didn't become a real rain. At least only water was draining out of my face (nose, and also eyes). When I used the toilet I lost about a tablespoon of blood.

Where had that come from, I asked myself. What had I eaten that might have been contaminated? I decided to stop sweetening my coffee at the cafe, just in case.

It was raining when I went home. I felt dopey, sleepy, sneezy, grumpy, bashful, and a few more little guys Disney overlooked: lazy, weary, whiny--and the last one wasn't "Doc," he was "Blocked." Disney mis-heard that one. He mis-heard "Happy," too, but this web site's contract bans mentioning that Dwarf's real name.

On Thursday morning the junior cats Silver and Swimmer came to breakfast, one with her left eye swollen hut, one with her right eye swollen shut. I was sniffling again, and had the predictable gas bloating that means the sniffles were caused by glyphosate vapors rather than a cold. The junior cats had, too. Poor little things, they probably remembered it from when they were kittens...that was how Swimmer got her name; she was trying to climb up my coat, wasn't strong enough, and fell into water. Most cats hate to swim, but they can.

When I came in on Thursday evening my nose was clear enough to notice just one whiff of a smell I've learned to loathe, as I walked past a house someone has been trying to sell. Then my nose clogged up again and all the water in my body started trying to pour out through my face, again.

Then I came home, and my Queen Cat Serena, who snuggled against me for many a kitten-nap but does not think snuggling befits a Queen...snuggled. Yes. Serena was snuggling. Serena didn't have a real fever but her nose was warmer than it ought to have been, from inflammation, from breathing toxic vapors. Serena wasn't feeling well either. Serena didn't seem positively ill during any of last year's glyphosate episodes. Well, she didn't seem ill enough to be taken to the vet yesterday, either, but she was not her tough and sassy healthy self, not the cat who always shrugs away any petting and tries to redirect me to throw or drag something she can chase. What was bothering her was closer than the railroad.

I went into my home office feeling not just grumpy, but seriously angry. I can be too soft when it comes to forgiving or even pardoning things people do to me, personally. Touching my loved ones is the way to see the fighting side of me. I know who poisoned Serena. I'd always thought of them as a nice family, before. I'd even presumed to pardon them for poisoning some valuable wineberry bushes, because the poor idjit had not looked them up but only asked the guys at the shop, who'd told him they were poisonous. However. I went into the office, closed the door, and I started praying out loud: "God, please heal these cats and all the other innocent animals this fool has poisoned, and transfer all of their suffering to him, now."

Even if I felt any compassion for people who torture other people's pets, I couldn't forgive them. That would not be possible. Only those animals and the God Who made them can forgive those who poison animals. And I hope to live to see those disgraces to humankind suffer much, much more than any individual animal...enough to balance all the misery of all the animals who did and did not survive.

I got up this morning knowing that it might be a good market day, but I had too much to do online. One job  to collect payment for, one to finish, one to negotiate. Cyberchores to wrap up. Yes, although the big glyphosate news story hasn't broken enough to be worth reporting yet, it's been a month; there ought to be a Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter. And also there had to be a blog post about what the cell phone's cheap little camera doesn't quite show you: the three-colored grass. No direct sunlight, no true colors in cell phone pictures. You might think this photograph of the lazy fool's side yard shows just the usual wintertime mix of tiny green plants and frozen dead ones. Look again. The colors are grayed, but you'll see that two of those grass stalks, and a few of the blades of crabgrass, have a much redder color than the other yellowish winter-killed grass...

What produces that three-colored grass? New, green grass (including crabgrass) pops up, even in January, whenever the temperatures are not actually below freezing. Idiot and his sons used, when his children were living in the house, to mow this sloping patch of yard every week. That was bad enough, because the slope is below a road and Bermuda grass will not hold a steep bank below a road in wet weather, as we have all seen along Route 23...but on Thursday, probably in the morning, one of this idiot family had swung by and thought, "I don't have time to mow but I don't want any prospective buyers to see unmown grass--horrors!--so I'll just spray poison on the whole lawn." During the next few hours, glyphosate had no effect on the yellow vegetation, which was already dead, nor on the new vegetation, which continued to pop up, but it dried out the stalks of those other little plants and some of the tips of the crabgrass, producing that brighter, redder color for a day or so before those plant parts will fade to the same color as the parts that died naturally.

