Tuesday, August 17, 2004

And Still Counting

We’ve been eating a bit more healthy-like over the past year or so, and I like the results.  I’ve grown four inches, doubled my muscle mass, and increased my intelligence to the extent that foreign governments are starting to recruit me for their breeding programs.  But the funny thing is, the damn stuff also seems to taste pretty good a lot of the time.  It’s gotten to the point that I am not eating my daily frozen car-o-mel Ho-Ho because I’m all full up of blueberries and sawdust.  And, inexplicably, I like it this way. 

One of the mainstays of my new diet has been the Ak-Mak cracker.  It’s an unassuming little baked good, crispy and unsalted, easy to eat with my lunch every day (which is already so healthy you could puke).  A few days ago I read the copy on the back of their box, which I found ideosyncratically amusing.  It’s a wordy treatise on international grain choices, biblical versification, nutritional standards and wheat biology.  The whole thing is entertaining enough to merit a read on its own, but the good Ak-Makkers at Ak-Mak Enterprises have made it even easier for this on-the-go era where even the earnest story of a humble cracker can be too much for some of us to digest. 

Instead, the copywriters have highlighted the bits they seem to consider most important with some of the strangest choices in underlineation I’ve ever seen.  About a quarter of the whole text is underlined, and I just don’t see the logic in what got underlined and what didn’t.  However, even though reading only the underlined portions doesn’t really tell you the whole story of Ak-Mak crackers, I think it tells enough of a story to merit standing on its own.  I therefore present, with a healthy pride, the underlined portion of the Ak-Mak story:

Whole wheat product
nutritional value
wheat
important part of the diet
high-protein wheat
highest quality wheat
complete whole-wheat flour - nothing added, nothing removed
full circle
present pyramid program
cereal grains
greater part
healthy diet
ancient peoples
Ak Mak Bakeries
leader
baking
flat breads
cracker breads
stone ground whole wheat sesame crackers
#1 cracker
and still counting

Now, don’ t you feel healthier?  I tell ya, it’s almost better than chewing on the box, but that box is just loaded with traditional roughage and healthy soy-based dyes.  Makes me hungry just to type it in.

And, just because I’d hate to leave you without a tidbit or three of tropical topicality, here are a few more of my Hawaiian vacation reminiscences:

* Visiting a huge ancient sacrificial shrine and marvelling at the masses of mossy skull-like rocks that tumble from the thirty-foot walls, feeling a sense of history and quietude; and then to visit a tiny new makeshift shrine at the top of the highest mountain on the island, higher than I’ve ever stood, and feeling the vital energy of the very earth coursing up from a molten core to the soles of my feet and up through the crown of my head into the universe and beyond - sensing that the former was a historical site but the latter was a living sacred space

* Making an offering, at that tiny mountaintop shrine, of an orange and a few drops of water, and seeing a small black-and-grey striped fly swoop down on the small pool of water I’d sprinkled to drink heartily of it, its thorax writhing with apparent ecstacy as it imbibed, and feeling as if that huge mountain was objectified in the body of that tiny insect, and that the mountain was telling me that it accepted my presence and blessed my travels

* Lanai yoga

Looks like my IT issues are resolved.  I’m in a bargaining session all day and can’t really put it off much longer.  Enjoy your day and be nice to a fly.  It may just be vermin; then again, it may not.