Take good care of yourself!

Tags

Basic health advice, Button Up Your Overcoat, Cut out sweets, Eat an apple every day, Ruth Etting

Advice on how to take good care of yourself hasn’t changed much since 1928! That was in the roaring Twenties and written a year before the Stock Market crash in September 1929. The Ruth Etting rendition of Button Up Your Overcoat was recorded on March 11, 1929, as the world was experiencing the greatest prosperity ever and it was still rising for another half a year.

Last night I was revisiting some current dieting sites because my weight has been flat for months even though I have been doing my standard intermittent fasting routine of only eating between 12 noon and 6 PM. It is a very easy diet to maintain after the first week of adjustment, but recently I have gotten back into eating sugary desserts after an excellent tasting vegetarian meal. But, I am exactly at BMI of 25, the official cut off point for good weight, and thus I want to lose about six pounds. So, for a few months, I am going to avoid rhubarb chutney which I am addicted to, jam on my morning toast, candy, pies, and pastries even when they are free.

Then I rediscovered the original Ruth Etting Button Up Your Overcoat (1929) recording and realized I am basically just following that song’s ninety-year-old message. I’ve bolded some obvious current recommendations.

(11 seconds into the recording)
Listen, big boy
Now that I’ve got you made
Goodness, but I’m afraid
Somethin’s gonna happen to you

23
Listen, big boy
You gotta be hooked, and how
I would die if I should lose you now

34
Button up your overcoat
When the wind is free
Take good care of yourself
You belong to me

44
Oh, eat an apple every day
Get to bed by three (AM?)
Take good care of yourself
You belong to me

54
Be careful crossing streets, ooh, ooh
Don’t eat meat, ooh, ooh
Cut out sweets, ooh, ooh
You’ll get a pain and ruin your tum-tum

1:07
Keep away from bootleg hooch  (street drugs)
When you’re on a spree
Take good care of yourself
You belong to me

Musical interlude

1:38
Don’t step on hornet’s tails, ooh, ooh
Or on nails, ooh, ooh
Or third rails, ooh, ooh
You’ll get a pain and ruin your tum-tum 1:50

Musical interlude

2:00
Oh, button up your overcoat
When the wind is free
Take good care of yourself
You belong to me

2:12
Oh, wear your flannel underwear
When you climb a tree
Take good care of yourself
You belong to me

2:22
Steer clear of frozen ponds, ooh, ooh
Peroxide blondes (natural blondes are okay)
Stocks and bonds, (This was months before the 12-year long crash)
You’ll get a pain ruin your bankroll

2:33
Take the spoon out of your cup
When you’re drinking tea
Take good care of yourself
You belong to me
2:45

---

That’s the end of the recording linked above, but

Here are some more lyrics found elsewhere.

Boop-boop-a-doop

When you sass a traffic cop
Use diplomacy
Just take good care of yourself
You belong to me

So, I’ll, Take good care of myself, eat an apple every day, be careful crossing streets, not eat meat, cut out sweets, keep away from bootleg hooch, peroxide blondes, stocks and bonds, ooh, ooh.

A Brief Encounter with Josef Muench

Tags

A brief encounter, Antelope Oregon, Arizona Highways, Josef Muench, My father's habits, Priday Ranch, Richland Washington, Santa Barbara Camera Club

Josef Muench, of Arizona Highways photo-fame, I met and talked with at the Santa Barbara Camera Club in 1954, and at the time didn’t think too much about it other than acknowledging that he took good landscape photographs, but then, so did I (I was 17, and silly of course). Once a month that camera club selected three photos taken by club members and at the end of the year from that group of thirty-six photos chose the best slide of the year. My dad was a member, but I was just visiting him and my timing happened to coincide with the monthly meeting.

I visited my dad that summer and he showed me the giant trophy with his name on it. He was proudly displaying it on his mantel. The only problem was that he had won the slide of the year with one of my photos which I had loaned him; it was a lightning flash taken at the Priday Ranch near Antelope, Oregon. I had been working there a couple of weeks after graduating from Richland, Washington, high school and took the picture while sitting on top of a truck.

My photo, with just our common last name on it, he claimed was mixed in with his submissions accidentally, “just to show what his son was doing.” Anyhow, a couple of months later when the club members found out about his “inadvertent” cheating and that it was, in fact, my photo … (OOPS!!!)… he was literally run out of Santa Barbara.

