Modified Fasting

JWise Photo of the Day

Avocados and Green Superfood

Here I am again trying near starvation. This week’s regimen is a modified Fasting Modified Diet (FMD). Instead of the Prolon version, I’m saving the $250 and trying to substitute with avocado and Green Superfood. What is all this you ask? A month ago I spent a week on a heavily restricted diet that kept my caloric intake under 850 calories per day. It’s designed by Dr. Valter Longo to mimic a water-only fast and includes the aforementioned $250 box of foodstuffs.

Back when I was first considering FMD I was still quite skeptical about the whole thing so I was thinking of trying the avocado variant when a friend I’d told about the program asked me about going in on a fast using a box of food items, specially designed by Prolon, that very precisely supply the balance of nutrients as recommended by Dr. Longo’s exhaustive research. She was taking advantage of a buy-2-get-1-free promo which allowed me to pay just $165 to test the efficacy for myself. It wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve tried but I liked the results.

As my friend wanted to use her second box she asked if I was up for round two. I said sure but I wanted to explore the avocado suggestion. So, starting yesterday morning I began this modified fast.

My diet for all five days of this week will be as follows: I do my best to not eat my first “meal” of the day until noon. That meal is one avocado with a bit of olive oil and lemon and an 8-ounce glass of water with Green Superfood powder. I do this twice a day for lunch and dinner. These 400 calorie meals are supposed to make fasting easier and while it’s not strictly a fast the nutritional makeup of this diet is intended to “trick” the body into acting as though it is a real fast.

Glocalization

JWise Thoughts

Glocalization

After spending the majority of my life being deterritorialized, I’m now “cursed,” living a glocalized existence. Little could I have understood that leaving New York state as a 5-year-old, being moved around between relatives, moving to California and taking up residence in Long Beach, Monterey Park, and then West Covina prior to moving to Arizona and within a few years of that heading off to Germany, where I’d be at home for ten years, I was being primed to have a nomadic sense of place.

It seems apparent to me now that this type of nomadism works to deterritorialize people. I had no connectivity to traditional social, cultural, or political identities but instead grew adept at normalizing diverse tastes for the various regional attitudes, flavors, and sounds that were integrating me. As I grew older, I desired to bring the hodgepodge of influences from my various stages in life to new modalities where novelty ruled, and traditions were never able to take hold.

Without American football, beer, god, television, Christmas, or guns as foundational cornerstones of who I see myself, I have been able to instead find refuge in the music of our vast world, pleasure in sampling the taste of water, the thrill of exploration, and the celebration of every day as my version of an experiential life. I’m in a state of near-constant curiosity about those things I’m yet to experience. I’m actively localizing my encounter with the globe and growing impatient with the market’s failure to bring me life as I want it to be: convenient and within reach.

For me, the palette of reality I’m able to paint from far exceeds the immediacy it affords me. The desert I live in is not only a physical realm but a metaphor for how I’m trapped in a kind of monotheistic capitalism, meaning there’s a tendency to be forced to pray before the American God of Consumerism. In my perfect world, the taste of Burma, China, and Italy, the live sounds of Indonesian gamelan, German minimalist techno, and the heavenly emanations of a choir singing in Latin, along with the clothes of rural Croatia, the fabric dying of Kumo shibori, or even a dhoti would be easily found and used, though I feel uncomfortable using these things here in conformist America.

As such, I no longer feel like an American in the classical sense of that identity but subjugated by a cultural orthodoxy verging on militantism. From my perspective outside this dominant purview, I feel it’s apparent that fear of losing the traditions and dominance of a ruling class has society scrambling to contain the evolutionary processes that are underway. It’s as though after 70 years of propagating a globalist agenda that was intended to strengthen American allies and contain leftist/communist anti-capitalism, the fruits of this global collaboration are having undesired follow-on effects.

The idea that putting the internet and humanity under tighter control could somehow quiet dissent and stymie attempts at rebellion seems to be futile. Our world shares music, film, food, art, electronics, communication, transportation, resources, and the environment, even when we are flawed in just how we do those things. Many people are well aware of the interdependence on one another, and it seems obvious that this will likely continue to shape our futures. The notion that this cat can be shoved into a box it left long ago is foolhardy at best.

Number 9 of 20

JWise Thoughts, Travels

Trip 9: We are now booked for a rather short 5-day visit at Yellowstone National Park with reservations in hand for Old Faithful Inn during May 2020.  I even called ahead to have a note put on our reservation asking for room #225 we’ve stayed in on nearly half a dozen of our visits. To date, we have spent 36 days spread between 8 trips here at Yellowstone; this visit will push us to 41 total days. You can bet I’m already thinking about a winter return, possibly as early as Christmas 2020.

