Week 2; The wheels on the taste buds don’t go round. They wobble and fall off.

I heard a term that resonated with me awhile back;

Infantile Omnipotence.

It basically means, since something isn’t happening to me or anyone I know, then it won’t happen to me.

I don’t have that. I know I’m in for a difficult journey, but I’m getting a tough time wrapping my head around logistics and timing. I’m certain I’ll be riding the pain train eventually. But it’s not happening now. This creates a gulf between what’s the best thing to grease the skids for healing and my reality. For instance, someone suggested I take off and only concentrate on “Healing”. I simply can’t take three months off to keep my head straight and concentrate solely on therapy. I cannot “not” work.

And what would such days off look like? Given what I do for a living, a large part of that time off would be doing exactly what I do all day. I work on computers and software (in a nutshell). Sometimes, my days off look just like work. The only difference being what’s on the screen. Since my company is being very accommodating, why not work until I can’t?

One of the things that’s been really heartwarming is the flood of support we’ve been getting from our friends. They work really hard on meals that they bring by. However, right on queue this week, my mouth got drier, and the wheels fell off my taste buds. Given how much I like to cook and eat, this is traumatic. They work so hard, and to me just about everything tastes like dog food boiled in Vaseline. I can sense texture, but can only barely taste what I’m eating. Basically, my brain is plugging in what I smell to what I should taste. Doesn’t work so well. I had a couple hot dogs today that may as well have been dried painters caulk wrapped in a sponge.

Awhile back a friend of mine hyped me to the book “Omnivore’s Dilemma”. A pretty interesting tome, cut into three sections. The first of which was about how pervasive corn is in our diet. It seems “Big Corn” is ruining things. I will argue that if they dropped tariffs for imported sugar, high fructose corn syrup would probably vanish. But on the other hand, he had an excellent point about beef. Corn fed beef, specifically. Cows don’t generally eat corn, they eat grasses. But we feed them corn, then have to drug them so they can cope. By the way, one of the big differences in Wagu or Kobe is that the cows are fed grasses. Those of you that have had them know the taste difference is staggering. So, he had an exercise where the next time you eat a burger contemplate what you taste. Savor it, if you will. Damn if he wasn’t right. You taste the bun, onions, tomato, lettuce, cheese, mustard, and ketchup. Far away in the background is something like beef. The experience ruined fast food burgers for me.

It’s something I put into play every time I eat – or used to. Try this with Bread. Contemplate if there were zero taste, only texture, how appetizing would it be? I can tell you, chewed with what little saliva I produce gives the feeling of a mouthful of joint compound.

Weirdly enough, What I can taste most is chocolate and vanilla. So all is not lost.

I’m down 10 pounds already. I know there’ll be a discussion about that in the very near future. My reasoning? No Booze, No bread, no fast food of any kind. So I don’t find that astonishing.