Preparing for Italy

On the final day of the school year, last Thursday (this was the last day of out-service and even those of us who work in the summer got Friday, yesterday, off; the children had ended the previous Thursday and sixth grade graduation was the Friday of last week), I was discussing my trip to Italy (to be taken later this summer) with a friend who had once lived in Rome, when she told me that she had written for her friends a little guide of hints about visiting Rome. I asked her to send it to me, which she did, and which I read yesterday and really enjoyed a learned from.

I decided to write her a thank you note about it, and how it had helped me, but as I was writing to her, I had the idea that my response might be an interesting entry for this blog. So here it is, very little changed from what I wrote to her, so please excuse its personal aspect, which I think doesn't intrude very much into the things that I have written for other readers to read.

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I really enjoyed reading your guide. I like that photo you have on the cover of the Coliseum—-it makes it look exciting, but I also see the crowds! I will definitely take advantage of the "line avoiding man" selling the ticket that you recommended. Talk about crowds—-I saw a video on-line of the Trevi Fountain and the immense crowd around it was about fifteen rows of people deep. I think throwing the coins in the fountain bring you these "prizes", because it is more like a carnival game—-you "win the prize" if you actually get the coin into the fountain from way far back where you have to throw it (and backward, over your shoulder, to boot). So it's not so much the magic of the fountain that makes these things come true, it is your skill at the "Coin Toss".

You mentioned three coins and I never knew about three of them (but then I remembered there was that movie, "Three Coins In The Fountain"). So I decided to research it see what "bound to be good" thing the third coin was going to get you. It ends up that the whole thing is all scrambled and different versions get you different things. With most of them, the first coin ensures that you will return to Rome. However, there are some versions that have returning to Rome coming from the second coin, the first coin is to bring you romance (although in most versions, romance comes with the second coin). I can see how romance could come first, since Rome (and all of Italy) is just so romantic. Even I am supposed to be able to find romance in Italy, according to one of my sisters (although she didn't say the "even you" part, that's my addition). She simply said, "Keep your eye out for a lover!" Well, miracles do happen, sometimes. But anyway, I could see how romance could come first and then you would really want to come back, especially if the romance was with an Italian instead, of say, a tourist from Russia. Not that that couldn't be a romance, but that it would maybe make you want to go Russia, not back to Rome. There was a woman I met on a cruise (it wasn't a romance, because she was with her husband) from the Ukraine who was very taken with me and she (and her husband) insisted that I take their address and phone number because I was so welcome to go to the Ukraine and visit them. (The Ukraine has not yet gotten onto my visit-wish list, though.) So one, does, of course, meet people from all over the world. In fact, I wouldn't be going to Italy at all this time if it hadn't been for bonding with the newlywed Italian couple during my trip to Fakarava last summer (where they were finishing out their honeymoon), who insisted that I come to Rome to visit them. But they kind of let that thing slide (as I knew was always a possibility); this whole year, they only wrote me (answered) two e-mails, although in each one they continue to insist that I had to go to Rome this summer and stay with them. However, meanwhile, they had a baby in April, and they didn't write me back until two weeks after I had booked everything by myself without getting any clear confirmation from them. I don't know if I will even see them at all; in this recent e-mail, they said that they spend the month of July "on the coast" (wherever that means), but maybe could "drive back to Rome" to see me if they knew when I was coming. I think I will send them my itinerary and hotel information so they can figure this out. But I hate the idea of interrupting their vacation. It would be cool if "the coast" for them meant the Amalfi Coast, then I could see them down there, but somehow, I think where they go must be closer to Rome, because they have spoken of some place where the tourists never go. But we'll see.

Now, regarding the third coin (and, by the way, it turns out that the "three coins" of "Three Coins In The Fountain" were all the first coin of three different women), it gets even more muddled. The third coin could bring you marriage, (after the second or third coin brought you romance), or it could bring you divorce (which, logically, could follow marriage, or it could follow romance, meaning a divorce from the spouse you had prior to having the romance in Rome!), or, kind of boringly, the third coin could bring "charity", although it didn't specify charity for whom. Maybe your romance drives you in the poor house (spending money wildly on "la dolce vita", so now you need charity? Or the spouse you have divorced took the house and everything else you owned so now you need charity because of that? But probably they mean charity for others. However, all the coins are actually for charity anyway, as all those coins are cleared out regularly and given to charity. And I guess doing something like that is essential, for, judging by the crowd of people I saw in that video, that fountain would be completely filled up quite quickly!

This charity angle is actually quite smart. One of the best uses of coins I have seen was at the Faaa Airport in Tahiti. Right at the spot where you board your international flight, they have a big box where you can deposit all your left over South Pacific Franc change that you no longer have any use for and that you cannot exchange back for U.S. Dollars (currency exchange places will only exchange back paper bills). They specify that it is for a children's charity, and one really would like to get rid of all that heavy and basically useless (at home) change, anyway, and this is for a good cause. Now, if only Tahiti would spread the legend that coins deposited like that will ensure the likelihood that you would come back to Tahiti (the more coins you put in, the greater your chance of a return visit), they would be rolling in charitable donations, I would think, like coins in the Trevi fountain!

It's funny when I think about it—-I am normally a "I want to go as many different places as I can" kind of a guy, so "going back" to a place is not normally on my mind. I would look for someplace new to go to. However, thinking back on my traveling life, I have actually gone back to a few places. And Tahiti was one of them, and that was last year. Kauai was another one, when I really felt that I should go back to a Hawaiian island I hadn't been to, I nevertheless was specifically drawn back to Kauai, so that's what I did, instead. I would definitely go back to Kauai even again, and, in fact, really do plan to (I want to kayak and camp along the Na Pali Coast). Many years ago, I went back to Sweden. Actually, I had been there several times. That was my uncle's main residence each year (he also lived in Helsinki, Finland, and Dana Point, California during other portions of the year), and when he died, I was executor of his estate. Doing that work brought me to Sweden twice, the second time I was there, I lived there in his condo for several months. I did a lot of touristy things while there, it wasn't just all work, but still, I consider those "working" trips, not vacations. But I met some people from Northern Sweden while I was there in Stockholm and made friends with them, so I ended up going back to Sweden twice, as real vacations, to see them. So, two vacations back to Stockholm after the several months I had lived there, and two trips to Northern Sweden (which also included visits to Stockholm) to stay with my friends.

London, and then Midlands England were also places I went back to. I had made friends with people from Darlington (in the Midlands) when I was traveling in Mexico, so I stayed with them twice in England, with repeat visits to London both times.

I for sure will be tossing two coins into Trevi fountain. But the third one, I'll have to think about that….

Going back up to where I mentioned the Coliseum, I think Italian (or Latin?) is such a hard language to write, because there is no good way that I know of to remember which letters are written double. I always have to look up how to spell cappuccino (or is it "capuccino", or "cappucino"?), and the Coliseum is another one (is it "Colisseum" or "Collisseum", etc.?). Even one of the cities I am staying in on this trip, I have to look up its spelling every time: Santa Maria Navarrese (in Sardinia); it is hard to remember that it has two r's, but all the other letters are single. Italian seems to be filled with words like that.

I am so glad you explained what "pepperoni" is in Italy, because THAT is most likely the kind of pizza I would have ordered, and I really don't like to eat chili peppers! (At least, not a lot of them.)

Peculiarly, it wasn't until I was in the middle of planning for this trip that I became clear that pizza actually was a genuine item of Italian cuisine. Somehow along the line, I had gotten the impression that it was some kind of an American creation that wasn't eaten in Italy at all, you know, like chow mein (that apparently is not genuine Chinese food but is a bizarre American creation) or, oh, I don't know, "chips and salsa" is probably not genuine Mexican food (I imagine that they would eat regular tortillas, not something crispy). I do understand that the Italians do not have the milk- or other flavored-with things versions of espresso except in the mornings (with, or as breakfast), that only Americans will order, say, a cappuccino or a "latte" in the afternoon. The waiter or bartender will serve it to them, but they find it to be very strange. But regular plain old espresso, it would be served all the time, any time after a meal, and what would be strange would be to not have that after a meal. So I am glad to learn these little variations on a cuisine theme and also what things are called in Italy versus the American version. A "latte" is simply a class of milk, for example, whereas our "latte" is called a "café latte" (and for mornings, only). So I need to make sure that I eat like an adult—-no cappuccino past breakfast, no meal without vino, no meal without ending with an espresso.

I also never quite understood the deal with all the courses, the Antipasti, the Primo, the Secundo, and all that stuff, and was always kind of embarrassed whenever I went into a fine Italian restaurant here in America ("Am I supposed to order something from each of those courses, I can't afford that!"), but now I understand how it works. It's interesting how big of a trendy deal it is among Italians, now (especially the young and hip), having what we call "happy hour", but for them is called "Aperitivi", where one can actually have a full meal with a series of appetizers for just the cost of drinks. My Lonely Planet Italy guidebook said that is because of the terrible economic straits that Italy is now in, a lot of people (especially younger people) simply can't afford to eat out in the traditional way very much any more. I loved it when the guide book said, "Leave it to Italy to find a way to put the glam into recession." Sue Nihiser, Linda Polan, and I, have become fanatics about "happy hour", here. Well, Sue and Linda have been that for a long time, but for me it is new. We usually are able to get half price on certain wine, beer, and drinks, and discounts on a whole list of different appetizers that we can explore and share. It's really loads of fun, dining out costs less, and, for me, it's a way to get out of the rut of always wanting to order the same thing all the time. It seems that chefs are the most creative when it comes to appetizers. So, in my bid to be careful about spending money in Italy—-in another words, I am a budget traveler (but for sure I will treat myself to some splurges), it is good to know about the possibilities of this "aperitif" thing. Of course, since Italy really is the food capital of Europe (if not the world), I won't be crazy about "budgeting"; I do want to take advantage of what so many visitors say is the best thing of all about Italy, the great food!

