Philosophy: I find that I could spend hours proofing and rewriting even the smallest blog post. Unless I just bang things out without regard to grammar, content or style I’ll become hopelessly bogged down and never publish anything. So there’s a part of me that wants to say “yo, don’t judge” but another, more ruthless part that says “Judgements are crucial to maintaining a vital tension between quality and lucid productivity.”

That said feel free to contact me regarding anything posted here.

Here’s what I just said, but restated in internet

from C******** <***********@gmail.com>
to Dustin ☮
date Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 7:55 PM
subject Re: Toyotas and Other Items of Interest Oct 15

Well if you find yourself in New York, you should…….. However, if you wind up in Louisiana or anywhere near the Big Easy (I arrived tonight!), visit me. You can take pictures.

If that’s out of the realm of possibility, I’d settle for another phone call.

~********

from Dustin ☮ <*****grass@gmail.com>
to C**********
date Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 9:12 PM

what should we discuss on this phone call?

from C***********
to Dustin ☮
date Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 5:54 PM
subject Re: Toyotas and Other Items of Interest

So I wrote this up to be a little bit of a smart ass – but then I read something on your blog or twitter link from your facebook page that said you are in “a murderous rage.” Sooo I send this with trepidation.
But to respond to your question, I have this outline:

I seem to have run entirely out of patience for people talking to me about 2012. Unclear if this is allergies, whimsical feelings related to prescription cough medicine or the sheer ridiculousness of the claims.

If only a viable healthcare infrastructure could be built on good vibes surely the well wishes proffered by my friends could build a single payer system rivaling France. I am, in fact, marginally better than reported in the last blog post. Thanks for lookin out, yo

Now on to the report: Given a natural temperance towards intoxicants and what I’m guessing is a highly addictive substance (the doctor just handed me a bottle and rushed out) I have been dosing out substantially less of “papa’s medicine.” Prudence seems in order since I have been high as a velociraptor on a substance that is largely a mystery to me. If the first few hours of super “cough” syrup are met with phenomenal levels of blissed out detachment the last few are wrapped up with a sort of massively unqualified, omnidirectional Vader-esque rage. It’s nonsensically unbalanced really. For instance, today while perusing a taco menu I was instantly dismayed that the local “taqueria” did not consider rice and beans as basic ingredients for their fare.

Internally, a savage fury swept over me but I managed outwardly to only convey a wry, yet pricklingly condescending smile. The poor college student at the helm of the taqueria attempted a defense by showing me regular sized taco tortillas and pleading that there simply would not be enough space for rice and beans. I delivered a clipped repost about other taquerias somehow “managing” such a feat and marched out in self satisfied glory. About two righteous steps out the door I realized I had just been a stupid jerk. True, it was a bit silly not to include rice and beans but who cares? It was precisely the kind of interaction that makes the service industry a living hell, and for that, taco girl I look back with serious regret. After some self reflection I was unable to determine even generally why I was so angry. It was weird, again evocative of some sort of disembodied third person experience.

20 minutes later I became aware of a vicious hate towards trees, mountains, the outdoors in their totally and especially every single human being alive and dead. A curious thought bubbled up into my consciousness, more cough syrup would make it alllll bettttter. RED FLAG. I noticed it had be about 15 hours since my last fix and things started to make sense. So yeah, I’m taking it easy on the old sauce.

However, in other health related news, the good people at Harvard Medical School have conducted an interesting health related study

Nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance, according to a new study published online today by the American Journal of Public Health. That figure is about two and a half times higher than an estimate from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2002.

The study, conducted at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, found that uninsured, working-age Americans have a 40 percent higher risk of death than their privately insured counterparts, up from a 25 percent excess death rate found in 1993.

“The uninsured have a higher risk of death when compared to the privately insured, even after taking into account socioeconomics, health behaviors, and baseline health,” said lead author Andrew Wilper, M.D., who currently teaches at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “We doctors have many new ways to prevent deaths from hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease — but only if patients can get into our offices and afford their medications.”

Deaths associated with lack of health insurance now exceed those caused by many common killers such as kidney disease.

::: Full Article here :::

I just sort of feel like our whole country, until very recently, has just been drinking prescription cough medicine. Who cares about the health care crisis? This chair is amazing!!!

Anyway, lets hope I (and our country) emerge from this perilous trial not violently sick or hitting up med school friends for cough syrup scrips.