What woke me in the night would have been glyphosate vapors drifting up from the railroad, which was lined with three-colored vegetation this morning too; the Southern Railroad Company always spray poison on the railroad in the middle of the night. What I smelled yesterday evening would have been a fresher application of glyphosate to the idiots' yard. Maybe it was even some "helpful" real estate agent, rather than the idiots themselves, who poisoned the yard; I wasn't watching. But that three-colored yard tells us all we need to know.

I'm not going to post the idiots' name here, but I am going to post the picture of the property they're trying to sell, so that they can keep paying taxes on it for another ten years or else pay somebody to take it over.

One thing we can do to build a healthier world, Gentle Readers, is to look for three-colored vegetation around houses for sale. People poison their yards because they think that will help them sell houses for higher prices. We can help correct that mistake. We can publicize the fact that these properties may contain residues of poisons that may make people sick for who knows how long, so their market value has dropped below zero. We can tell owners who are trying to unload real estate with three-colored grass around it, "I might take that place off your hands if you pay me a couple of thousand dollars an acre, just to pay taxes on it while it recovers from having been poisoned! It's not worth anything now, for sure. Maybe in ten years, if the soil is assayed and all that stuff you sprayed on it has completely broken down, it might be worth some money again. Maybe. It's a very risky investment."

 

Do not buy this property, Gentle Readers. Do not let anyone else buy it. That lovely, scenic little brook runs below the poisoned grass shown above. It is washing glyphosate residues, AMPA and other nasty stuff, down toward Tennessee now. Whoever owns it might be considered responsible for making people sick in Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, or even Louisiana. Yes, the idiots who poisoned that grass need to pay anyone who takes the risk of owning that field now.

We should be snapping pictures of poisoned properties, whenever it's possible to snap a blurry image that proves that plants have been poisoned. We should be posting them on social media with tags that include #GlyphosateAwareness and the name of the nearest town, e.g. #GateCityVA, so people will know better than to pay for these properties.

Further along the road, before accepting a lift into town with a neighbor, I saw further evidence of glyphosate poisoning along the railroad. Some poor soul had spewed blood-flecked mocha-colored froth into a napkin and thrown the napkin out beside the road. Since it landed on the passenger's side, who knows whether the sufferer spewed upward or downward, but it had definitely come out of a human body. Maybe the body belonged to the fool who poisoned the lawn; I hope it did, rather than to some innocent child who waited for the school bus at a railroad crossing. It was too cold for frogs, dead or alive, or for birds to be flying and singing. I did not see a dead bird...yet. At least the robins I've often seen flitting over the lawn photographed above are probably still further south.

I came in, sat down, bought coffee, went to the bathroom, and instead of anything a healthy person would see floating around a water-flush toilet, what I flushed away this morning was about a tablespoon full of blood and little separate semi-solid blood clots. That, too, is now on its way to promote the growth of cancers, the loss of valuable native animals and birds and insects, and the growth of Bermuda grass and Johnson grass and Spanish Needles and kudzu and very little else, in Tennessee. Sorry, Tennessee readers, that's what youall get for having sewer systems so you can keep those nasty old water-flush toilets. Nobody in Virginia would be dropping poisoned blood into your water supply if we could help it. 

Maybe it's a symptom of glyphosate poisoning, too...I think people need to have the evidence of the harm glyphosate does shoved in their faces. I snapped a picture of blighted grass. Maybe I should have snapped one of the blood clots. Maybe I should have saved the actual blood clots, themselves, and thrown them at the idiot's white door frame. Maybe what worked for the homosexual lobby is what it will take to convince Americans to stop the insanity. 

There is not, there never was, and there never will be a "weed" as ugly as glyphosate. Friends don't let friends spray poisons...especially on yards they are hoping to sell.

Peter Stocker Embarrasses Friends of the Earth

These days I hear a lot more hillbillies say "Joe-wurge" than "Jarge," but one of my grandmothers was a Tennessee hillbilly, and she said "Jarge." Therefore today's topical song is in Hillbilly Mode...dum-de dum-de dum-de dum-de...