Also, back to pizza, there is an awful woman who has a terrible website on which she rants about everything going on culturally in America, and one of her targets is "pizza", which she seems to put in a category like corn dogs at a carnival, or something. Like pizza is not a food that sophisticated adults should ever eat; to her, it is more like child-friendly junk food, like CocoPuffs cereal or a McNuggets Happy Meal. But I realize that pizza was a serious food item, for sure developed in Italy and a legitimate food creation. (Good to know that I should eat it with a knife and fork, in Italy.) It's possible, though, that after eating pizza in Italy, I may be ruined for having pizza in the United States! If so, then it's a "good" kind of ruin, though!

You wrote about bread being brought to the table. That reminded me of Mexico, where things on the table that we are used to having for free end up being charged for—that meant when they brought out a basket of rolls, you would find that they had observed how many rolls you ate, and how many pats of butter you used, and were charged for them. This also included how many sugars you put in your coffee, or how much cream. That was shocking to me as an American, but then when I thought about it, it did make sense, even though I disliked it. Here, we expect to have endless cups of coffee and unlimited soda refills. I am sure each tiny cup of espresso is charged for in Italy.

But after you warned your readers about the bread, I read in my guidebook in the section on "The Italian Table" that explained all the things about eating in Italy, that the charge for the bread is part of the entire "table charge" that you apparently are charged anyway. I don't know what all is included in this "table charge" (are we paying for the fact that we have clean forks and napkins, and water…well, I bet water is a separate charge, too), but I guess it would be good for me to find out. The guidebook made it seem that you would get this table charge whether you ate the bread or not, but it looks like you got some Euros removed from your bill by refusing the bread. Now, me, I probably want to eat the bread, as for so long it has not been on my diet, but then, neither would be cornettes (cornettos?), gelato, and several other things that I will be eating anyway, since they are so forbidden but now I would be in Italy and so I have an excuse to be bad. Anyway, since it looks like I will be walking all over the place, my body can probably burn up any amount of forbidden foods that I eat on this trip. (People expect to gain weight on a cruise, but on the 10-day Mexican/Central American cruise I took a few years ago, I ate whatever I wanted—-and drank whatever I wanted, too--and lost weight. I think that was because I was so much more active on that cruise than I am normally. I must have walked all the way around that ship over a hundred times, plus I was swimming, snorkeling, climbing steep pyramids, going on hikes through the rain forest, dancing in the disco, and just generally keeping on the move so much of the time. And Italy promises to be my most active vacation, ever.)

I love that word, "Agua Frizzante"! I'm going to have to have that all the time, because I would love to be able to say that word! (Normally, I would just drink "still" water.) When I was learning Spanish for my "vagabonding" in Mexico (three months of roaming around), one of my favorite words was "ferrocarril" (which means "railroad", and I did quite a bit of traveling on the Mexican ferrocarril). I loved how it sounded, the two trilled r's in one word, and also the creation of the word, itself, in that "ferro" means "iron" (as in the word "ferrous") and "carril" is "way" or "road". So that sounded so poetic and romantic, "the iron road" or "the iron way". I guess our "railroad" is really no different, but somehow hearing it come out of "ferrocarril" (rrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrr) made it sound so much more wonderful. And guess what, Italian's "railroad" has the same derivation; well, duh, Italian and Spanish are both coming out of Latin; it is "ferrovia", so they have the same "ferro" for the iron, and then "via" for "road" or "way".

I see that I am now starting to get into the fun of these words, which makes traveling so much more enjoyable and enlightening. I remember that moment in Stockholm, when for a while I had been thinking that their words were so ugly. For example, the subway stop that was nearest to my uncle's condo was "Liljeholmen". Just a horrible bunch of mis-matched consonants (but it helps to know that "j" is pronounced like our "y"). And the street that my uncle's condominium tower was on, "Grenljusbacken". Ugly ugly ugly. However, I was there during the Christmas season, so there were many things oriented toward shopping for Christmas. There was a department store advertisement in the subway car, talking about a line of perfume and bath soaps that had "Lilje" as part of their name. In the advertisement was a photograph of a beautiful woman bathing in an elegant bathroom with lilies in crystal vases all around the room. I looked at that poster, hummm, lilies, the name "Lilje", I wonder…and looked up the word lilje in my Swedish dictionary and saw that it meant "lily". Okay, so what is "holmen?" It means "harbor". So my (formerly) ugly-looking and sounding subway stop name actually meant "Lily Harbor", and I imagined a field of lilies growing right by the beautiful water of the lake that my uncle's condominium was next to. In fact, the name of Stockholm, itself, is also a "harbor", in this case, "Timber Harbor" ("stock" is "timber"…you know the phrase "lock, stock, and barrel"? Those are the parts of a musket or a gun; the lock is the metallic mechanical part with the flint and trigger and so on, the barrel is what the bullet goes through, and the "stock" is the wooden part). In former times, the great northern forests of Sweden were its greatest resource, and trees by the thousands were harvested and the timber was floated down the water to Stockholm for sale to the rest of the world. So Stockholm actually got its start because it had a great harbor for receiving timber.

Posters in the subway (tunnelbana) also had advertisements with photos of candles in the windows, which is a Christmas tradition. Light is "ljus" and "gren" is a modifier that has something to do with Christmas, so "grenljus" are the candle lights that people put in their windows for Christmas. "Backen" means "to go up a hill". I stepped out of the subway car at the Lily Harbor station and began walking up the hill to where my uncle's condominium was, at the top of it. It was dark, now (which it had been ever since 3:00 PM, this being winter in Sweden), and as my feet crunched on the snow as I walked up hill, I could see the warm, welcoming glow of Christmas candles burning in every window, reflecting a peace and love as I trudged through the snow up the hill; I was experiencing the very embodiment of that street's name, "Grenljusbacken". The whole world of Sweden had opened up into being a world of fascinating natural beauty, and from then on, I translated the meaning of every street and place name, and it was like reading Emily Dickinson poetry everywhere.

I am now going to have to be doing that with Italian.

"Duomo". Gosh, everywhere there is a duomo, That was confusing me…why does every town have a major building with the same name? Florence has a "Duomo", Siena has a "Duomo", I wouldn't know if I had visited this "duomo" or that "duomo". Well, finally I learned that "duomo" means cathedral. Ah, now I get it! Well, of course, they all have a cathedral. Okay, so now it makes sense.

Anyway, understanding those things will make a big difference!

Boy, those magazine vendors sure are important! It seems that you can buy so many things from them—-maps, tickets, discount passes, why even magazines! And since I will be walking around so much, I will actually be able to easily buy things from them. "Magazine vendors can be your best friend!" ("Where is the nearest bathroom!" Whatever that phrase is in Italian….)

While I hope it won't rain while I am there, I would like to see the rain coming in through the open dome of the duomo. (There's a kind of a poem lying hidden in there with dome, duomo, rain, drain….)

For some reason, when I see the name "Capitaline" (as in Capitaline Hill or Capitaline Museum), it always makes me think of "Palpatine", as in "Emperor Palpatine", the evil ruler of the galactic empire in Star Wars III. And, of course, there is some sort of a connection, I am sure, between the Roman Empire and the epic of the Star Wars empire.

Come to think of it, that hooded man statue that you showed in your section about Campo de Feuri that had carvings representing all the executions that took place in that square actually looks like "Palpatine" (or I should say, Palpatine looks like him!) Look at this photo of Palpatine-—do you agree?

Okay, so for sure George Lukas spent some time in Italy! (Well, and of course he did…and for example, this gorgeous retreat palace on the Peaceful and Artistic planet of Naboo is pure "Lake Como":

and also this scene from that planet is very much like Venice:

It is clear that Lucas (or his designers) used real scenes from Italy to help fashion this science fiction futuristic world.

I think I will avoid the Campo de Feuri in the evenings, though (stabbing and shootings, looking for fights with Americans?)! I'm here to enjoy, not have an in-depth tour of a Roman hospital. I'm worried enough about pick-pockets!

Regarding getting around, my hotel is about a ten minute walk from the main train station (that I will be coming in to from Venice and then going back out through to Florence), definitely walking distance, which also is a main connection with the subway system (and other local trains). I figured that would be very good for my purposes, but today when I studied the subway map, I saw that most of the stops are in the area where I plan to be walking to anyway (say from the Coliseum and the Ancient Rome area all the way up to the Trevi Fountain and Spanish Steps area). Which according to my hotel's website, are all in walkable distances from the hotel), so I probably wouldn't even use the subway unless I get too tired to walk. However, I am very glad to see that they have a subway route that goes to (or quite near to) The Vatican, and I plan to go there, too, but I think it is too far to walk to. However, there were other interesting areas that if I had time for (such as the region that is called "Centro Storico" that has the highly recommended Piazza Navona and also the Pantheon), I would like to go to, but there is no subway for them! The guidebook gave directions to those areas by bus. I probably won't have time for them anyway, but I did see that there was a certain "hole" in the subway routes (like in Los Angeles!). So when you said that the public transportation system in Rome was terrible, that seems to be the case. (I'm not a real fan of taking busses, although I will if I have to. I much prefer subway systems.)