Update: This trip was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Caroline Wise and John Wise in Yellowstone Jan 2010

Trip 8: The next time these two faces are seen in Yellowstone National Park, it will have been ten years since we were last in the park and 20 years since we made our first visit back in May 2000. This photo was taken on January 22, 2010, during our second winter visit to the first national park on Earth. This indulgence of being able to visit two winters in a row afforded us another eight days here. That ice-cream-colored beanie was hand-spun and knitted by the woman on my right, and I chose the colorway. I felt it made a bold statement.

Yellowstone Jan 2009

Trip 7: Our first winter visit to Yellowstone was for nine days, split between Mammoth Hot Springs and Old Faithful Snow Lodge. We thought the park was going to be enchanting, but we never could have anticipated just how astonishing the place is during winter. There’s a fraction of the number of people who visit during the summer, and the quiet and serenity that accompanies this time of year cannot be understated. We arrived on January 10th, 2009, in time to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary here in Yellowstone.

Canary Spring in Yellowstone July 2007

Trip 6: Four days over the long 4th of July weekend back in 2007 was enough to refresh our memories of how beautiful Yellowstone Park is.

Yellowstone Hot Spring May 2005

Trip 5: Only two days were spent in Yellowstone back in May 2005. My mother-in-law, Jutta Engelhardt, is with us again five years after her first visit to Yellowstone, this time in the spring instead of late fall.

Bison in Yellowstone May 2004

Trip 4: It’s May 2004, and we are with our friend Jay Patel on a cross-country road trip that wouldn’t have been complete without a stop in Yellowstone. Over the course of three days in the area, we spent a great deal of time exploring the geysers, mud pots, and wildlife. While you can’t tell from this photo, we also had plenty of snow to make snowmen and snow angels in.

Old Faithful Inn Yellowstone July 2003

Trip 3: Our only 1-day visit to Yellowstone occurred on July 6, 2003, after being away from the park for three years. We were on our way south after visiting Glacier National Park on the long 4th of July weekend.

Jutta Engelhardt and Caroline Wise in Yellowstone 2000

Trip 2: Under the guise of bringing Caroline’s mother, Jutta Engelhardt, over to see Yellowstone (because I’m that kind of selfless husband and son-in-law), I was able to convince my beautiful wife of the importance of making a second visit to this corner of Wyoming in the same year. Truth is, I would have sold Jutta to any bidder for the opportunity to visit again, as I couldn’t get our first visit out of my head. This is during October 2000, the closing days of the park. We spent five days on this visit.

Caroline Wise and John Wise in Yellowstone 2000

Trip 1: Our very first visit to Yellowstone National Park with our friends Ruby and Axel Rieke started on May 14th, 2000. While we had reserved a room for four days, I could have stayed for months. I was smitten with Yellowstone all summer long and schemed to figure out how to justify coming back sooner rather than later. Never in my wildest dreams could I have ever imagined that within 20 years, we’d be making our 9th visit and that we would be able to visit the park during all seasons.

Cleaning Up

JWise Photo of the Day, Thoughts

Back on November 1st, we bought a grabber from our local hardware store and took our 5-gallon bucket out for a walk around our neighborhood. We’d grown tired of the abundance of trash in our neighborhood and decided that we had to take personal responsibility for it, or we’d grow angrier being confronted with it every day.

Starting on the 1-mile loop, we walk a couple of times a day I thought we might pick up about 10 gallons of trash, but I was surprised by the reality of the situation. We had grown so accustomed to seeing the trash that much of it had become invisible. The statistics of exactly what has been collected boggle my mind. While we expanded our pick-up zone to a small area around the intersection we live next to, the majority of our new roles as trash collectors/de-ghettoization crew are focused on our walking route.

Here are the statistics so far:

  • 150 gallons or 30 buckets of often overflowing trash
  • 150-300 pounds is the estimated weight of our haul
  • 21 miles we’ve walked in our effort to pick all of this up
  • Four syringes
  • Six shopping carts returned to our nearby grocery store
  • One tire with one more that we still have to roll to a trash bin
  • One hubcap
  • Two bullet casings
  • $5.31 in cash
  • countless cigarette butts
  • hundreds of Halloween candy wrappers – consider the dates we’ve been doing this
  • probably a couple of hundred straws
  • dozen of plastic bags
  • various clothes, towels, shoes, work gloves, and rubber gloves

We refuse to pick up dog waste, though there is plenty.

