This past Saturday, I got the result of my blood tests following up on my recent Urinary Tract Infection. They were for the most part, good. My cholesterol is fine. (The good cholesterol is low but so is the bad.)
My Triglycerides are another story. That came back as at 257 mg/dL. And yes, that is too damn high.
Now The Flying Spaghetti Monster knows I’ve been working to modify my diet since the Incident from a few months back. But there is no denying that I have occasionally…backpeddled. But it’s been hard to not indulge with stories like this…
So far this year, more than 2.1 million acres have burned in wildfires, more than 113 million people in the U.S. were in areas under extreme heat advisories last Friday, two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought, and earlier in June, deluges flooded Minnesota and Florida.
“This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level,” said Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. “The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about.”
(Snip.)
As recently as March, a special report on extreme events and disasters by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of “unprecedented extreme weather and climate events.” Its lead author, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University, said Monday, “It’s really dramatic how many of the patterns that we’ve talked about as the expression of the extremes are hitting the U.S. right now.”
“What we’re seeing really is a window into what global warming really looks like,” said Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer. “It looks like heat. It looks like fires. It looks like this kind of environmental disasters.”
Oppenheimer said that on Thursday. That was before the East Coast was hit with triple-digit temperatures and before a derecho — a large, powerful and long-lasting straight-line wind storm — blew from Chicago to Washington. The storm and its aftermath killed more than 20 people and left millions without electricity. Experts say it had energy readings five times that of normal thunderstorms.
Read the whole thing and then you tell me why I shouldn’t just say, “Fuck it” and spend the rest of my days living in a Roscoe’s Chicken N’ Waffles?
I live a mostly healthy lifestyle. I don’t smoke or drink. I don’t use heavy drugs. (I do use St. John Wort and an Aspirin a day for the heart.) And The Flying Spaghetti Monster knows I ain’t engaging in high risk sexual activity. (Hell, I’m so cautious, I clear my browser history after every porn viewing session and I live alone!)
And frankly, all this clean living has given me is a clear complexion, a clean arrest record and damn little else.
Now I’m not saying I’m going to go out and start pumping myself full of booze and pills. Frankly, I’d start turning into an asshole and FSM knows we’ve got enough of those running around without me adding to their numbers.
But the food thing…
Why am I keeping myself healthy for a future that’s not going to come?
That was not a rhetorical question.