I have found that I am glad that I have an up-to-the minute Lonely Planet Italy Guide Book (which even talks about Italian government scandals!), even though I have done a lot of my planning with the simpler, more abbreviated Rick Steve's Italy guidebook, which I bought in 1999 (I figured Rome has been there since B.C., so a 1999 travel book should be okay!). It's good to have him zero in on the most important or popular things to do and see, but then to get more in depth with one of the other, newer books once the trip is narrowed down. For Rome, I have appreciated having a Frommer's book on Rome alone, also, and its walking tour of Ancient Rome and its one on Romantic Rome I plan to follow exactly point by point (my hotel in Rome is in the middle of a triangle made of one point at the train station, one point at the Coliseum, and one point at the Spanish Steps), and the small Dorling Kimbersley EyeWitness Travel book Top Ten Venice is a true gem (it's got a whole heck of a lot more than just "ten" things…it lists the "top ten" of about 40 different categories, and I was so pleased to see, after I already booked it, that my hotel was listed in that book as one of the top ten mid-priced hotels).

But updated information is extremely helpful. Rick Steve presents inter-city buses as the faster way to get from Venice to Florence, Florence to Siena, and Siena to Rome, faster than the train, but he wrote that (apparently) before there even were the newer Alta Velocita high speed trains, which are now the fastest way to get to these cities. These trains travel up to a speed of 300 km per hour (which converts to 186 miles per hour). The fastest train I have ever ridden on was the Intercity 125 high speed train in England, which, as indicated by their name, travelled 125 miles per hour, which I took from London to Darlington, which is about halfway up the island of Great Britain. That was pretty exciting. And in France, I first heard, and then saw, the amazing thundering bullet of one of their TGV ("tres grande vitesse") high speed trains, that apparently go at the 186 miles per hour speed that I mentioned the Italian AV trains do (although a Wikipedia article indicated that these trains can go almost twice as fast, but safety measures do not allow them to go faster than the 300 km limit). After experiencing that French TGV train go ground-shakingly by, I have wanted to ride on one, so it looks like I will be getting my chance to ride the same kind of thing in Italy. Riding one of those high speed trains would be a "destination" in and of themselves. If I had followed Rick Steve's 1999 advice, I would have planned on taking those trips on a bus! Yikes! (A bus would be much cheaper, though.)

In planning this trip, I was constantly having to battle out the choice between seeing a lot of different things versus seeing more in depth fewer things. Obviously, regarding Italy, itself, I opted for the "seeing lots of different things". I simply could not eliminate any of the places I chose to go to—-definitely not Venice, definitely not Rome, definitely not The Vatican, definitely not the Amalfi Coast, and definitely not Pompeii. The one piece of art in Italy that I wanted to see more than any other is the Michelangelo statue of David, so that meant that I had to go to Florence. And besides, "Florence" is the given name of one of my sisters, my mother, my grandmother, and my great grandmother. They are all actually named Florence Nightingale as first and middle names, except for my great grandmother, whose last name was Nightingale. I was always told that the famous Florence Nightingale (the founder of the profession of nursing) was my great grandmother's first cousin, so they shared the same paternal grandparent (I think that means), so that's why they had the same last name. That was always presented as fact, that we were related to Florence Nightingale and that's why that name was always carried down through the generations. Now, I am not so sure about that. Maybe that was a fantasy…but I would like to somehow research that to verify the truth. For one thing, I'm not sure that the dates line up correctly…such as, could my great grandmother and Florence Nightingale have been in the same generation? I kind of feel that the famous Florence Nightingale was a generation (maybe two) older. Of course, we still could be closely related, but that my great-grandmother and she might not have been as close as first cousins.

Anyway, there was some reason the famous Florence Nightingale was named Florence, and I think it was because even though that family was English, they were living in Florence when she was born and so she was named after that beautiful city. (I will have to research that, too.) So if all this is true, then the name of the female line of my family from my sister back to my great-grandmother are all carrying a first name that came from Florence, Italy, so I should at least spend a day there!

The Rick Steve guidebook said that while Florence is incredibly wonderful during the day (the very essence of the Renaissance), it is kind of dull at night, but Siena, which is only about an hour's train trip away, is spectacular in the evenings. So he recommended spending a day in Florence, but sleeping in Siena. So that’s how Siena got on my list. Actually, I am more excited about seeing Siena that I am Florence. However, I am getting excited about Florence, because I have learned that the three things I want to see there [the Galleria dell'Accademia (where the Michelangelo statue of David is), the Uffizi Gallery, and the Ponte Vecchio (bridge) over the Arno River] are all in walking distance from the train station. Things apparently really are much closer together than they seem when we look at them on the map with "Los Angeleno eyes". So I like the idea that I can go to see such wonderful things but not have to hassle with travel distances and confusing (and unreliable) public transportation to exhaust me before I even get to them.

And finally, Sardinia….in my last three vacations, what I wanted was beaches in a tropical paradise, so last year I went to Fakarava (a coral atoll in the Tuomoto Island chain of French Polynesia), the year before, I went to Palau (in Micronesia, next to the equator and about 500 miles east of the Philippines), and the year before that, back to Kauai. I haven't used up my "fantastic beach desire" yet, so all this urban traveling in Italy and going through museums and cathedrals and the like was starting to depress me a little (despite how wonderful I know it will all be). So I remembered that Italy was on the ocean (duh), so just for fun, decided to do a Google search for the best beaches in Italy. I got a list of the top 10 best beaches in Italy, and nine of them were on the island of Sardinia. Looking at all of them, one really stood out as my clear favorite, the beach Cala Goloritze, so I decided I had to go there. If you look at this website (that's the hotel where I am staying on Sardinia) and scroll down to where they have "the beaches of Baunei", you will see pictures of Cala Gloritze and several other fantastic beaches that are all in a line next to each other up the coast. I will staying in the town of Santa Maria Navarrese, which, as you can see, is really the only town close to the coastline, because those northerly spectacular beaches are in a protected area like a national park, so there is no building or development close to those particular beaches.

A person can tour that whole spectacular coastline via boat tours (which I may do), but since the land is protected, the tour boats cannot land on the beaches. You have to jump off from the boat and swim in. Or you can hike in from the other side. The hike to Cala Goloritze is about an hour hike, but the hike, itself, is highly recommended. I'd rather be on my own instead going with a crowd of tourists and being dependent upon the schedule of a tour company. That is why I am renting a car, so I can drive to the parking area in the hills at the trailhead for that beach. (If I only wanted to go on an organized tour, I could simply take a bus down to Santa Maria Navarrese from the airport in Olbia.)

I realize, of course, that there is a beach at Venice (the lido, which means "the beach"), which might be kind of cool to go to, and also, of course, the whole Amalfi Coast. However, whether I will go to either of those beach areas depends upon what other things I will want to do, instead. I'm going to be in Venice for only two days, and Amalfi for two days. I'm not sure if I will have time for going to the beach, although it would be great if I could. But I am giving Sardinia three days (actually, a great deal of the first day will be getting from the Amalfi coast back up to Naples, flying to Sardinia, and then driving a rental car for two hours down from the airport in Northern Sardinia to Santa Maria Navarrese, which really shortens the first day, and then having to go to bed pretty early at the end of the third day because I have to get back up to the Sardinia airport for an early flight out of there back to Rome and Los Angeles, so really, Sardinia has one full day and two partial days) and that is intended to primarily be my special beach time.

That's funny what you wrote about the Roman taxi drivers not understanding tips and trying to give you the money back. That's almost worth using their services at least once!

So, once again, thank you so much for your very cool and useful tips, and I will be taking advantage of almost every single one! Your advice has enhanced my trip, and I really appreciate it.

All my best to you for a fantastic summer. I am sure you will love everything about your house when you make it the way you want it to be. Summer in your own beautiful back yard could be the best summer you ever had!

Hotels Die

View from my floor of the Sofitel Tahiti Maeva Beach Resort

Today I sadly learned that the hotel I stayed in in Tahiti this past summer, is closed. This is not Raimiti, the place where I stayed on Fakarava in the Tuomoto Island chain, which was the major part of my vacation. This was the Softel Tahiti Maeva Beach Resort, in French Polynesia’s capital city, Papeete, on the island of Tahiti. Since I had already been to Tahiti in the past and what I wanted to experience was something entirely new to me (a coral atoll in an isolated island chain), Tahiti, itself, was only to be my in and out place, somewhat like many people nowadays treat Honolulu when they take a trip to Hawaii, considering Maui or Kauai or the Big Island to be their main destination. So I stayed in Papeete only the first night in, and then flew out to Fakarava the next morning, and then again on my last night in French Polynesia before flying home to Los Angeles.

But the hotel I had chosen for this, which was actually quite close to the Tahiti airport, was surprisingly nice. Here are some pictures of it--what's not to like? Once upon a time, it had been a destination resort itself, a place where honeymooners would come for their dream trip, but the word has long been out that Papeete is a pit and the thing to do is get in and out of Papeete as quickly as possible. While I entirely disagree with this for myself, certainly, or for any serious traveler, probably, it may be most likely true for the thoughtless tourist, the kind who is actually disinterested in history or seeing the business end of a country and only wants to be pampered while lying on the beach. I certainly understand the desire to be pampered, but I also want something more. The Sofitel on Tahiti seemed to me to offer a good combination of both and at a way less expensive price than what one can get on Bora Bora or Moorea where really the only economy is tourism.

While I had yearned for what I received in Fakarava, I also realized that on the whole there really wasn’t much to do there and once I experienced it, I could see no reason to ever go back there. I regretted that I had not planned on staying in Tahiti much longer than two partial days and the Sofitel was so beautiful and had enough of the good amenities that I definitely wanted to go back there for a longer stay, and to also explore the interior of Tahiti, that I had only learned recently has much to offer but very few visitors ever experience it. All that most people ever see is the perimeter around the island, along the ocean’s edge. (On a coral atoll like Fakarava, that is all there is—the entirety of the land is the perimeter, all of the interior is a lagoon!)

