A fun thing about YouTube is how touchy its recommendations algorithm is. I look up a few YouTubes on fasting and bammo! I'm immersed in the keto fat blasting world, full of freakish exceptions to the rules (you too could be one of them).
I'm doing what I call my Flowers for Algernon diet. There's some unpacking there if you're new, but its about a miracle drug, el dopa (L-DOPA), that unfroze a bunch of catatonic people and made them move again. Eventually, however, this miracle effect wore off.
Although Charlie is not catatonic, is more your average joe not-an-Einstein, he becomes an Einstein, briefly, thanks to his Algernon Diet. The parallels are there.
Anyway, today was the day to get back into glucose cycling. That's why I avoided those yummy snacks at Meeting: I was a man with a plan. Good to connect with y'all Quakers.
I walked home by way of Movie Madness, renting two David Lynch movies. Why? I'm a student of Synergetics, as a kind of weirdology (explorations in thinking, the geometry of). Mark Fisher is a current focus, the British philosopher, and honorary subgenius (in my flight patterns).
Mark Fisher and David Graeber (anthropologist) both write eloquently about "BS jobs" i.e. looking busy as a profession in itself, even if you're really just pacing the hallways, like my friend Glenn did, when at NSA, post seeing action in Vietnam.
Lets distinguish between "doing a meaningless job" and "making oneself useful to the world". These may well be orthogonal, but then orthogonal doesn't mean "at odds" or "in conflict" but rather "independently of" as in "still free to".
You're free to make yourself useful to the world even where and when you consider the job in itself to be meaningless.
For example, in taking in the human experience of being a bartender in Vegas, you're setting yourself up to be insightful and curious, as the best bartenders are. They're also multi-dextrous in the sense of able to multitask at the level of an experienced restaurant chef, in many cases.
Lots of jobs are changing though, not because of AI, but because of apps like TikTok (including TikTok itself) that allow a bartender or train engineer to hang a phone and live stream, sharing an over the shoulder view of what it's like to do the job.
Not only that, the engineer is free to chat.
No, I'm not saying "looking down into a device" and making the world unsafer thereby. Engineers: keep your eyes riveted where they should be and all your attention on "the road" (whatever that means in your field). Pray that I do the same. But then let peripheral cues stay important too.
It's actually easier, not harder, when you have others watching, to maintain a state of acute awareness (coffee also helps sometimes). Many religious have prayed for similar supervision from the angels, whereas now ordinary mortals are free to supervise (be the guardians of) one another.
So that was four days with no eats, only fluids. I had a hamburger Tuesday night. Today is Sunday.
Those fluids were not exactly calorie-free, as the Spindrift grapefruit seltzers have other juices mixed in, and therefore sugars. I drank lots of coffee, in addition to water, but then I do that anyway.
I broke my fast after Quaker Meeting (I walked to and from) with an old favorite: fresh cooked pinto beans in an Instant Pot (a one hour process) added to melted cheese on a spinach-tinged burrito wrap, large size, with raw uncooked onion and spinach, nutritional yeast, Picante hot sauce (that's a brand).
Just one will do for the time being. I don't wanna sink back into "catatonia" too quickly.
A first sign I was slipping was this afternoon, after eating, when I tested the new toaster, from an estate sale, but without toast. A dry run.
It would have worked fine (the toaster was in mint condition) had I only remembered to remove something plastic I'd slipped in to one of the slots, during transport. I neglected to dump it out, and instead filled the kitchen with obnoxious fumes as whatever it was melted and fused to the internals.
There's no way to rescue it; worth way more than the $5 I paid for it, but no more.
For those unfamiliar with "ketotonics", the theory is that our hominid ancestors developed the fat cycle in order to undertake prolonged hikes, from A to B, without any ready source of food.
The promise of a feast at the far end, once Valhalla was attained, was sufficiently alluring, i.e. realistic, to propel the fat-burners to set about thoroughly exploring their globe. Chimpanzees, in contrast, according the YouTube authorities, don't really have a fat burning cycle i.e. they can't feed their brains with "calorie bricks" saved up as adipose tissues in various places.
Humans know how to plump up and press on. Fat is money in the bank (saved calories) if you're planning on lean times, perhaps already scheduled per your religious and/or secular practice.
And so, the theory goes, when you get off the glucose treadmill (eating food) and experience lean living, your brain starts eating "keto bricks" and yowza wowza they "taste good" (metaphorically, brains having no taste buds, really).
In subjective terms, many entering ketosis experience enlightenment or other forms of satori. What you get depends on you and your brain and how its all wired. Be OK with varying mileage.
The fact is, a male of my make and model is capable of going without food for many days on end. When that's imposed, as a cruel form of punishment, then other hormones kick in, not a pleasant experience. But if I'm voluntarily pursuing objectives, such as happiness, then the trip may be well worth my time, and worth repeating.