Come and listen to my story'bout a man named George,
Curious indeed how he's still fit to roam at large,
Ninety years old and more if he's a day,
And never lived here, yet he wants to run the U.S.A.!
Soros that is! Crazy like a...Silver fox!

Well, the first time I saw him made me wish I hadn't looked,
Funded a foundation whose grant fouled up a friend's book.
Then he paid poor people to be pests as "Occupiers."
Since that year he's funded lots of miscellaneous liars,
Mudslingers that is! 'N' spin artists! 'N' Latter-Day Socialists!

Well, his idea of retirement is to work for all he's worth;
Now he's fighting Trump and using our "Friends of the Earth."
It's a treat to see that this old fellow's still got game!
But it might be a treason charge to sign below his name!
Bad idea that is! If he touched it! Leave it alone!

If Peter Stocker, F.O.E., sent you that "interview,"
Just hit that "Trash" button,'cos here's all a click will do:
Try to steer away from glyphosate and just blame Trump
For following Obama's errors...send that to the "dump"!
Beg much, Pete? Stay out of! My e-mail!


Actually I wasn't surprised that the "digital interview" from Friends of the Earth ended with a plea for money. I was surprised, though, by its blatant awfulness. A person reading the "digital interview" is being set up to think that tolerance for glyphosate and other deadly poisons in the food supply, oil leaks, and a sold-out E.P.A., are new things for which the Trump Administration is to blame. The Trump Administration does deserve some blame, because all Presidents of the United States should pledge to uphold the legendary desk sign of Harry S Truman: "The Buck Stops Here." (That's a reference to then-current U.S. slang; it meant that if other government offices don't solve a problem, the President has to try.) However, the E.P.A. was reasonably accused of being a sluggish sold-out pit of swampiness in 1973, the leaking pipeline was planned during the Obama Administration, and glyphosate levels in the food supply became increasingly massive and toxic every year since 2009.

Here's my reply to the "digital interview" that went out under the name of Peter Stocker at Friends of the Earth:

"
Nice try to raise money. However I'm quite sure you have more than I do, so you should send me some money. I'm interested in fixing the issues, not attacking a person or party. Glyphosate Awareness has NO politics. We welcome Bernie Sanders; we'd welcome George Wallace or Lyndon LaRouche if they were alive, too. We nag at Trump; we would have nagged at Obama if we'd absorbed more information sooner; we will nag at the next administration if we have to coexist with glyphosate that long.

And, although I think his tolerance for glyphosate would come closer to being a valid reason to impeach Trump than the current foofarah, I think efforts to impeach Trump are a waste of taxpayers' money that will probably cost the opposition more than it costs Trump.

Wake up and smell the coffee. Soros has already been identified as funding this campaign so, although patriotic and public-spirited Americans wish this interesting old man the best, we don't want to be tarnished by association with his efforts to buy influence on U.S. politics. That could subject Trump's opposition to the same kind of charges of "treason" that are being raised against Trump. I voted against Trump before and will probably do it again but let's keep clear heads, even about Trump.

PK
"

Good News for Some Seniors

So, two weeks ago someone paid for a blog post I have yet to do, while I've been working with e-friends on books. This morning by way of a prod someone paid for two more posts. The Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter is still moving forward but its schedule is changing. It's time to give the nice person the post already. This post is about some relatives of the sponsor, who are of course more distant relatives of mine (this being Gate City), and about other elderly relatives across North America.

Ten years of glyphosate insanity have given many non-celiacs an insight into the celiac experience. It's hard to describe this experience within the terms of this web site's contract, but this web site will try. These days many people know they're celiacs because their celiac relatives had their blood tested when they were children, but for a long time, the way people knew they were celiacs was the specific scary symptom known as celiac sprue. Sprue, a word most often used to describe the similar effects of a tropical bacterial infection with similar symptoms, is a frothy diarrhea and/or vomit that looks a bit like chocolate mousse, only streaked with blood and flecked with particles of undigested food.

Celiacs usually have had years of experience with their "spastic colons" before developing sprue, and usually manage to suffer discreetly. Most of the sprue in North America lands in toilets or "leaks" into Depends, or other brands of padded plastic-lined pants. People with unexpected glyphosate reactions don't always realize what's going on, which accounts for a mess I saw beside the road on the way in on Tuesday morning.