But it wasn’t just the hotel in Papeete that died (it closed at the end of November, 2012), I had already learned on-line that the place that was my destination that summer, Raimiti on the island of Fakarava, had been sold and the man who had built it had planned to remake something like it elsewhere on the atoll to a location closer to the scuba-diving action. This upset regular visitors who enjoyed Raimiti’s utter isolation. So far, nothing seems to have been done, though, and as far as I know, Raimiti is still taking bookings. But basically, both of the places I stayed last summer are either now gone, or soon to be.

* * *

I have a thick travel binder that had been put together by my maternal grandmother that is a journal of a several-month-long road trip throughout Europe that she took with one of my uncles in his MG. Part of what my grandmother wanted to do was to stay in all the beloved hotels that her parents had stayed in during a similar road trip (in a chauffeur-driven fire engine red Pierce Arrow six-seater with polished brass light fixtures and bumpers), a trip taken a whole generation ago. My great-grandparents travelled the world in an era in which people of that economic class could travel with their car as baggage aboard a ship, so they rode in that Pierce Arrow everywhere in Europe, India, Asia, and Africa. That may seem like ancient and almost unthinkable times to the people living today, and yet all those hotels, both grand and small, were still in business and my grandmother and uncle were able to stay in them all.

Cruising by ship for my grandmother was certainly different than it is now. For one thing, the ships were much smaller, they were not monstrous floating Las Vegas hotels like they are now. But the point I want to bring up here is that they stayed around for a very long time. My grandmother developed a love for certain ships that she would travel on again and again over several decades. There was a ship, the Sagafjord, that stayed in port in San Francisco for two days and our family got to visit her aboard that ship and be her guest a dinner in the dining room. That would have been sometime in the 1960s. That was the first cruise ship I had ever been on and I yearned for the day when I would someday be able to afford a similar cruise. However, cruising by ship was all but decimated by jet airline travel, so the cruise line that owned the Sagafjord (along with the Vistafjord that my grandmother sailed, and several other ships), Norwegian American Lines went out business. However, Carnival most likely gets the credit for reinventing cruising several decades later, offering short duration destination party cruises for middle class travelers. Cruises of my grandmother’s type would sail around the world, or last several months. Carnival cruises might be as short as three days, or perhaps as long as seven, sailing, let’s say, from Miami to the Bahamas and back again.

Now cruise travel was affordable for me, and I booked passage on the Norwegian Cruise Line ship, the Norwegian Sea. Little did I know that I sailed that ship on its last season; it was already considered to be a ship too small for “today’s” ship travel (it was NCL’s smallest ship), so had been moved to an “inferior” port (Houston, Texas) and after the summer travel season was transferred to its new owner, a local cruise line operating out of Asia. However, for me, the cruise was marvelous, Houston, Cozumel, Roatan Island in Honduras, Belize, Cancun, and some days at sea at the beginning and end. I saw nothing wrong with it at all.

Interestingly, I actually could have sailed on the ship, the Sagafjord, that my grandmother had loved, although now owned by a different company, and entirely refurbished and sailing under a new name, the Vista Rose. I had assumed that it was long gone, crashed up onto a beach in Bangladesh to be cut up for scrap, but I remembered its unique shape and happened to see it from the water at the Port of Los Angeles when I was taking a harbor tour cruise (imagine the coincidence of events!). I took down its new name, did some Internet research when I got back home, and lo and behold, it absolutely was the former Sagafjord, now operating very specialized boutique trips out of England, but outrageously expensive, about seven times the cost of my Norwegian Cruise Line cruise.

But mostly these huge big ships don't seem to last very long, at least, not with the same cruise line and in the same market. The year before I took my cruise on the Norwegian Sea, which was already on its last legs as far as NCL was concerned, my on-line friend Jeff (whose Blogger blog, My Piece of the Beach, I follow) went on a cruise to Nova Scotia with his family on one of Carnival's newest, hugest, and most spectacular "new ships", the Triumph, that I was very excited to see on my cruise in Cozumel. But guess what, it is that very same ship that has been in the news lately, recently suffering an engine fire and now all hell has broken loose aboard with toilets being unable to be flushed and people savagely fighting for food, sleeping in tents on deck, and so on (so says the press). I don't know if Carnival plans to retire this ship, sell it to somebody else, change its name, or what, but cruise ship passengers will probably be reluctant to sail on this particular ship if they know it was the one with this history.

* * *

When did I develop a nostalgia for particular hotels? I think the oldest memory I have of sleeping in a place other than in my own house or at the house of either of my grandparents was when I was about five or six years old. From the way I remember it, the family had taken a trip to the beach at Cape Cod from North Carolina that summer. I never wondered why my parents had chosen to do that, but in thinking about it in preparation for writing this, I realized that normally there would be absolutely no reason for my parents to make a beach trip to Massachusetts. We did take trips to the beach when I was younger, I have seen the pictures, although I have no memory of it at all. We always went, quite reasonably, to beaches in our own state, such as Wrightsville Beach, and to Myrtle Beach in South Carolina; no possible reason to go all the way north to Massachusetts.

Our only connection to Massachusetts was that my father went to M.I.T. there, got his master’s degree in Nuclear Engineering, which he did when I was around six or seven years old. So I am making the strong assumption that Dad needed to go up to Massachusetts to check out the program at M.I.T., maybe take some entrance exams or something, so they decided to bring the whole family and add in a beach trip to Cape Cod. If Dad was going to be going to M.I.T., we would be living in the Brookline area, so I am sure Mom wanted to check it all out, too.

While I don’t remember a single moment at a beach in North Carolina or South Carolina, I still to this day remember what it was like where we stayed at Cape Cod. (Oh…here is an odd factoid that just this minute popped into my head. While my parents were southerners through and through…until they became transplanted Californians, that is…and therefore would have had no love whatsoever for the “Yankee land” of Massachusetts, the house they lived in in Biltmore Forest, North Carolina, was, peculiarly, a “Cape Cod style" "saltbox” house, architecture that was not indigenous to the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. Why they had such a house, I have no idea, but I am pretty sure that my father, who liked to gently teach us things, and I was into listening to him and remembering as much as I could of what he said, must have told me that they lived in a Cape Cod style house, and he might have even explained the salient features of such a house that distinguished it from other kinds. So the words “Cape Cod” must have stuck with me, so that for us to actually go there to "Cape Cod" must have been significant to me, and my senses were primed to experience what I could of it.)

The beach at Cape Cod fascinated me. Unlike the North Carolina and South Carolina beaches that I don’t remember seeing as a child, but I know that I did (and I have seen them as an adult, so I know what they are like) that are simply flat expanses of sand along the length of the ocean, Cape Cod had undulating sand dunes punctuated with tall wild oats and lined with crooked, sand-blown slat fences (or wind breaks). There was a complex of wooden slat walkways coming from the front doors of the cottages or apartments where we were staying, curving along and going up and over the various sand dunes until depositing you down onto the smooth, flat part of the beach. I have never seen a road, path, railway track, or trail that I didn’t want to follow, and these wooden walkways going up and over the sand dunes fascinated me no end. To me, those curious and intriguing walkways were the best thing of all, although I also enjoyed playing in the sand dunes themselves. I do remember the ocean water, also, it was dark green and felt cold. Everything was windblown and the sky was gray and cloudy. I had no negative judgment of any of this, but was simply absorbing the experience of it.

I am pretty sure my parents had expected to stay there a week, or so, because what unit they rented had a fully stocked kitchen and my mother cooked us dinner that night. I was full of excitement over all of the experience and as I had not yet had my fill of exploring the place, I was chattering on about going to see where all those wooden walkways went the next day. That’s when my parents dropped the bomb on me—we were leaving the next morning. I am sure I must have whined, “Why?”, because they explained that the weather was terrible, my mother didn’t like it, and we would end up having a much better time going to a beach back home, instead.

I was devastated. And I clearly remember feeling that feeling of childhood helplessness in the face of powerful parents who were going to do whatever they wanted to do and whatever hopes and dreams you had were utterly irrelevant. I think I struggled with that particular complex my whole childhood (maybe every child does), which had made me into an adult who pretty much always does (within reason) whatever I want to do, and no one can deny me it. (Whenever anyone goes on about how wonderful "blissful" childhood was when you were "free" and "careless", I always think, yeah, and you were also powerless, so adulthood is better. And whatever we ended up doing after we left Cape Cod, I have absolutely no memory of it, but I can still hear the wind whipping against the screen door of the unit in Cape Cod and feel the dried salt on my shoulders while I ate my dinner in unhappy, terribly disappointed silence.

* * *

Other than our aborted trip to Cape Cod, I don’t remember a thing about motels (even though we had moved around a bit with my father going back to college and all, which meant we must have had some temporary lodging during those changes) until our family was moving across country to California when I was eight. And even then I don’t remember any of it until we joined with Route 66 in Oklahoma, which was halfway across the country. Whether it was the perceptible climate shift (somewhere around the middle of Oklahoma the humid air disappears and dryness takes over, and on every one of my twenty or so road trips across country that I have taken, the skin on my body feels the exact moment of that change), or there just was something truly magical about Route 66 (for which there is such nostalgia among a certain generation, today), I don’t know, but I sure feel it always. This was a big deal, though, our family moving to California. After my father got his masters degree from M.I.T., he and my mother had taken a road trip across the U.S. with my uncle (the same one that my grandmother took that European sports car trip with), with Dad job-hunting all the way. He ended up getting thirty-five job offers(!) by the time he was back home, so he took the best one, which was to be an aerospace engineer with Lockheed. Lockheed was paying to move the family out to California from North Carolina. Mom and Dad bought a convertible to celebrate the occasion (a 1956 coral and white Mercury Montclair)…they were going to be Californians, now! In Palo Alto, they bought an Eichler house in a housing development of Eichler houses (my "travelling" grandmother said on her visit that she couldn't even recognize that that house was a house), filled with other aerospace engineers, Stanford University scientists, Hewlett-Packard technologists, and Stanford Research Institute researchers. All that is now “Silicone Valley”, but in the 50s and 60s it was the space frontier, and so I always felt that that region was “technologically futuristic” in character.

