Le Déluge

Back when I was in college, and running my first company, I regularly took the Metro North from New Haven to New York City several times a week. Each time I did, I’d stroll through the Posman Books location inside Grand Central, perusing the new fiction and non-fiction laid out on the tables by the front. I kept a list of books I wanted to read. And, dismayingly, despite being a life-long voracious reader, that to-read list always seemed to expand exponentially faster than the list of books I’d actually managed to finish. I remember being a bit depressed about it at the time, knowing I’d simply never be able to read everything I wanted to.

These days, I only rarely make it to a bookstore. Yet, every day, I watch enticing information and ideas stream across my path in an ever-growing number of mediums. On top of books and audiobooks, articles ‘saved to read later’ pile up in Pocket, episodes of podcasts accumulate in Overcast, blog entries stack in Feedly, and Tweets from smart and insightful people rush through my feed all day long.

In a way, that increased information overload has actually been comforting. With just a book-reading backlog to contend with, I could sometimes convince myself that I might, with herculean effort, find a way to ‘catch up.’ But now, with what I’d like to consume so vastly outpacing any conceivable human bandwidth, I’ve been forced to become a bit more zen. I learn what I can, and let the rest go.

Even so, I can’t help but sometimes wish I could freeze time, to finally make my way through all that delightful, fascinating content. As Tolkien observed, “I wish life was not so short. Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.”

In the Weeds

[Is gluten intolerance really about pesticides?]

As I’ve said before, I’m not a nutrition dogmatist. While I think an ancestral-based approach is a good starting point for most people, I also strongly believe that differences in genetics, epigenetics, and microbiome cause different people to react very differently to the same foods. So it seems a prudent approach to start by paring down to a healthful dietary core, then test the re-addition of new foods to gauge their individualized effects.

Though wheat isn’t a central part of my own diet, I find that I can easily enjoy a bowl of pasta, say, without issue. But for a number of friends and Composite clients, removing grains has had hugely beneficial health impact.

More than a few of those ‘grain-reactive’ folks, however, have shared with me similar stories: though they feel terrible after eating even organic breads here in the US, while traveling in Italy or France, they decided that the chance to enjoy the local cuisine trumped their usual dietary concerns. But even after eating relatively large amounts of a food that they couldn’t tolerate at home, often for days at a time, they had no problems while abroad.

I’m dubious of claims (at least, health-based ones) against GMO’s, so I’d previously written off those international bread stories as the vagaries of travel – the excitement of being somewhere new, or the masking effects of a circadian rhythm tossed out of whack.

But today, I ended up diving down a rabbit-hole of research papers about glyphosate, an herbicide used as a primary ingredient in Monsanto’s hugely popular pesticide Roundup. Roundup is nearly ubiquitous in the US, where it’s used on 98% of non-organic wheat. And it travels well enough when airborne that it’s found on more than 50% of US organic wheat, too.

Though Roundup was approved as safe for humans back in the 1970’s, deeper research over the last decade has increasingly indicated that glyphosate – especially when combined with other ‘inert’ ingredients in Roundup – may be an extremely potent mitochondrial disruptor, which in turn can cause a broad array of health issues.

In other words, while people are complex, foods are, too. And, indeed, over the next few years, I suspect we’re going to discover that the rise of ‘gluten intolerance’ has less to do with an increase in people reacting negatively to wheat, and more to do with people reacting to the specific ways in which wheat is increasingly raised here in the US.

Our approach to large-scale agribusiness has certainly changed the fundamental economics of how we feed the world. But boy does it seem to come with a lot of second-order costs.

Key to Happiness

As the old adage goes, you only value your health once it’s gone.

That appears to apply to the health of your digital devices, too; I never realized how much I enjoy the left-side shift, control, and command keys on my MacBook until they suddenly gave out earlier today.

Since then, I’ve discovered that I use command- and control-dependent keyboard shortcuts pretty much nonstop, and I capitalize each ‘I,’ and the start of every sentence, using the left shift key by habitual default.

Having popped out and cleaned all three keys to no avail, I’m planning to simply leave the laptop at rest overnight, in the unrealistic hope that the wonky keys somehow miraculously fix themselves. And, barring that, I’ve blocked out all tomorrow morning to camp out at the Apple store, to see if their team of Geniuses can get things fixed relatively quickly in-house.

In the meantime, I’m at least getting to put my iPhone thumb-keyboarding skills to the serious test. As they say, fml.

Workshop

by Billy Collins

I might as well begin by saying how much I like the title.
It gets me right away because I’m in a workshop now
so immediately the poem has my attention,
like the Ancient Mariner grabbing me by the sleeve.

And I like the first couple of stanzas,
the way they establish this mode of self-pointing
that runs through the whole poem
and tells us that words are food thrown down
on the ground for other words to eat.
I can almost taste the tail of the snake
in its own mouth,
if you know what I mean.

But what I’m not sure about is the voice,
which sounds in places very casual, very blue jeans,
but other times seems standoffish,
professorial in the worst sense of the word
like the poem is blowing pipe smoke in my face.
But maybe that’s just what it wants to do.

What I did find engaging were the middle stanzas,
especially the fourth one.
I like the image of clouds flying like lozenges
which gives me a very clear picture.
And I really like how this drawbridge operator
just appears out of the blue
with his feet up on the iron railing
and his fishing pole jigging—I like jigging—
a hook in the slow industrial canal below.
I love slow industrial canal below. All those l’s.

Maybe it’s just me,
but the next stanza is where I start to have a problem.
I mean how can the evening bump into the stars?
And what’s an obbligato of snow?
Also, I roam the decaffeinated streets.
At that point I’m lost. I need help.

The other thing that throws me off,
and maybe this is just me,
is the way the scene keeps shifting around.
First, we’re in this big aerodrome
and the speaker is inspecting a row of dirigibles,
which makes me think this could be a dream.
Then he takes us into his garden,
the part with the dahlias and the coiling hose,
though that’s nice, the coiling hose,
but then I’m not sure where we’re supposed to be.
The rain and the mint green light,
that makes it feel outdoors, but what about this wallpaper?
Or is it a kind of indoor cemetery?
There’s something about death going on here.

In fact, I start to wonder if what we have here
is really two poems, or three, or four,
or possibly none.

But then there’s that last stanza, my favorite.
This is where the poem wins me back,
especially the lines spoken in the voice of the mouse.
I mean we’ve all seen these images in cartoons before,
but I still love the details he uses
when he’s describing where he lives.
The perfect little arch of an entrance in the baseboard,
the bed made out of a curled-back sardine can,
the spool of thread for a table.
I start thinking about how hard the mouse had to work
night after night collecting all these things
while the people in the house were fast asleep,
and that gives me a very strong feeling,
a very powerful sense of something.
But I don’t know if anyone else was feeling that.
Maybe that was just me.
Maybe that’s just the way I read it.