My wish is for more people to go to their local hardware store and spend the $10-$20 for a picker/grabber and another $4 for a 5-gallon bucket and get out on their streets and start picking up the eyesores. Caroline and I will maintain this over the winter while we can still walk the streets of Phoenix before the heat prevents us from venturing outside for longer periods of time. Hmmm, this makes me think I should write to the CEO of Home Depot and ask them to partner with us on just such a project.

Not My Favorite Coffee Shop

JWise Photo of the Day

Plasma donor at my least favorite coffee shop in Phoenix, Arizona

There’s a certain major-brand coffee shop down the street from us that I was happy to see opening since that meant that they’d be so much closer to where we live. Then the reality of their choice in location became apparent and now I can honestly say they could shut this one down and I’d be okay with that. You see, they opened on a corner in front of a mostly empty plaza with the other major tenant being a blood plasma donation center. Across the street on one corner is a school for those who couldn’t do traditional high school, a discount store, and an area of the parking lot is taken over by people waiting for a gig as day labor. On another corner is a title-loan store that preys on the poverty of the people in the area. The last corner is a battery store but next door to them is a fast food joint that takes EBT (a.k.a. food stamps).

Here’s the scenario that makes this coffee shop my least favorite: Young men (always men) with bad attitudes (damage from their ineffectual fathers) set up shop in groups of two and three and sell heroin (or opioid of choice) right from this well-known global brand. It most typically works with two guys in the shop and one outside. At some point, a person drives into the parking lot and the person sitting out front goes and gets into the car; they drive away. But these are junkies so they drive to the other side of a tire shop that has drive-through bays so you can see the car on the other side. They sit there for a few minutes and then the seller gets out of the car and walks back to the shop.

Back in the front of the place of the green aprons, one of the guys on the inside either heads out to sit down with the seller or he goes to the bathroom, and after a minute or so the guy outside joins him in the toilet. Five minutes later they emerge and the cycle repeats.

On the other hand, we have those who apparently have already been a member of one of these not-so-subtle circuses and are now a member of the blood plasma donation spot where they go earn about $40, depending on the needs of the market. The next stop, likely per the instructions of the vampires buying junky blood is to go hydrate at the coffee shop, but this is where the heroin is also easily available, wtf?

A bandage around the elbow, a large ice-water, and the blank stare at the phone with their head pulsing to the music is the way they roll.

It’s a shit-show here and this isn’t the only unfolding tragedy. This corner is a transit point for homeless people, the mentally disturbed, and a large number of the poor who cannot fathom paying $5 for a cup of coffee. It’s nearly impossible for me to find productivity at this location as I’m distracted by the cavalcade of personalities that in some way I’m enchanted with. I think that tomorrow I’ll return to the place where I can get things done.

Romania Fest 2019

JWise Photo of the Day

One of the bands at Romania Fest 2019 in Phoenix, Arizona

It must be the season of the festival because here we are for the second week in a row hitting the circuit. Who are those pop stars rockin’ it onstage today? I can’t say but I can tell you that they are playing the hits, especially if you are a bit older and Romanian. The Romanian detail is important because that’s the clue to the theme of today’s event. The other detail I’m learning quickly about Serb Fest 2019 and Romania Fest 2019 is that these are fundraisers for the church that supports the community. With this bit of knowledge, our visits become more valuable to us as we know we are contributing to helping sustain a culture that remains important to a generation that grew up knowing these sights, sounds, and traditions.

Romanian Church in Phoenix, Arizona

The most obvious thing about not just this Romanian community but the Serbian too is that religion plays a large role and the number of people from these countries who live here in the Valley is still quite low, relatively speaking. (In comparison to the large Hindu population Phoenix has or the Hispanic community.) I have no way of knowing what the percentage is of people who come out but I’m guessing that the expense might limit participation to some degree. We easily spent $40 on each visit and that was just from buying entry and lunch.

Today’s food was a treat with Mititei being the first dish we sampled. These little sausages are nearly identical to the more well-known Serbo-Croatian sausage known as Cevapi or Cevapcici. Next on the menu were Sarmale or stuffed cabbage rolls with a side of sour cream. So far everything was pretty basic Slavic staples. The Romanian Fest 2019 culinary award however should go to the Ciorba de Burta. What is Ciorba de Burta you ask? It is tripe soup. Describing it simply as tripe soup would be a disservice because until you mix in the extra sour cream and more importantly the ramekin of garlic sauce with Romani power, the dish might be considered just okay. With the amount of garlic that we mixed into our large container of soup, we were enjoying the flavors of Romania for the next day and a half. We finished our visit with Caroline trying a Romanian beer for the first time as we sat and listened to some ladies singing traditional folk songs. Maybe you noticed we said nothing about chimney cake? Well they had those too but our festival allowance was now gone, a good thing as we really are trying to watch what we eat.