But Route 66—I remember the deserts and the cactus plants and the lonesome roadways and the crazy signs (“See the gila monster!”) and the Indian curio shops and the progressing Burma Shave advertisements and the spectacular sunsets. But most of all, I remembered the motels…or “tourist courts”, as my parents called them. Just that word, “tourist court”, makes me think of humming ice machines, pairs of metallic shell-backed rocking chairs sitting next to each doorway in a long curved line of rooms, and neon signs depicting, likely as not, a cowboy riding a bucking bronco twisting a twirling lariat. How I long to go back in time and stay once more in a tourist court with a cowboy on its neon sign. I think there probably still are those in small western towns on the U.S. (federal) highways (the most nostalgic routes for current cross-country travel), long-ago by-passed by the Interstates and the national motel chains. If I had the money and a kitsch art collection, I’d want one of those neon signs. (Las Vegas, of course, was the ultimate in the neon sign in those days.)

If my parents stayed in motels back east during our moves prior to California, I am sure they always arrived way after dark when we kids were already asleep in the car. We’d see nothing of these places except maybe a glimpse of white sheet as we were carefully laid down on the beds, and maybe the sense of a clean bathroom with green tile, a toilet with a paper ribbon across it, and a drinking glass wrapped in a paper envelope.

Fortunately on Route 66, my parents always stopped before dinner; they were probably tired of driving the hot road. This was before there was air conditioning in a car…and until their dying days, my parents never fully understood the luxury of having an air conditioner in the car, which, while available for me when I bought my first car in 1970, was a high-cost add-on. In later years, my father would argue with car salesman about the air conditioning, angry when it became standard and he had to pay for it by default.

But back in 1956, you needed water to cool off. You’d stop hourly by the side of the road to get a drink of water and maybe pour some of it onto a handkerchief to wipe your face. Having a bucket of ice in our motel room was so wonderful! But, best of all, was the motel swimming pool. Not every motel had a pool, but my parents always attempted to stay in a motel that had one, if possible. How great it was to find the motel with the cowboy and a “vacancy” sign, unload the car and then the whole family would put on their bathing suits and run out to the pool and jump in! I wish that a swimming pool still felt that magical…I think they still do to every kid, who can find endless joy in running around and jumping in and out of a pool or diving from a diving board or playing all the made-up games that kids can continue to create. But out there as evening began to fall in Texas or New Mexico or Arizona, there could hardly ever be imagined such a delight as a swimming pool.

Then we’d have dinner in a restaurant at the motel, if they had one, or perhaps in a somewhat “fancy” restaurant on a main street in a small western town, the kind where you could always park on the street in front, parallel parking, or, if a more crowded town, they would have diagonal street parking. Who remembers diagonal street parking? I don’t know how long it has been since I have seen that.

It seems that every one of those downtown restaurants had “cattle” themes…it was as if every meal was on the set of the movie, Giant, still one of my favorite movies of all time. The walls were decorated with gigantic and carefully rendered oil paintings of bulls or steers, and the menus were forever decorated with branding irons.

But still, best of all, was going back to the motel for bed. There is a particular wonderful cool and clean smell of every single motel, even those of today that are no larger than two stories, a smell that I guess comes from the air conditioner or perhaps the laundry detergent that they use for washing the sheets, or maybe some other kind of cleaning fluid. I honestly have no idea what it is, and hotels or large, multi-story motels do not have that smell, it is only the smaller motels. But, whatever it is, I want to have that smell, I want to have it in my own house, or in the bedroom, at least. To me, it is a sure sign of rest and comfort after a long, but exciting day, and a promise that tomorrow will be more of the same.

I have never heard anyone say it, but I wonder if all that nostalgia for Route 66 isn’t really for the highway itself, but for the motels that were on it?

* * *

It wasn’t until I was about ten that I finally saw the inside of a hotel. We never stayed in a hotel while travelling (motels, yes, hotels, no). But when both sets of grandparents would come to California from North Carolina, they would stay in the President Hotel on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto. They stayed in Palo Alto because that’s where we lived, but even when we moved to Atherton, they continued to stay at the President Hotel, which they had come to love. So my parents would drive there to pick them up, but they would stay parked on the street while we kids got to ride up the elevator to whatever floor our grandparents were on and knock on their room door. They would let us in to see the room and look out the window. It was fun to look out from somewhere high like that and see the street and the people below. So a hotel, to me, felt like something very special, and I liked that idea of being in a room high up in a building. I also liked that closed-in, secure feeling that a hotel like that has. You’re cozy up in the clouds, practically.

That hotel, by the way, is now an apartment building.

I finally got to stay in a hotel, myself, when I was a freshman in high school. I joined a state-wide high school club, The Junior Statesmen of America, where we seriously played at being congressmen. Twice a school year, there would be a state-wide convention that would take place in a hotel or resort, where the order of the day was submitting bills that we would write and sponsor, giving speeches arguing for or against their passage, and having them voted on. There were also parties, and dinners, and small meetings, and lectures from very big, famous people (I remember a lecture from California’s Governor Pat Brown at one convention—he was the father of our current governor, Jerry Brown--and the renowned linguist, who later became a senator, S.I. Hayakawa, at another one). I made friends with people from all over the state of California due to this club. Fortunately, my parents had allowed me to go to all eight state conventions (they paid for them!) and I still remember the hotels where each of those conventions were held. All these hotels were really something, as you could see if you click on the links.

My freshman year, Fall State was at the Sheraton Palace Hotel in San Francisco. That has the most spectacular dining room I have ever seen (look at the pictures!). That hotel gave me a particular feeling of love for the whole romantic atmosphere of the city of San Francisco.

Spring State was at a beachside resort in Long Beach, the name of which I have forgotten, because it went out of business so very long ago. But I don’t think there is anything in Long Beach today like it.

My sophomore year, Fall State was at The Hotel Senator in Sacramento. It was right across the street from the State Capitol building, and when we had Fall State there, we were able to have legislative meetings in the actual assembly chamber at the State Capital, itself. That was pretty awesome. However, that is another one of the hotels (the subject of this blog) that went out of business, much to the chagrin of several people who remember it with honor. We were lucky enough to have Fall State there at The Hotel Senator and use the State Capital building for the Fall States of my junior and senior years, as well, so I stayed there three years in a row.

Spring State was at the beachside resort hotel, The Miramar, that is yet another hotel that has gone out of business, but there are those who hope that it will be restored (but this has been going on for years, so I am doubtful.

Spring State my junior year was at the grand and famous El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs. Guess what its fate is—it is now part of a hospital.

Spring State my senior year was at my favorite hotel of all. It has gone through going out of business, being turned into apartments, being turned into a dormitory for the University of California at Riverside (unimaginable), and then, fortunately, back to being a spectacular hotel. See if you wouldn't like staying here!

It’s one of my favorite places in the whole world and I have been saying for years that “someday”, I want to stay there again (while it is still a hotel!) And yet, that “someday” never seems to come. What with the way that fantastic hotels suddenly go out of business, and especially after learning today about the Sofitel Tahiti Maeva Beach Resort going out of business before I had a chance to go back there, I think I better make reservations in this hotel for a few days this upcoming spring break or I may be kicking myself for the rest of my life.

By the way, remember that I said that I had been to Tahiti before? When we were there in the mid-80s, we stayed in a quite unusual hotel way over on the other side of the island where the "Tahiti-iti", the small little piece of the island is attached to the "Tahiti-nui", the major, big piece of the island. This hotel was built up into the steep hillside, each room, a suite with a patio in front, except that all three walls were underground. When you looked up at the hotel from below it looked "normal", that is, you would see the glass-faces of each of the suites. However, if you looked at the hotel from up above, all you would see would be a grass hill. When you sat on your patio in front of your suite and looked out over the ocean, you would feel like you were the only ones there, sitting on your own hill with nothing below you but lush grass and the ocean. This hotel is now so "disappeared" that I can't even find anything about its history on the Internet. So, I have been to Tahiti twice and both hotels I have stayed in there are out of business.

One summer in the early 70s, a girlfriend of mine gave me a free ticket to Hawaii (she worked for a wholesale travel booking company and received more free tickets to Hawaii than she could ever use). I was there for ten days, staying in Honolulu in the house of a friend of mine except for three days in the middle when I took a side trip to Kauai. On Kauai, I stayed in a cheap motel in downtown Lihue, but I drove by the famous resort, Coco Palms, and vowed that someday I would go back to Kauai and stay in that hotel.

About five years ago, I went to Kauai, and for sure was going to stay at the Coco Palms, but by now you can guess that that was not possible. Why? Because the hotel was destroyed by Hurricane Iniki. So, of course, you can imagine that it, too, is undergoing that whole campaign to restore it. Will it be restored? I hate to say that by now I think it very unlikely. That just doesn't seem to be how things are done in the tourist industry. Just tear 'em up and build condos.