When young people have this symptom, what leaps to mind is probably cancer. When older people have it, what leaps to mind is "Not able to take care of self. Not fit to be in 'nice' retirement project." Or, if you've watched Roseanne Barr's classic movie She-Devil...



"Incontinence!"

Sometimes it's obvious that loss of bowel or bladder control is one of the things that wear out all at the same time as an aging body really does shut down and stop living. Some people grow old and die that way.

Then again, sometimes even at age eighty or ninety a person is fully conscious, has some ability to walk, and yet loses control of per excretory functions in the same way and for the same reasons a young person might.

During our conscious lifetimes most of us have episodes of incontinence, sometimes accompanied by loss of mobility. Some of these episodes are alcohol-induced; others are known as Norwalk Flu.

Others are glyphosate reactions, and although these reactions may threaten to become chronic, the good news is that people recover from them. Usually recovery begins as soon as the level of glyphosate inside the body drops below the individual's threshold level--typically about the time the poisoned food is flushed away.

During the week I talked to a couple of people from the local retirement projects. They were talking about how sick their neighbors in the projects have been, about which ones were helping which other ones scrub messes off the floors--mercifully, the projects have hard tile floors that don't show bleach spots.

These are the people for whom do-gooders have been snapping up all those cans of corn and boxes of cereal at must-sell prices, because people who wanted to buy canned corn and cereal at the regular price had already noticed that it made them sick. "Well, it's outdated food." Yes, and it was unfit for consumption by any living creature before it was outdated, too; that's why.

I read that a clueless young singer is dedicating a concert to "farmers," raising money to donate masses of unsalable glyphosate-poisoned and probably genetically modified grain to "hunger relief." Ooohhh. And the people buying tickets to that concert think they don't believe in punishing welfare cheats by measures like one I've often proposed--oh how mean I am!--of requiring welfare recipients to spend 40 hours each week on a day labor site. Some of the people who spend their cash on drugs, by choice or necessity, and tell food bank volunteers that they're hungry, are in for torture. Could they but know what knots their insides are about to tie themselves into, if they had the choice, they'd beg to be sent to that day labor site!

During the week I was also reminded of the time a friend's father moved into a retirement project, had a minor accident during the night, and was caught bleaching a spot in the morning. On his first full day in his new flat he was told to move, or be moved into a nursing home, that day. My husband and I had just moved into a house the seller had fitted with brand-new wool carpeting, and were enjoying the downstairs rooms, ourselves--it was still hot enough that a computer wouldn't run in the upstairs office; but my husband was a bit indignant that I'd even asked him before inviting the friend's father to move into our downstairs bedroom. The way we were brought up, you don't let your elders, or your friends' elders, be put in nursing homes.

Instead, of course, you Care (it really ought to have a capital C): You move into their house if possible, or they move into yours if necessary, so you can be no more than one room away from them at all times. You wheel them to the bathroom if possible, or haul bedpans back and forth. You wash the sheets, and the quilts that go between the sheets and the rubber mattress cover, during the times when you're not walking behind the person to make sure person doesn't fall, or otherwise doing the person's bidding. You get up in the middle of the night. You make the care of this person's dying body the focus of your life. Whether or not the person knows you're there, or has any idea who you are: no lucid moment when the person might have a message of love, pardon, or forgiveness to leave should ever be lost.

The first year or two I lived in the house now known to cyberspace as the Cat Sanctuary, my mother was showing me how this is done. Oh, what a...it was sixteen months actually. Grandmother was a Perfect Southern Lady and a heroine. Mother was not, strictly speaking, Southern but she was also a heroine. They were very, very polite to each other and usually didn't dump their real feelings on my brother, Dad, or me. I was a skinny, sickly, undiagnosed celiac child but that was the year I was skinniest and sickliest.

It was a relief, later, that Dad was one of the older people who don't actually want that much of a time and energy commitment from their children. Some people don't. All blind people spill things on floors and Dad didn't mind his daughters mopping his floors, but when his bed needed cleaning he shouted through the door, "Go away. No females allowed here! Your Cousin John Doe can come in if he wants to."

