Tasty, Tasty Poison

Bread and I are coming to a parting of the ways. I don’t know if I have a wheat allergy, or I’m sensitive to gluten, or if it’s those little yeasties that my system doesn’t like, but every time I binge on stuff made with flour, I pay dearly for it in the days and even weeks following.

I go in cycles. Sometimes I am scrupulously careful about my diet (not diet in the “lose weight” sense, though the proper diet certainly has that effect, but diet in the “eat what your body was evolutionarily designed to eat before the advent of agriculture screwed everything up and introduced us to new and wonderful diseases” sense). When I am in emotional survival mode, as I was for the last few weeks of Mom’s life, it all goes to pot and I eat bread and butter and chocolate and sugar and sometimes great hunks of meat.

This week I have been in celebration mode. That sounds terrible, considering I’m going to be officiating at Mom’s funeral in a few hours, but this trip really has been a celebration of her life. Everything reminds me of her. We went to Outback Steakhouse the night before last, and I ordered a lobster tail just because it was Mom’s favorite food in the world, but she rarely ordered it because lobster was too expensive and she felt she just wasn’t deserving enough to spend that kind of money on herself. (See, I come by that notion honestly!) I decided it was time to start saying Yes to little extravagances. Life is too short, and it was my way of saying, “Mom, you were indeed worthy, and so am I.”

Of course, while the lobster is properly paleo, the yummy bread that accompanied it wasn’t, nor was the beer, or the potatoes, or the Bloomin’ Onion. And last night’s Ledo’s pizza, that rectangular masterpiece of thin, flaky, pie-like crust and sweet-yet-spicy sauce, was about as far from paleo as it’s possible to get. So today, in Prince Frederick, Maryland, I am wheezing and my joints ache (the initial signs of what I call “bread poisoning”), and in a few days I will have a new outbreak of dermatitis herpetiformis on my hands and elbows. It goes away when I stop eating bread. It comes back when I do. I no longer what to play that game. I want to live life and move forward.

Starting Sunday.

And by the way, the bed here is every bit as hard as the one I slept on last night. Worse, the mattress is so smooth that the sheets slip off as I move around. If I were a quiet sleeper, it wouldn’t matter, but I’m a tosser-and-turner, so I have effectively already stripped the bed for the housekeeper.

Time for breakfast and a shower, then off to put the “fun” in funeral. (Shame the printed page doesn’t convey a sardonic tone of voice very well.)