I ended up staying in a quite reasonably-priced hotel (motel is more like it), The Kauai Sands on the beach only a little bit over from the Coco Palms (which, itself, was not actually on the beach, but across the highway from it…and there still is nothing on the beach straight across from the Coco Palms). I liked staying there, it was close to everything, and was completely satisfactory to me. However, it has been in the process of being sold for several years, turned into time shares, or is in danger of being torn down, so that I am surprised to see that it is still there, but barely, just barely. Hanging by a thread.

* * *

It wasn’t until about five years ago that I started to take actual vacation trips. I guess that’s because I finally felt settled in a long-term job. Almost all of my other trips as an adult were based on me moving somewhere or having a trip between school semesters. I moved one hell of a lot in my life. The year before my trip to Kauai described above, I took a trip to Miami Beach and Key West, basically my first real vacation trip. I had long wanted to experience that highway out to Key West from Miami, going from Florida Key to Florida Key as if on stepping stones across the ocean. And, of course, I figured that Key West would have spectacular white sand and tropical blue waters. Miami Beach I planned to use as an arrival and departure place; I had been there before, so Key West was my main destination.

However, I was disappointed by the highway to Key West…it really didn’t feel much different than, say, driving from Tallahassee to Mobile, Alabama. And the beaches were, in a word, awful. The only real “beach” at all was in a facility owned by the Navy. The resort where I stayed, which was right on the shore near the Southernmost point, provided a long pier out over to water with a stairway down for gaining access. Not my idea of how to get into an ocean, but there is too wide of a strip of sharp and creepy-to-walk-on sea grass along the Key West shoreline to enjoy access from the land.

I did enjoy the town of Key West, eating and touring, and the resort where I stayed had a nice swimming pool. Other than that….

Where I was staying was called the Atlantic Shores Resort and it had a few innovative features, such as the place was clothing optional and they had weekly dance parties open to the public, and outdoor movie nights in their parking lot. I honestly hadn’t chosen this hotel for its clothing optional feature…I had already figured out that my own clothing optional days were over. I chose it because the price was right (in an otherwise rather expensive city) and the location was excellent, and also I rather liked the kind of “funky” atmosphere I expected it to have.

Where I stayed in Miami Beach (“North Miami Beach”, although it is also called “Sunny Isles”), was a simple Days Inn, pretty old and small. As this was meant to be my “first night in, last night out” place to stay, I wasn’t demanding much. However, it did have a feature that really like, it was right on the beach, whereas all the fashionable “Art Deco” hotels in South Beach are across the street from a park that fronts the beach. I felt that I had a better deal with that inexpensive Days Inn on the sand, and upon seeing it, I liked it a lot. My room on the second floor also had a balcony, facing the ocean, no less, something that (room with a balcony, ocean view, hotel on the beach side of the road) would be (for me) an unaffordable luxury in Southern California.

So, being disappointed with Key West, I decided to check out of the Atlantic Shores Resort and go back to the Days Inn in Miami Beach. I even got the same room back! And I was quite happy with Miami Beach and felt that I had found a great find with that Days Inn, there, and figured I would go back there several times. However, going back there was not to be…Donald Trump bought up that Days Inn and the several hotels on either side of it, tore them all down and built three immense condominium towers (see, I told you it was a great location!). Actually, in looking for an on-line link to a photo of those towers that replaced the small hotels on that strip, I saw that the entire Sunny Isles strip has been taken over by immense and spectacular condominium towers filled with multi-million dollar condominiums. So my little Days Inn motel didn’t stand a chance.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic Shores Resort in Key West has also been razed and the property rebuilt with something quite chichi, and expensive. I guess that’s the way of it. But it was weird to have both of the places where I stayed on that trip disappear.

Do I now have the feeling that if I stay in a hotel (or go on a ship), that will be the kiss of death of it?

I wouldn’t mind so except some of these were places that I wanted to go back to, or stay in for the first time. But that’s life, I guess…constant change. Whatever happened to things being like my grandmother’s day when she could stay in all the same places her parents had stayed in and loved? I can’t even do that with my own hotels half a month later!

What's Up Part I: Weight Loss (Rant?)

Well, not really a rant, per se, although not a post about the happiest of situations. Weight loss...yikes. Heck, I COULD write a rant, but that is not really my style, at least, not so far, as I like to put a positive spin on things, which IS my style.

I feel like I have a peculiar relationship with this blog, in that I don't write steadily and also have no set "subject" matter like "successful" blogs are supposed to do (write steadily), and have (a set subject matter)...which, thus, in their case, builds a following. Me, I write when I feel like putting something down in a public (but semi-anonymous) place...and have the time to do so (which seems to be a big problem, lately). I also do write in a hand-written journal (much more there, actually), things that are only for me and my eyes (for which, I am sure, most of you would be thankful).

A friend of mine sent me a message that simply said, "Wazzup?" and that got me to thinking about what HAS actually been happening lately. You know, sometimes you simply slide right through it all in real time and don't really reflect on it, but there is a time when looking back at it as a whole is valuable. In fact, I think that "journalizing it" in this case would be a good thing, so I realized that I would write my friend a comprehensive answer to his question and that a lot of my answer may be worth posting here, too.

I started what I think could be a pretty long answer, but as one of my "New Year's Resolutions" (ha ha, have I EVER been successful with them?) was to NOT stay up all hours of the night working a project that I hadn't completed yet (that is to say, to WORK on getting enough sleep and creating a steady circadian rhythm), but to put it aside and come back to it in the morning, that this section that I did complete kind of makes a whole entry by itself, so I am posting it now.

Since most readers come here by way of a particular tag search, I think that this section (weight loss) may be of broad interest.

I have also made a second "Resolution", and that is to strengthen the character of my will and steadfastness, which means to actually FINISH TO COMPLETION my ideas rather than put in a good start and then move on when the time or energy runs out and never finish it. I have known since my early 20s that I am what I call a "comprehensive doer", which means that once I start, I don't want to have to stop before I am finished. But if I DO stop (or am forced to), then it is very hard to get back to it and very often I just never do. (Interrupting that creative energy flow makes me lose interest.) Paramahansa Yogananda used to talk about what he called "monkey mind," which he said interrupted a person's meditation. This refers to a mind that just jumps from one thought to another instead of focusing one-pointedly onto one thought. Well, I have a subset of that, in that my interest in something can jump around, too, but only when situations interrupt my will to "comprehensive doing". Like having to go to bed.

A good example of what I mean is that once upon a time, I wrote a novel. I would have been perfectly happy to write it all at once at one sitting, if that were possible (and sometimes it is), but my novel, which was nearly 400 pages long, could not have been done that way. As it was, my energy pattern was that I would write for 36 hours straight, then sleep for 8 hours, write again for 36 hours, sleep for 8, and so on. This meant that I had NO circadian rhythm and often had no idea whether it was AM or PM (at certain transitional times of day). It worked for me; it seemed to keep me in that creative space for several months. I successfully wrote the whole thing, and even got an agent for it. However, she was unable to find a publisher for it, that is to say, she got tired of looking for one within whatever was HER level of sustainance, and surmised that the book, while interesting to hear about, needed to be rewritten in order to sell it. She may be right, I don't know, but the point was, my mind then moved on to something else and I couldn't abide the idea of sitting down and writing it again.

I was thinking about that book a couple of weeks ago, realizing that it actually still DESERVES to be rewritten (is worth doing) and I feel bad that I had not done it all these decades. So I have resolved to not let projects be shoved to a back burner where they get ignored and then forgotten.

So, with this, which is supposed to be a comprehensive answer to my friend's question, which I had to interrupt, I hope that I DO follow my New Year's Resolution and finish writing, and posting, the rest of it beyond here.

* * *

So, what's up? I could just say, oh, not much, you know, same old, same old, just work and stuff, blah blah blah. And on the surface of it, that would probably be the truth. More or less. Oh, there are some good things about work, and also some bad things, but the bad things are pretty much not all that bad compared to most other people’s situations. I have it really very lucky, actually. I am developing quite a good reputation (in a small circle of people) for doing amazing work with truly awful things, things nobody in their right mind would ever want to deal with, and I don’t want to either, but I do seem to have a particular knack for it and while each new project along those lines is awful, I do end up making it fun for myself. Most of it has to do with constantly-increasing and unreasonable government regulation to the point of absolute insanity, nothing that anyone should ever have to deal with since it is all negative and destructive and makes me feel that my job is doing nothing but digging holes and then filling them up again and then being asked to dig yet new holes. In other words, in the world of universal meaningfulness, it has no meaning whatsoever…it just keeps our enterprise alive, that is all.

But since I enjoy figuring things out and setting up processes and procedures to solve the issues and to comply with them, I view it as a campaign of sorts, like a military campaign and perhaps organizing a great adventurous journey through “systems”. (It’s sort of how I imagine some people might love writing computer software, except at least in my case, it is slightly less abstract than that.) So once I get into it, or maybe around the time I successfully complete one of these “campaigns”, I realize that it has been fun. (A kind of scary fun, but fun nevertheless.) And THAT amazes people, especially those who are my bosses, or immediate co-workers. “We’re so glad that it is fun for YOU, for us, it would kill us.”

But, is it the best use of my time and talents? Is this the fulfillment of my lifelong dreams? Is this an acceptable way to spend the remaining years of my life until I become frail, senile, unable to care for myself, or dead? No, not at all!

I had thought that this past Christmas break (for which we get, I am most thankful, two whole weeks off…which is in addition to the two whole weeks we get off in the spring and then whatever time we get for vacation in summer, which for me is three weeks), was rather depressing. Looking back at it a month later, now, I see that it actually wasn’t and that what it really was quite wonderful, even though it didn’t conform to what I thought had been my plans for it. But to explain all that, let me just go back to a little more than a year ago, well, actually more than a year ago. This sort of sets the groundwork…maybe!

