Looming Void: December 21, 2024
Chapter 14; I relinquish baking bread.
10,000 minutes
I am at last hammering out words on my last undone Chapter 14 (there will be an additional concluding Chapter 15, difficult enough, but that won’t involve “data,” facts, references, and all that). The past fortnight has scarred me, so difficult was it to wind up one of the most difficult chapters, the proliferation/nonproliferation one.
Strange as it may seem, this is also the crucial stage of “really telling the story” of the book. Yes, I’ve been patching together a narrative but that narrative seemed to be undergirded by what happened and when, plus overarching themes and story notions. Now is the point when I survey the grand arc of this particular patch of history, when I REALLY figure out what the book is about.
I can hear you ask: why didn’t you know all this before? I’m not sure I know the answer to that question, but I’m not surprised. Up until now, I’ve been working with the clay of reality, now I get to mess around with drama and reality and truth and poetry.
All of that sounds exciting, I bet (maybe, huh?). Well, it’s also terrifying. So I’m also desperately striving to clear out the rest of my life for this next phase. Let me give a minor example. Matthew Long, a most interesting reader/writer, will conduct a slow, week-by-week read of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey over 2025. Readerly desire (do you experience that?) tugs me toward that challenge, for I “read” (as in, tried to read) those classics as a teenager but never appreciated them properly, and Homer’s raw drama has beckoned me ever since. So this morning I went as far as looking up how to buy the Penguin editions of both books, translated by Robert Fagles (there have been translators galore but Matthew Long’s navigation will be based on him). Long also refers to the most modern translations by Emily Wilson and I actually bought her translation of The Iliad earlier this year (but never read more than a few pages). I nearly pressed the purchase button but then the voice of reason intervened: I cannot afford the time, cannot, cannot, cannot.
I’ll have more to write about this clearing of the decks. In the meantime, enjoy the festive season as you see fit and see you in 2025.
Monsters
Ever-alert Jessica Hullinger startles me:
New research published in the journal Science concluded that a recent marine heat wave killed off more than half of Alaska’s population of common murres, resulting in “the largest documented wildlife mortality event in the modern era.” In total, some 4 million of the birds died between 2014 and 2016 due to fish die-off from rising temperatures in the north Pacific. “Population abundance estimates since then have found no evidence of recovery,” the researchers wrote, “suggesting that the heatwave may have led to an ecosystem shift.”
I suspect most of us are like me. We can forget about all those harbingers concerning species extinction. Since I ditched my writing project to use the fifteen bird species of Cranes as extinction inquisitors, I’ve become blase. Blase no more, kiddo, blase no more.
Brian Klaas writes a rational newsletter, The Garden of Forking Paths. Recently he cheered me up by penning a salutary reminder, “We don’t have to destroy ourselves.”
Mortality
What bread should one eat? A trivial question but it has vexed me for two years. Until today.
This is an Irrewarra stoneground wholemeal sourdough loaf. Most “wholemeal” breads are just white bread with brown coloring, still highly milled, but this is the real deal. It is a genuine WFPB, a tick from the Whole Foods Plant Based diet. The only problem was, until recently, its salt content. A couple of thick slices of this and you’ll easily scoot past the recommended max daily sodium intake of 1,500 mg.
In spite of jogging my whole life and being only slightly overweight, my blood pressure seemed to be too high. 140/100 is the current (out of date?) borderline to “high blood pressure" and I didn’t seem to be much better than that. So for two years I’ve been measuring my blood pressure first thing every morning. And more recently, because my readings in clinical settings always seemed to be better than those morning numbers, a cardiologist recommended I do three extra measurements daily for a fortnight, which I did.
Some social media influencers (I know, I know) plump for an “optimal” blood pressure of 120/80. The cardiologist wants 130/85. I spent two years trying to cut sodium down to under 1000 mg/day, often as low as 500. I baked my own (no-salt) bread. And guess what? I could never get under a consistent average of 135/90. A low-salt diet did not, as some doctors recommend, bring it way, way down.
What to do? I sometimes do register as low as 105, so my GP reckons I shouldn’t take blood pressure medications as it might generate occasional days of excessively low blood pressure. He also believes that the 120/80 figure relies on studies funded by pharma keen to sell medication. He is comfortable with my 135/90 and, after measuring scrupulously, after trying diet, so am I now.
The upshot? No need to bake my own clumsy bread. Eat the Irrewarra, just not too much of it. Be content with one core biomarker, the ebb and flow of my blood pressure.