consequences

This will easily be my worst blog-post ever.
It is several hours after dinner, evening bath, and bed.
Awoke to an unfamiliar grumbling in my stomach. Headed to the toilet.
Now, in my pre-PCP days I used to have stomach problems all the time. But the past three months have been the most uneventful and regular in my life.
Until now.
With no exaggeration, I can honestly say I now understand why diarrhea is a leading cause of childhood mortality in developing countries.
Seriously.
I cannot exaggerate how utterly miserable this is: dry-mouth, cold sweats, light-headed, weak and shaky...only now twenty minutes later can I even focus and steady myself enough to type this.
Actually blogging is helping me deal with the physical pain and mental stress. In a strange way, analyzing what is happening, trying to break it down and describe it, is a pretty good mechanism for just dealing with the reality which I am in right now and from which I cannot possibly escape.
And it does not end. Surely I did not actually eat enough food to produce such a volume of gut-busting misery?
Again apologies for the graphic detail, but in the interest of full disclosure, to be consistent with my total honesty and transparency, and for posthumous/historical purposes, I must say: I am shitting a stream of filth and suffering for it.
Suffering and learning a valuable lesson, perhaps the most important lesson of the whole PCP: it is neither ideal nor impressive to eat unhealthful foods.
I ate today "normal" meals, the kind of salty, greasy, sugary, buttery junk I used to eat all the time, and I stuffed myself to gut-busting, over-eating just like I used to.
Only now, after 89 days of eating well, I have lost my completely unnatural ability to cope, both mentally and physically.

I think some will read this blog and conclude that the PCP is a failure: it has weakened me and my ability to cope with modern reality. I can't even enjoy a decent outing with friends, a meal of Chinese food and dessert at Starbucks, without ending up groaning in the toilet late into the night! PCP has turned me into a raw-vegetable eating, proselytizing foodie; a bore to be with and an impossible date!

Others, myself included, see this as an affirmation: there is nothing "normal" about what we call food in these modern times. The 293 calories in a chocolate chunk scone is not normal; it is a gross concentration of fats, carbohydrates, sugars, of butter and additives and preservatives chemically designed to stay fresh-looking on the shelf all day without refrigeration, to make my mouth water, to make my stomach grumble. But is is not food, at the very least not to be consumed in the concentrations and volumes with which modern society so easily provides.

Brian said PCP is great for people who love food. I agree: it has unlocked my taste-buds to a point that I cannot describe to anyone these days who eats "normally". I do not exaggerate when I say an onion is sweet, a carrot has a deep and rich tangy after-taste, the juxtaposition between the almost-sour bite of a ripe banana and a perfectly sweetened strawberry is perfectly accented with the addition of a hint of cinnamon. This is what food taste likes. Not oil, nor salt, butter, cream, sugar, not salad dressing nor ketchup, not soy sauce, not Tabasco...just food.

The exotic abdominal exercising routines, the cleverly measured rope-jumping, the scientific calculations of dips and pulls and raises and pushes...this is all well and good, but utterly and completely irrelevant without getting free from the vicious circle of modern eating.
If this blog serves any purpose, let it be for those who are considering PCP for themselves, or just those who wonder about healthful eating habits. Let this be both a warning and an invitation. Perhaps I am just a weak-stomached whiner who needs some familiarity with modern medicine to ease my so-called eating troubles. Or perhaps I am a closet vegan hippie proselytizing some good-intentioned but utterly impossible utopia of convenient and affordable healthful foods, locally and organically grown.
Most likely, though, I am just another guy whose eyes have been opened, through his stomach, to the reality: a food-culture based on chemical nutrition, dominated by convenience food, plagued by deadly and utterly avoidable obesity, diabetes, and cancers, controlled by huge processing entities focused on efficiency, regulated by a meek and subservient government aligned perfectly with said entities, and a silent, ignorant base of consumers who have been advertise brain-washed into thinking that cooking is hard and time-consuming, food comes in a box, chemicals can solve the problems that chemicals produce, and that all of this is perfectly, utterly, normal.
As a society, we suffer the consequences of our actions.
As an individual, I suffer the consequences of my actions.
I do not seek to foment revolution, and I do not think anyone reading this, or in fact my entire blog, will somehow be inspired to throw off the shackles of modern eating. I am only trying to help myself settle my own thoughts and feelings, as I sit here dealing with the very real consequences of my own actions; to trace the cause and effect, so that I can at least learn something and be a better person for it.

Recently I have been trying to "deepen" my zazen practice, and one of the ways I have been doing this is by reciting the Gokan-no-ge, a zen Buddhist chant called "Five Reflections".
This goes quite harmoniously with a PCP-enabled understanding of food and eating.
The English translation is something like:

1. We reflect on the effort that brought us this food and consider how it comes to us
2. We reflect on our virtue and practice and whether we are worthy of this offering
3. We regard greed as the obstacle to freedom of mind
4. We regard this meal as medicine to sustain our life
5. For the sake of attaining the Truth we now receive this food

(There are innumerable English and other translations of this on teh internets, but being as how I actually understand the Japanese in which I was originally taught this chant, and since I prefer the lyrical rhythm of the Japanese, I do not recite this in English.)