It never really entered my adolescent mind that I had beaten out some of the acknowledged best photographers in the country in an open competition while using a ten-dollar camera. It was a 35mm Edindex, kind of a poor boy’s Leica.

George and Mary Scamahorn at Liberty Lake 1937

I really liked my father. He was intelligent and a great storyteller, but I must face it now in my old age … a deadbeat conman.

This is only a funny sample of the things my father stole from me. Another not so funny was seven years of child support after abandoning my mother.

A brief encounter with Jefferson Poland

The Sexual Freedom League was founded in Berkeley, California, by my friend at that time, Jefferson Poland. In Berkeley, in the 1960s I was friends with and participant with many people who became famous for what we did. The Sexual Freedom League came into being when Jeff, Ina, Shirley and I drove in my VW over to the beach just beneath the famous Cliff House and went for a naked swim in the Pacific Ocean.

Jeff had arranged for this to be videoed with a 16 mm camera for some publicity stunt, so somewhere in the universe, there may be a movie of us all running into and quickly out of the very cold Pacific ocean with the Cliff House as a well known background prop. We weren’t there very long because it was cold, so we headed back to Berkeley. About the time we went through Treasure Island tunnel, in the middle of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, Jeff started smoking a joint. I insisted that he put it out because a VW with Jeff, Ina, and Shirley smoking in it would attract enough police attention, and being caught with marijuana in my van would have created serious repercussions for me. This picture is of my VW van at another totally separate event.

The National Guard holds off a protester, while Tiger watches from the open window on my VW van.

Jeff contacted the San Francisco Chronicle and told them what we had done and said he was going for another naked swim. He wanted me to drive him over again, but as he was intentionally challenging the law and inviting the press to watch, I didn’t. Apparently, he wanted to be arrested for a trivial offense so he could gain some notoriety and public leverage.

I have always obeyed the laws, and here in Bend people must consider me a rolling speed bump because I obey the traffic laws that most people here flaunt.

Going for a naked swim that day for about one minute with Jeff, Ina and Shirley is about as illegal an act as I’ve done in my eighty-four years.

You can’t change the present.

Tags

Becoming beautiful, Becoming educated, Becoming lovable, Becoming rich, well spoken

It is common knowledge that you can’t change the past. It is claimed that you can change your relationship to the past by retelling it in ways that fit your current needs. And, with each retelling of your new story with an ever more positive spin, you can remake your past self into a whole new person. With a bit of lying to oneself, you can become that new person. I don’t recall anyone who actually did this, but it sounds plausible. Perhaps there are professional actors who change their persona to fit a theatrical role, and I’ve encountered some introverted people who can successfully play extroverts that have scripted characters.

Some personality gurus tell us to just be ourselves. If we do that we will soon be accepted as we are and be loved. That might be true for people who are totally loaded with positive lovable characteristics, along with being beautiful, rich, well-educated, and always saying the right thing at the right time. I have known and presently know people I really like, but not one of them matches that shortlist of easily attained qualities. Well, not so easily attained.

Looking at that spontaneously written list it now appears to me that being rich might be the easiest to attain. Just make more money than you spend. Being well-educated might sound easy, just go to school. But I’ve been there, done that and have seen many people with degrees who fail. Read George Vaillant’s Triumphs of Experience, 2012, for examples. Being beautiful is tricky; even George Clooney and Jennifer Aniston have had their bad days. Saying the right thing at the right time has many supposed masters, but you can watch the master of improv, Steven Colbert, make  major goofs fairly often, and there is some editing of his show.

The hardest thing to change is the present because the moment you think about it the present is already past. The only thing you can change is the future.

A prayer to the Universe

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A Universal Prayer

Matthew 6:9-13, King James Version (KJV), has a path to proper living:

Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: 
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

---

Mohammed’s Opening prayer has a similar path concept within it:

In the name of Allah, the merciful the compassionate.
Praise be to Allah, the Lord of all worlds,
The compassionate the merciful,
The master of every judgment.
You alone we seek to please, and
You alone we ask for help,
Direct us along the proper paths,
Along those paths that you do favor,
Away from those that you dislike,
Away from those that will lead us astray.

---

(Based on My Unbounded Hopes #28) August 11, 2019

My prayer to the Universe

I respect the Universe as the source of everything.
I seek what it will reveal to me of the ways it supports, and
Warn me of the ways that will lead to my failure.
I request that it grant me the freedom to seek and choose the ways that feel best to my wishes.