Let’s go back to October of 2010. The big thing that happened in that month and year was that I became a patient of a particular doctor whom I understood to be a GENIUS in weight loss. Weight, or to be more specific, obesity, was a problem that was very much bothering me. I was after all heading toward weighing 300 pounds (I had actually gotten to 275)…I will let you convert that to whatever other mathematic system communicates those numbers to you. And the problem was, I simply had no idea what to do about it. That was because by then I had tried everything, in fact, so many things that worked reasonably well, but nothing worked perfectly well. And even those things that worked reasonably well were nevertheless a huge struggle…a struggle that actually completely takes over a person’s life during the time that it is going on. And to have all that effort not really BE THE ANSWER is worse than a disappointment; I think it genuinely counts as a form of trauma.

So in the years and months leading to October of 2010, I was a traumatized person. I had doctors of every stripe continually haranguing me over that issue, “You HAVE to lose weight” (as if I needed them to tell me), but my answer back to them was always “you tell me how and I will do it,” and they all would tell me what they THOUGHT was “how”, and I would say, “no, I KNOW that doesn’t work.” So they always knew that I should lose weight, but they never REALLY knew how I should actually do it, but that wouldn’t stop them from making it a constant refrain, so I would “fire” them…that is to say, I would stop going to them and start over again with a new doctor…and then fire him when he got to be too much on that subject. Don’t bother me over something you have no genuine solution for (and you KNOW you have no solution, since not ONE of your patients that you make this demand of is able to do that, and that I can win a bet on).

My attitude was (still is), there IS a way to do it that works, and I think that somewhere deep inside me is the knowledge of what that method will be, but so far I don’t consciously know what it is anymore, but when I hear it, then I will do it.

And that’s what happened prior to October 2010…a friend of mine at work (this happened in August, actually), happened to tell me that she had lost 60 pounds by working with a particular doctor who works in the town where we live, and she described how it worked and something inside me of said that this was IT. She loaned me her copy of the book the doctor had written, and I read it, and I even more knew that it would be the diet that worked, but it also looked like I would be suffering terribly throughout all of it, so it took me from August to October to finally get up the energy to actually go to him and get started with this “misery”.

To my surprise, it really wasn’t miserable at all…in fact, I say to people that it was the easiest and most pleasant weight loss program I had ever been on. Sure, there was always what I think was an emotional sense of deprivation associated with it, but it didn’t feel like physical deprivation. The program was really pretty strict…I was limited to 40 grams of carbohydrates and day and 1,100 calories per day. The theory behind it was that keeping carbohydrate ingestion below 40 grams a day, there would be no insulin response (since there was not an over-abundance of sugars), and with no insulin response, nothing would block the burning of my body fat, and with eating only about half the number of calories that my body needed to sustain itself, the other half would be coming from my own fat stores. It would be like having a constant “IV-drip” of your own body fat, feeding you 24-hours a day, so you would never be hungry. No cravings. No misery. Your own FAT would be making you THIN! (In fact, that was the name of his diet, “Your Fat Will Make You Thin”, although in medical circles, he called it “a Ketogenic Diet”.)

In order to eat like that pretty much meant eating only what I prepared at home. I found that I COULD eat out from time to time by having some kind of meat dish and then vegetables, forgoing all other foods, but that pretty much made eating out not really worth it, so the particular fun of that was out. Also, parties were pretty much impossible; oh, maybe there would be one food item that was acceptable, but usually not, so I pretty much understood that if I went to a party at all, there was going to be no eating and drinking at all. Sure, one can enjoy other things at a party, but essentially, it is the near total elimination of the fun of parties and eating out that contributed to what I refer to as the “emotional” deprivation, when there really was no accompanying “physical” deprivation, since I wasn’t really bodily hungry, per se. I maybe WANTED to eat other stuff, but I didn’t HAVE to.

So, I was losing so much weight on this program, so fast, that it was obvious to any and everyone who ever saw me. The results were exceedingly dramatic and impressive and every day was exciting…looking in the mirror was exciting...constantly moving down in clothing sizes was exciting. Since I work in a school that has around 500 families, I was a very visible weight loss success to a huge number of people. I’d say that every single day I would have three or more different people pointing out the impressive weight loss, asking me about it, saying that they wanted to go on the program, too (but almost nobody ever did actually do it. Maybe about five others attempted it, but only one of those has stuck with it).

I was my doctor’s “star” patient (and, to my knowledge, the ONLY one to ever show any true demonstrable success) to the extent that he would take me as an example to lectures that he would give. He even made a video tape of me that he shows to new or prospective patients. And, I, of course, was floating on cloud nine.

By July of 2011 (I had been on this program for 9 months), I reached the weight of 173 pounds. I had lost 102 pounds. According to my body composition metering scale, I had a fat percentage of 9% and the metabolism of a 14-year old. My body was defined as “athletic”. And I was able to buy “male fashion model sized clothes” at the clothing stores…even the extra-lean or extra-fitted versions of those clothes. So, in clothes, I looked like a million bucks. To me and to everybody else.

By this time, now, my doctor kept haranguing me to “choose a goal weight”. He would say, “Are you there, now?”, or “So, what is your goal weight, 170?” And every time he brought that up, which he brought up once a week since that was the frequency of our medical visits, I’d give him the same answer—“I do not have a goal WEIGHT, I have a goal FAT PERCENTAGE”. According to a fitness calculator that I was going by, I had started out with a fat percentage of something over 30%, which was defined as “Very Poor” for any age (they allow you to have, or expect you to have, more body fat on you the older you get, but even at my age, the oldest age category they had, I was “Very Poor”, so certainly I was “Very Poor” for someone in his 20s). To me, it was unacceptable to be limited by the age categories. Why was I going to go all through this only to be “Excellent” for a man in his 60s? If I’m going to do it, and it looked like I certainly could, I was going to go all the way to the best. And “the best”, to me, meant 6% fat, which was the absolutely lowest fat percentage for any male of any age. I figured I would get down to 6% and then allow the fat to settle up to a healthy 7% when I wasn’t dieting any more.

I told the doctor that I didn’t care so much what the weight number was…whatever I weighed when my body fat percentage became 6%, that would be my “goal weight”. And I expected that ultimately my weight number would increase, but not from fat…I figured I would then want to work on gaining more muscle, so my weight would actually get higher, but I will still have this awesome low fat percentage. But none of that “computed” with him, because, as I viewed it, he was still so old-fashioned that he only thought of “goal weight” when “weight” isn’t the issue, but the amount of FAT is. So we reached an impasse where he could not go any further, in his mind…he’d kind of sit there catatonic like a computer waiting for the next correct instruction input and until it comes, it just freezes. So everything kind of remained in abeyance at that point.

But I didn’t care about his reaction, I only knew what I wanted to do and I set out to continue of the path that had been working so well to achieve that. After all, here was where I stood at that time…I had long ago gotten to an “Excellent” fat percentage for a 60-year-old, which was 20%, and then I had gotten to an “Excellent” fat percentage for a 50 year old (19%), and then to an “Excellent” fat percentage for a 40 year old (17%), and then to an “Excellent” fat percentage for a 30 year old (14%), and even an “Excellent” fat percentage for a 20 year old (10%)…I was 9%. I only wanted to get down 3 more percentage points to “perfection”.

But from July 2011 all the way through to July 2012, one whole year, I did not budge one pound down below the weight of 173 and that fat percentage of 9%. So, was that year, for me, “half full” or “half empty”…was I a success, or a failure? Well, the “keeping my weight off for a whole year” could be considered quite a notable success, so that’s the “cup is half full”. But to me, I was on a painful PLATEAU for over a YEAR, could not LOSE ONE MORE POUND, no matter how dedicated I still was to the diet, not matter how much I still continued to follow it, no matter how much emotional deprivation I was putting up with. And, worst of all, I now had PHYSICAL deprivation. I now was hungry all the time…the meals I was eating felt like “nothing”…I craved to be able to eat like a “normal” person, hadn’t I certainly earned that by NOW? (Well, maybe not like a normal person, but something a bit beyond an eating program that somebody more than a hundred pounds overweight would have to be stuck with…for the rest of my life?)

And the doctor had no advice to offer, at all. He only knew to say the same old stuff over and over again. His advice was outstanding to “get you nearly there,” but that was where it ended.

Then came my trip to French Polynesia, and particularly, to the isolated resort of Raimiti in Fakarava. There at Raimiti there would be no control of the eating. While we would be fed at this resort an hour and a half boat ride away from any other civilization, it was whatever the kitchen there presented to us. No choices at all (they felt that we were lucky that they got supplies way out there at all). Well, there would be one choice, and that was to simply “not eat” certain things, which I don’t think was an acceptable solution. Not for a trip that cost something like $4,000. I’m not going to starve on my vacation. And besides, shouldn’t I be ABLE to more or less eat the things that they serve at a tropical resort with a kitchen run by a French cook? Surely my life did not require me to be forbidden this kind of exotic travel, which I plan to do a whole lot MORE of. This is very different from simply having ones daily working life back home in Los Angeles, where things are more or less dull but for a while I can stand being deprived of elaborate dinners in world class restaurants, and having fun at parties.

I came back from that trip having gained four pounds. And the doctor hit the ceiling. I could not believe his negative reaction. I was described as “a failure”, a “disappointment”; I was his “star patient” and “look what happened” to me, it’s so “embarrasing”; in short, he had to say it, I was “disgusting”. And his final summation was that I needed to be on a “very short leash” because I had “a great will to relapse.”