A doctor friend told me that my medication is so highly prized among degenerates that it is kept behind TWO locked cabinets at the hospital. I feel like I’m watching a movie about myself. The movie is mostly about me trying to check email via an extremely slow internet connection. I’m hoping for some explosions or political intrigue soon.

For the last week I’ve been fraught with either The Swine Flu or some sort of severe allergic reaction. Both possibilities are weird as I have a top notch immune system nor am I allergic to anything. Finally, when the wheezing hour long coughing fits failed to subside, I booked an appointment at Ye Olde Health Shack where I paid a highly educated professional absurd sums of money to tell me that I either had swine flu or a severe allergic reaction. At least I didn’t have to wait in line, ZING!

She was kind but “informed” me that I simply had to wait it out and visit the emergency room if I started coughing up blood {!}. As a lovely parting gift, I received antibiotics for no reason (!?!?!) and a magical prescription elixir which does absolutely nothing for my cough but does get me so high that I simply don’t care about anything. I promptly disposed of the antibiotics but quickly determined that the doctor juice is sort of like a pleasant little bottle of existentialism. It also makes me incredibly comfortable and disinterested so I’ve been lounging around pleasantly all day taking in the joys of a pastoral nirvana. The downside is that this elixir tastes, as I can only guess, of a sweaty shirt ruefully peeled off a dead wino. Whatever, it’s fast acting.

So there we have it, my healthcare dollars in action. Why can’t I just call up Andrew Weil? It would be like this:

Me: Andy, bro, what up with this wheezing?
Andrew Weil, MD: Dawwwg, don’t sweat you gots to eat some goji berries and drink matcha. And here’s some mineral complex that I made up special just for you!
Me: awww shucks mang, you’re the bestest =)
Andrew Weil, MD: Don’t thank me, thank the beard!!!!

Speaking of which, scope this from one of Andrew Weil’s latest columns:

Unfortunately, we can make one more unassailable observation about depression: the disorder — or, more precisely, the diagnosis — has gone stratospheric. An astonishing 10 percent of the U.S. population was prescribed an antidepressant in 2005; up from 6 percent in 1996.

Why has the diagnosis become so popular? There are likely several reasons. It’s possible that more people today are truly depressed than they were a decade ago. Urbanized, sedentary lifestyles; nutrient-poor processed food; synthetic but unsatisfying entertainments and other negative trends, all of which are accelerating, may be driving up the rate of true depression. But I doubt the impact of these trends has nearly doubled in just ten years.

So here’s another possibility. The pharmaceutical industry is cashing in.

In 1996, the industry spent $32 million on direct-to-consumer (DTC) antidepressant advertising. By 2005, that nearly quadrupled, to $122 million. It seems to have worked. More than 164 million antidepressant prescriptions were written in 2008, totaling $9.6 billion in U.S. sales

anyway, this is how I feel right now, thanks american medical system!!!

For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, nights left open to chance.
Mignon McLaughlin

Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen.

The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.” Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

Using a combination of sources — a practice followed by most large producers of fresh and packaged hamburger — allowed Cargill to spend about 25 percent less than it would have for cuts of whole meat.

Those low-grade ingredients are cut from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces, which carries E. coli, industry research shows. Yet Cargill, like most meat companies, relies on its suppliers to check for the bacteria and does its own testing only after the ingredients are ground together. The United States Department of Agriculture, which allows grinders to devise their own safety plans, has encouraged them to test ingredients first as a way of increasing the chance of finding contamination.

Unwritten agreements between some companies appear to stand in the way of ingredient testing. Many big slaughterhouses will sell only to grinders who agree not to test their shipments for E. coli, according to officials at two large grinding companies. Slaughterhouses fear that one grinder’s discovery of E. coli will set off a recall of ingredients they sold to others.

“Ground beef is not a completely safe product,” said Dr. Jeffrey Bender, a food safety expert at the University of Minnesota who helped develop systems for tracing E. coli contamination. He said that while outbreaks had been on the decline, “unfortunately it looks like we are going a bit in the opposite direction.”

::: Beef Article via New York Times Via Email (Thanks The Meerkat!!) :::
So this article is wayyyyy old news, especially if you’ve ever read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Things are better than that now but not so much better that I would consider eating meat.

Additionally there are a few letters to the editor that the Times published today, again via the ever vigilant Meerkat

Hizzy: What the hell are you mumbling about and why aren’t we listening to music?
Dustin: Fuck you, this is my impression of Sean Connery singing Raffi’s celebrated children’s song Baby Beluga
Hizzy: Where is my iPod?!?!