---

(Based on Our Unbounded Hopes #27) August 11, 2019

Humanity’s prayer to the Universe

We respect the Universe as the source of everything.
We seek what it will reveal to us of the ways it supports, and
Warn us of the ways that will lead to failure.
We pursue the freedoms needed to seek and choose our ways.
We intend that all beings live along the Universe’s provided paths.
Let us constantly seek the best way to live.

---

October 30,2019

Psalm 23 (KJV) – Rendered by Probaway as

A Universal Prayer

The Universe gives me everything I need!
There are beautiful places for me to find rest;
Where everything is given to restore my strength, and
I am shown the ways of finding the Universe’s beauty.
Even when confronted with oblivion I am comfortable. Yes.
Everything is provided by the Universe and it is given freely.
Surely its goodness shall continue to provide for my fulfillment,
And I will continue to be an integral part of the Universe. Forever.

---

I have been thinking intermittently about prayers since the 1960s and remember going to the Graduate Theological Seminary Library in Berkeley, California, in search of a Universal prayer. Perhaps my search strategy was flawed but I didn’t find one. What I have written here as “A Universal Prayer” would have served me well for those intervening fifty-five years.

A typical view of my present world.

Tags

Black Krim tomato chutney, Geriatric conversations, Mirror Pond Bend Oregon, Rhubarb chutney

I walk past this exact spot (44.0595, -121.3155) on the Deschutes River about four times per week. Twice a week it’s on my way to the Commons to have coffee and repartee with my old dudes. The conversation is generally about two hours of hilarious banter about trying to cope with words, visual art, local driving hazards, crazy people, world travel, professional deep-sea fishing, and of course the world going to hell. Occasionally we get into golf, boat racing on the Columbia, professional polo, what women want, and moving to Sedona.

This last month I’ve been centering my life on my homegrown veggies which Debbie  has converted into rhubarb chutney and Black Krim/green tomato chutney. We dudes have been swapping various concoctions we’ve cooked up. One of our guys was a professional cook for high-end restaurants for forty years, so the standards of excellence are very high. I start salivating about this stuff even while I’m writing this dribble.

Do all old guys have as much fun as we retired Bendites? Or is this a retreaded Bendor dudes’ monopoly?

 

What’s the difference between kindness and kind acts?

Tags

Kind actions, Kindness

People talk about being nice to one another and consider it an upgrade to go from being nice to being kind. It is similar to having loving feelings in one’s heart, as if a loving feeling is an end in itself, and then progressing on to having loving feelings directed to a particular person or thing. It is still an internal feeling and as I’ve posted before, those unexpressed feelings will go to the grave with the death of that person holding them. They may have only held that feeling for a few moments and then moved on to other things. If they haven’t expressed those feelings with an intentional physical manifestation of that feeling directed toward that other person’s needs, then it was a fruitless feeling. Those fleeting emotions are as meaningless to the potential receiver of kindness as a summer cloud passing overhead.

Kind actions that are intended to help another specific person achieve a specific goal are easiest to conceptualize, but actions intended to help the general public can be just as kind, and might have greater consequences. For you to choose to seek to develop an automatic kindness response is one of the finest things that you can do. Finding tiny things to exercise your kindness potential is the place to start because there are vast numbers of tiny things that can be found and done.

Of course the flip side to the kindness response is to learn not to do an unkindness, no matter how small that unkindness may be. Here is an easy one to get started with.

“I am not too proud to pick up litter, but I am too proud to toss it down.”

The goal is to learn to react reflexively to a discovered opportunity for a kindness.

 

I’m feeling okay on the fourth day of my cold.

Tags

Cure common cold

This is my fourth day of taking hot baths to suppress my cold/flu symptoms. Yesterday I took three baths because it was impossible because of my planned meetings to time the baths evenly. Thus there was one bath at 8AM, another at 12 Noon, and a third at 9PM. For me, the normal timing for two baths per day would be 9:30AM and 9:30PM. I took the extra bath because one time, as an experiment, I only took one bath on a day I had flu symptoms and the next day my symptoms were worse. When I follow my usual procedures of two evenly spaced baths per day for six days, no one other than me would even know I have a cold because my symptoms are almost nonexistent.