What is this…I who had lost 102 pounds, gained four pounds on a vacation when I had no choice in the meals presented, and now I am disgusting and have to be kept on a very short leash because I had a “great will to relapse”? What am I, a drug addict?

This man had had nothing of value to offer me for a whole year…he had no solution for a year of hunger, and now he loses his mind because I gain back four pounds, four pounds which I assumed I would burn off in the next couple of weeks.

So I decided that there was no point to going back to him anymore. It would be great to save that money. I didn’t tell HIM that…I simply stopped making any more appointments. Does he notice that I am no longer going to him? What does he think about that? Probably now chalks up his “star patient” as “yet another failure”…like ALL the others.

Okay, now…hold that thought. Is there something else I should have done, instead? Such as…what? Well, I could have decided that I had already lost enough weight, that 9% body fat was low enough for anybody. I could have satisfied him by establishing that my goal weight was 173, and then he would move us into the next phase which was “maintenance”, but which he called “stabilization”, which meant (under some kind of guidance from him) that I would be slowly taken up into increased carbohydrates and increased calories until I started to gain, at which point, I would have then “known” how much I could eat from then on.

But, I simply would NOT have ever thought that I should stop three fat percentage points away from my goal. Why would I? That would be like running a marathon and stopping with my chest just one inch away from the ribbon at the finish line.

It’s more like what HE should have done, such as said, “Well, you’ll burn that extra four pounds off in no time and then we will work on getting that fat percentage down to where you want it”…or else MAYBE he could have said, “I don’t think you CAN get the fat percentage down to 6% unless you are running marathons, but where you are is amazing and awesome. I think you should stay right here, but if you INSIST on going down where you want to go, then I will help you and we will see if it can be done. But I warn you, I think it is going to require some serious changes in the program [I don’t know what they might be…fewer carbs for a while, fewer calories, much expanded exercise?].”

But really, there was nothing he could do, nothing that he KNEW to do, because I DID have the horrible hunger and craving and yet he had no solution for that.

In short, my feeling about that program now, was that he knew how one can get the fat off, but he had no idea how one can keep it off. So, ultimately, his plan was no different than other ones I had followed successfully, but that also never worked at the end.

Because IT IS NOT OKAY to have to follow a starvation diet for the rest of ones life, and to live every day with serious hunger and cravings. Not when there are people who follow no rules at all and remain totally thin (so it IS possible). (Those are these shits who think they know everything there is about weight loss, when in reality, they don’t know any more about it than they know what kind of nutrients are growing on a habitable planet near Alpha Centauri.)

So now I am back to that same place I was before August 2011 (except, thankfully, I am not 102 pounds overweight), not consciously knowing what to do, but still thinking that somewhere INSIDE of me is the answer, I just haven’t “heard” it, yet.

I have tried some other things, though, but haven’t figured out anything conclusive. And the truth is, I would do just about ANYTHING if I had faith that it would actually work and that it was possible to live with forever.

There are some conflicting schools of thought and I have no clear idea which one is the correct one.

School of Thought Number 1: It is all about having a CALORIE DEFICIT. You cannot burn any fat off your body unless you eat fewer calories than you use up. You can create a deficit by eating fewer calories than your body needs, or you can create a deficit by burning more calories than you eat (by exercise), or some combination of both. All this sounds kind of good, until you get very near the end. When you are very obese, it is very simple to create a good fat-burning deficit. There is a big difference between the calories one has been eating to weigh nearly 300 pounds, and the eating that will sustain someone at 150 pounds, so there can be a visible and encouraging weight loss week after week as a person diminishes from that nearly 300 pounds. But when you are nearly at your goal, those few remaining pounds, based on the calorie deficit theory, would take more or less forever to burn off, based on the concept that to lose one pound of fat, you have to have a 3,500 calorie deficit. To lose even one pound a week (if one can stand that slow rate) means that there has to be a calorie deficit of 500 calories a day. That most likely would put a person below their basal metabolic needs (and the 1,100 calories a day I was eating for two years was definitely doing that), which means that their diet is destroying their metabolism. They’re losing weight, sure, but then are putting themselves into the situation of having to always maintain this “below basic needs” calorie eating in order stay there, so of course their body is fighting them tooth and nail about that with all the arsenal it has as its command…hunger, cravings, and storing as fat ANYTHING extra that ever passes beyond those lips. Does one want to REALLY live their whole life battling (and hating) their own body?

School of Thought Number 2: It’s all about making your body healthy, providing it all the nutrients it needs so that it can function humming along energetically and doesn’t feel that it is starving, and once you are healthy and properly nourished for a sustained length of time (say, three to four months), then your body (when it has “faith” in this steady nutritious food supply) will automatically NORMALIZE, as it no longer needs to hang onto this excess fat, which was there because the body felt that you were undernourished. This means that obesity is NOT a sign of eating too much, but is, instead, a sign of eating not ENOUGH of what the body actually needs. Plain old “calories” is not the measurement of that; one can get a LOT of calories in sugar, white bread, pasta, and Coca Cola, for example, but there is not ONE nutrient in all that.

That second school of thought is the more appealing one for many reasons, although it does have a bad side and that is that IF IT IS TRUE, that it was holding onto pounds of fat because it felt like it was in a famine (even if you were “overfeeding”), it is going to make you gain a scary amount of weight during the time you are eating this way (now that it is finally getting some good nutrients, it is going to want to hang onto them), until it feels secure enough to “normalize”.

I really wanted to avoid that “gaining more weight” outcome, but as I was more interested in testing that theory than I was going back on a calorie-deficit diet that I felt had already harmed my metabolism and that would take too long to achieve success with, anyway (by my calculation, two more years of being very hungry with nearly imperceptible success every step of the way). Unfortunately, this HAS definitely caused weight gain, so far, 30, maybe 40 pounds worth (I am, once again, scared to death of the scale), which is very terrible to undergo, and I don’t really have much in the way of clothes that I can now wear (that are comfortable and look reasonably good), plus what I see in the mirror looks horrible, and people have (thankfully) stopped talking about my body, now, because I don’t think the conversation would be GOOD, so I’d rather that they just shut up. And actually, I don’t really want to view myself as a failure (like they probably do) in that what I am really doing is trying to find out what really WORKS, but for the sake of appearance, I am always on the brink of simply going back to the “starvation” method, although I think that is the wrong way to go.

One might want to ask, “how or why were you under-nourished, didn’t you know how to eat healthfully?”

Uhm…does anybody in America know how to eat healthfully, and if they do know, do they actually do it? There is a lot of conflicting buzz about that, too. Such as “everyone” seems to feel that a McDonald’s hamburger is a very unhealthy thing to eat. And it seems that the majority of the people who think this way feel that it is the MEAT that is bad…oh, too much FAT, too many calories, and maybe they will attempt to moderate that by substituting a chicken patty for the beef, or maybe fish, or perhaps even a vegetarian (soy) “burger”. The program that I was on felt that the unhealthy aspect of a McDonald’s hamburger was the BUN (all that white bread), not the meat, and that those various meat substitutes made it the worst of all, especially since the fish was breaded, for example, and soy is not only an excess of carbohydrates, but is also a poisoned GMO (genetically modified organism) product.

Then there is the question of “healthy fats” versus “unhealthy fats”, where the average person maybe thinks that animal fats are bad, but vegetable fats are very healthy. While the program that I was on didn’t distinguish among the various fats, the doctor just wanted you to moderate the fat level (controlled by the calorie restriction more than anything else), but things that I have been reading and believing lately state that almost ALL vegetable oils are horrendously unhealthy and that animal fats are better or at least “okay”, but what would be ESSENTIAL would be animal fats loaded with Omega 3 amino acids, which means certain seafoods or grass-fed animals (natural grass-fed free range beef, wild deer, etc.).

And, of course, “dairy” is extremely controversial, from those who think all dairy is unhealthy and definitely not for adults, to those who will accept it only if it has 0% fat (which in the older days was the waste that the farmers fed to the pigs). The other polarity concerning dairy says that milk is extremely HEALTHY and we need to be drinking a LOT more of it, but only the full-fat kind, and that cream is definitely good to have, not avoid (and butter, too). And for those people, RAW dairy is best of all, which is illegal, now, in most states in the U.S. and “federales” have arrested even farmers who drink raw milk from their OWN cows.

Everybody seems to understand that sugar is bad, but I challenge anyone to completely do without any kind of sweet taste, so, should you use artificial sweeteners that at least have very few, or no, calories? But those seem to be poison, so which do you choose to use, that which will make you fat or that which will cut holes in your brain?

The truth is that no two Americans (or doctors, or nutritionists, or diet book writers, or the government) will agree as to what foods are healthy and which ones are to be avoided, and besides, NO ONE is eating most foods in a natural state since we are no longer hunter/gatherers and very few of us even live on farms, and so our food is preserved, processed, insecticided, antibioticized, growth-hormoned, raised in horrible and unnatural conditions, and even genetically-modified. SO WHO IS ACTUALLY HEALTHY? We may be eating a lot of STUFF (and the more convenient it is, the more likely we are to eat it), but we also may actually be STARVING anyway, so our poor bodies are like squirrels saving nuts for the winter, except for us the nuts are BODY FAT and winter is not always COMING, it is ALWAYS HERE ALREADY.

So that is what we are up against. I am up against. Except I insist that there is a solution and that I can find it.

I can see at this point that I have only just warmed up—the weight loss thing was NOT the main story, here, but rather than write all night at this point, I think it might be better to at least send you this one thing and hope that I do continue this