Pulp

I'm pretty pleased with myself. More so than usual, that is. I've long been thinking about smoothieing salads, but haven't gotten around to it until now. Juicing is not actually all that incredibly great an idea -- mostly what you're getting is the carbs and some colored water -- good nutrients in that, but it's only part of what should be available. All that pulp is fiber, and all that color in the pulp is nutrition, usually being tossed out. Waste is a sin.

So I hunted up my old Champion Juicer that I bought in 1979 (before I was born, since I'm only 29), and put it to use. (It's still going strong, like me!)

Mine’s yellow too!

The juice comes dripping out the square bottom there, into a bowl or something, and the pulp comes out the barrel into another bowl as a rather obscene-looking tubular extrusion. Not a great design, I affirm, what with all these bowls, but there you go. I took bags of frozen chopped spinach and Brussels sprouts and mustard greens and turnip leaves, and romaine lettuce and endives and parsley and arugula, celery and yellow carrots and half a red onion, and so on -- all the salad stuff that it's a chore to eat -- and jammed it through and then mixed it all together again, juice and pulp, in the blender. Got about 6 cups full of slow thick green goo. Put them in the freezer, ready to go.

Had some last night -- drop the frozen block into the blender, add lots of water, get something more than two glasses out if it. Add a bit of Braggs for seasoning. Sip, don't swill. Icy cold. Really, it's pretty good. Quite good. All things told, it's easy. Get five days or a week's worth done at a time, the equivalent of an unreasonably big and onerous salad, but nothing except fantastic nutrition. It is, frankly, a genius idea. Makes literally every nutrient available, no need for cooking since the fiber is completely broken up, sipped so there's no overwhelming of the enteric enzymes, really easy. How else could anybody be expected to eat chard, whatever that is, or bok choy, whatever that is. Yuck.

For my recent 29th birthday someone gave me a gift certificate for a massage ... a therapeutic massage. I have to admit I'm feeling some trepidation about it. Scoured the website searching for the difference between deep tissue, Thai and shiatsu, and not finding it. That troubles me. I'll have to talk to someone and I'd rather read than talk. Well, they're masseuses, not web designers slash professional communicators. My tissue has the consistency of a leather bag filled with fist-sized rocks. It seems there's something more to health than just a superb diet and an amazing capacity for stellar athletic performance. It fills me with inexplicable melancholy, the idea that we need other people, sometimes, to maybe touch us.

Do I have to take my shirt off? Will they touch my legs? Oh, I can handle it. But I'm pretty skittish, like a thoroughbred, high strung, untrusting. You know, normal.

All in all though I'm feeling pretty good. Now I have to figure out how I can share the genius of my many brilliant insights. Because the people are like sheep without a shepherd, knowing not what to do.

J