I’ve been doing these 105°F hot bath treatments for almost thirty years. Most of those years I raised my mouth temperature to 102°F and immediately got out of the tub and cooled off slowly and naturally. Now, because of my advanced age, it doesn’t seem wise to raise my temperature that high, so instead I raise it to 100.0°F and hold it there for fifteen minutes before getting out of the tub. I let the tub temperature drop to 103°F and sit up in the water, and that lets my mouth temperature drop to 99°F. When my mouth under the tongue gets to that temperature, I fully immerse my whole torso under the water, leaving just my face and knees out of the water, and go back up to 100.1°F.

I think this new technique heats my body more completely and stimulates the same things to happen in my body. My hypothesis is that the “heat-shock” stimulates the natural disease-fighting process, such as the body’s macrophages, to seek out and eat the exposed flu virus. They can’t get at the viruses within the cell, but the viruses must come out of a cell to invade another cell, and during that time they are vulnerable to being eaten by the macrophages.

This is a basic scientific method in that these ideas can be tested. I believe them to valid because I have done them at least once a year for decades, but it would require a controlled study to establish the likelihood that the technique works for other people. A new scientific idea must begin with someone thinking it, and generally, a new idea is hard to promote because it is strange and because it has never been experienced before.

Unfortunately, there isn’t anything salable about this flu suppression technique; thus the drug companies won’t fund it because there’s no drug product for them to make money on, and if the idea became widely known they would probably find ways to cast doubt on its legitimacy. They would say there haven’t been any tests, so it can’t be trusted. If the government tried to sponsor a test, they would accuse it of squandering public money on something that hasn’t been proven to work.

Anyway, I will keep taking hot baths for a couple more days.

 

I attended three events and took three hot baths.

Tags

Hot baths, My cold cure treatments, Three lecture events

It was a day where I got up an hour early because I wanted to take a hot bath before going to visit my Monday morning geriatric conversation. Today’s hot bath was my third day of twice a day raising my body temperature to 100° F to suppress the very mild cold symptoms I was having.

Then because of my time constraints, I came home, ate a small lunch and took a second bath. Then off to a lecture on the history of electronic displays, followed by my Monday afternoon organized conversation about the evils of internet fraud. But, because I came home from that event not feeling tip-top, I took a short snooze, ate an excellent dinner prepared by Debbie, and then we went to a lecture about climate change at the Tower Theater. (Oops, that makes four events.)

The theater was packed with people, and as it turned out there were two women directly behind me who were sneezing, and I heard one of them mention that she thought she might be catching a cold. Thus, when I got home I took a third hot bath to suppress any chance that I was contaminated by her sneezing on the back of my neck. I could tell by the sound that she wasn’t elbowing her sneeze.

It was thus a day of attempting to suppress getting a cold. Yes, I did get my flu shot a month ago, but I am now feeling a bit compromised.

Sweeping UU sidewalks

Tags

Carrying water, Chopping wood, Contentment, Diary, Epigrams, habits, Kindness, policy, psychology, Shoveling snow, survival

I just realized I’ve been doing some things beyond Chopping wood, carrying water, and shoveling snow. I’ve been sweeping sidewalks.

The photo above is of the UU front entrance, taken last week, as I departed for home. Notice the sidewalk isn’t covered with pine needles even though there are Ponderosa pine trees directly overhead. Almost every Sunday I sweep the needles, or in the winter clear the snow from this area, and occasionally along the paths to the car parking areas too.

There isn’t any payment for this needed task, and other people do tasks that are certainly more essential to the operations of our fellowship, but I do this. No one asked me to do it, and occasionally people will help. When the snow is a foot or two or three deep, people come to the rescue. It is a real challenge making paths out to the cars and there are several guys that pitch in and do the real effortful labor. The roads are contracted to be plowed, but not the paths; we do the paths.

Occasionally something special happens, and this morning was one of them. A boy  about three years old, whom I barely recognize because he is just one of the three hundred people who walk by, said, “Hi, Charles, thank you for sweeping the sidewalk.” He might have been prompted by his mom before they came close to say my name, but it was the kid who said it and probably added the thank you for sweeping, and that made me feel good.

Some of the adults do say thank you, and I appreciate that, but I am not doing the cleanup for the thanks; I’m doing because it makes everyone coming into this building have a more pleasant experience. And, in a small way, their seeing someone who is simply a member making it look and feel better is meaningful. It is better than if it were cleaned by someone paid to clean it. Out of sight, out of mind, like a rainy and windy act of nature washing the mess away and making it look clean in its own natural way.

When nature has its way, this area looks messy and I clean it up to civilized standards.