Enemy

When you're +, especially when you're on the meds, you become an expert on digestional discomfort & intestinal distress.  That translates to having gas, diarrhea, bloating, cramps, nausea, dizziness, sour stomach & a whole host of other similar issues Tums & Pepto never even mentioned in their commercials.  This leaves you constantly on the look out for things you can use to settle your stomach, things you can incorporate into your diet to ease the intestinal passage.

High fiber foods do help but have issues of their own.  Watching out for too many fried foods or food too high in sugars will also be beneficial.  But then came the Enemy's spin doctor & her name is Jamie Lee Curtis.

Jamie Lee wouldn't lie to me.  After all she saved us so many times from the evil that was Michael Myers.  But lie to us is exactly what she did.  She laughed all the way to the bank wearing her red devil outfit.

She pushed her snake oil on us & laughed, laughed I say.  What snake oil you ask, well let me show you.

Activia promises you a better digestion in just 14 days, hah. By that time I think I would've been dead.  This product gave me some of the worse stomach problems I've ever had.  I thought I'd gotten some stomach virus or the flu, but that wasn't the case.  I'd eaten it for a while & the effects or pretty immediate.  I ate it midday & by that evening I found myself perched on the toilet wondering what bomb had gone off in my stomach.  

The gas, diarrhea, fever, cramps & other intestinal issues went on for a few days then stopped.  I realized I'd had forgotten to eat the Activia.  Stupid me, I thought I'm not through with the fourteen days, so I ate it again. Within hours the symptoms were back.  A couple of days later I forgot to eat it again & it was well into the next day before I remembered it all.  During this time all my digestive issues had settled down.

I got curious & googled Activia & things like "Activia gave me diarrhea".   I found an interesting site talking about just the same things me & my roomie were experiencing.  About half the people were really loving on the product, but for the other half it was pure hate.  Ever notice that arrow on the container points straight down?  Your intestines twist & turn.  Activia basically turned my digestive track into a straight from point A to Point B pipeline like the arrow shows. 

If you're brave, you can take the Activia challenge, but I wouldn't recommend it.  This has been a dreadful time for me & my digestion.  I will never eat this product again.  The weird thing is that I can eat other yogurt & be fine, just not Activia.  I don't think it's the live cultures or probiotics either.  Several different yogurts have live cultures in them.  I will eat my yogurt from time to time, but Activia, you & your devilish spokeswoman are now the ENEMY.

Looking Back

Looking back is seldom a good thing.  Thanks to Google, you can type in an address & viola  there you are.  I've used this application on Google to look at places from my childhood & for the most part it was a rather disappointing trip down memory lane.

I looked at places I'd lived, there were a lot of them, my family moved a lot.  I looked at childhood haunts & old schools. All but a few held unwanted visages I for some reason went looking for via cyberspace.  Most of the places just looked small, so very small & unimportant.  How could these be the places that loomed so large in my memory?  Many were dingy & in need of some serious maintenance or a bulldozer.  That same bulldozer seemed to have found many of the places I went looking for on my venture.

I never cared much for the town I grew up in, but I could always same it was clean & rather attractive. That is no longer the case.  Now it's run down, neglected & nothing like what it had been.  Since I was a child many things had changed.  Walmart came to town & destroyed the downtown businesses.  McDonalds came & soon all the local drive-ins & little cafes fell to the wayside.  The old folks held onto a lot the older businesses, but as they passed so did those businesses.  Good bye to Woolsworth, Montgomery Wards, Belks, Ramsey's, BF Goodrich & all those local shops that made my hometown what it was.  So long to all kids hangouts like the places to park while out doing the drag on Friday night, the skating rink & others too vague to recall.

Now when I use Google to look at my hometown, it's just a cliche of a broken down little town that used to have some character.  Now it's just a statistic.  All that was grand in my memory remains only that, a memory. I may not have liked my hometown & I certainly would never have gone back to it, but it deserved better than this fate.  I'm sure that's what a lot of people think when they finally get around to looking back to that town they'd left in their rear view mirror years ago.  We may have wanted out, we have even cussed the place, but we never really expected it to be so devastated by time.

For those of you that haven't been to your hometown in a long time & have been considering going back or using Google to look at it, STOP.  That's right stop.  Once you go back or look on the net for images of your old town, you will have information you may not really have wanted.  You could wind up wishing you had just been content with the memories you had of your old places.  Instead you may end up stuck with nasty images that belong in some Faulkner novel.

There's no sense in looking back anyway.  Even if it looks exactly the same & the very same people are still there, it isn't the same.  You can't go back to what it was, because that place doesn't exist anymore.  Those people, those relationships, those dreams don't exist anymore.  Time may not be linear, but the way we live our lives is.  We live in a line progressing forward, downstream or however else you want to look at it.  Going backwards isn't an option.  Time to take a cue from a Beatles' song & let it be.