Oregon Coast 2019 – Day 0

JWise Photo of the Day, Travels

Caroline Wise at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, Arizona

We are flying from Phoenix, Arizona, to Portland, Oregon, tonight. We are on today’s last non-stop flight that will have us arriving at midnight. After we fetch our rental car our hotel is just a couple of minutes from there. The plan is for an early wake-up so we can get moving south on Interstate 5 to hopefully reach the coast by noon. If weather from the interior to the coast looks like we could hit icy roads, we’ll instead head out the Columbia River towards Astoria and then south, which will require at least 8 hours of driving.

As I said in a previous blog recently, this is our 18th trip to Oregon over the past 17 years. We are surprised that after this many times and our ability to venture nearly anywhere we’d like to, we are still as excited as ever to be encountering this beautiful corner of America yet again.

At the airport, I start to become overwhelmed with my social anxiety, seeing that the masses are a corruption of sniffling convulsions who have no idea they are in public. Their tics are on the verge of Tourettes, while their vulgar displays of what is measured in their minds as fashionable drive me to the edge of losing my composure and returning to the car so we can have a pleasant drive north. This temporary clan of people only has one thing in common with me: we are at the same airport; beyond that, they are barely human. I make this assessment from the pedestal of advantage as I’m able to see through their insipid artifacts of fake personas that attempt to show aspects of a thing they find relevant, but this act is transparent. This facade is an illusion, allowing their shallow meaninglessness to scream at me, “Look, look here! I have these things that give me the appearance of relevance!”

I can’t shrink at these antics and allow their greasy lather to simply flow off my back. I become entangled by their creepy web of superficiality that can be read as a plea to become meaningful if only they could cast off their hostility toward knowledge and ditch the banality. Their consumption of media defines their shape, and their future is a custom-made straight jacket subliminally created by their lack of personal intellectual responsibility. This nothingness they embody oozes out of them, dripping like hot wax into my sense of well-being. This is how I fly.

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.

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.