There's actually a wide range of opinions about family care. Some people like to be visited by all their young relatives, but fret about some of their relatives not being big and strong enough to catch them if they started to fall. Some don't mind being cleaned and dressed by a same-sex relative, but would give themselves heart attacks from pure humiliation if they were cleaned or dressed by an opposite-sex relative. Some would feel mortified if they had to be cleaned or dressed by any of their own children. Some want to spend their last days with one "special" heir. Some want to draw up a rota where all their younger relatives, roughly in proportion to the degree of kinship, spend some time with them during every week.

And some people really do want to be allowed to die, when they've stopped living, without any particular effort to keep their hearts beating longer. Some people feel very strongly about this. Sara Teasdale, among others, loathed the thought of being helpless and useless so much that she committed suicide when, according to doctors, she was probably in no danger of any permanent disability.

Is it, as writers like Stephen King and Jacquelyn Mitchard have postulated in fiction, the last act of filial devotion to help a dying parent commit suicide? I hope not. But it may be the last act of filial devotion to witness all those heartbreaking documents people find it necessary to write, rewrite, and videotape, affirming that they don't want their bodies artificially prevented from dying when their minds are ready to go.

So, suppose you are (somebody I know). You have a grumpy old relative who replies to all hints about home sharing with "I'm only seventy-five, I might have an overnight date." He likes being alone in a big empty house. He seems to be living on cheap greasy meat, Coca-Cola in the morning, and beer in the evening. You try to leave healthier things, like those crisp and juicy summer apples, at his house. He offers them to other people, warning them that he ate one and it didn't stay down ten minutes. (That is a glyphosate reaction. He has other problems too, but if you monitor his complaints, they follow the timing of the poisoning of the railroad near his house. He felt bad after inhaling vapors and then couldn't keep that glyphosate-poisoned apple down.)

So one day he doesn't answer the door. You let yourself in, and you find him lying on the bottom of the stairs, facing up, on a broken knee, a broken wrist, and two cracked ribs, barely able to push his face out of the horrible little puddle on the step nearest his head. As you approach, making guilt-stricken pity noises, he screams something that sounds like an atherosclerosis rage attack and vomits on your feet. Clearly he "can't take care of himself." Is it time to put him in a nursing home?

If he recognizes you and says no, the position of this web site is: NO. It may be time for you or someone else to move into the basement. Because he's old and has lost bone mass, it may take longer for his bones to heal than it would for yours or your child's. Because he's humiliated enough by having this reaction, even without your having seen it, he may be very unpleasant to be around--even for himself. But his life's not over yet.

He could go back to work, if he had a job he enjoyed doing, as soon as the knee permits.

He can probably drive, as soon as the wrist permits.

If he's been the head of the clan, or of your branch of it, he still is.

When we get glyphosate (and the similar chemicals some eager fools are offering to replace it) out of the food supply, your relative's digestion will probably become regular again.

Trust celiacs on this. A lot of us have already been as sick as your relative is now--some of us at appallingly early ages. We didn't tell you because we knew you didn't really want to know, but, if you know someone whose favorite fragrances are all sort of compatible with Oxy's Pet Odor Eliminator, there's a reason for this. We went gluten-free, we'd been overtraining just in order to be flabby or skinny sickly people all those years, we became positively athletic and so perky as to be annoying.

A glyphosate ban will have similar effects on your competent but incontinent elders. And the one who's seventy-five just might have a hot date again, too.

And the one who wants to be in the retirement project rather than the nursing home, if he can't be in his own home? The retirement project is the place for him all right. We know because he still knows where he is.

Am I going to move into the project as your relative's attendant? Don't be ridiculous. This post is about women as well as men, but if we're talking about male retirees, moving in with them is for their sons or nephews to do. For me to do it would be a disgrace. That some men in the project are not living with their sons or nephews in their own homes is already a disgrace. Don't get me started.

Even for me to move in with someone else's mother or aunt would be a disgrace, because hello, my own mother is an eighty-year-old celiac. I have to be free to stay with her, if that becomes necessary.

However, considering the number of retirees who are having these occasional episodes of incontinence, I see no reason why the retirees shouldn't pool their resources and hire a few younger people to come in and mop their floors.

It's not incompetence. It's not senility. It is SIMPLE FOOD POISONING.