a hint of light

Consider the following construct: If you eat like a normal person, you are normal. If you eat like an idiot, then you’re an idiot. But if you eat like a caveman, you’re not a caveman. What the fongool? Let me explain.

I do not look much like a caveman—yet I am a man and I do live mostly in my man cave. While I do not wield a large Fred Flintstone club, early last Friday morning I did shoot a brontosaurus in my pajamas. How it got in my pajamas is a matter of public record, although honestly, the police report reeks of unprofessional cynicism.

The weapon I used was a powerful, clip-fed Rapidstrike CS-18 blaster. (To its detractors: a stupid nerf gun.) I waited three days for a police background check before buying, yet no one ever said I was good to go. So I went anyway. If you can’t buy a CS-18 to keep a thieving creature from 500 million years ago from stealing your PJs without Uncle Slim’s approval, then I say we live in a hull, rivist välja maailma. Pardon my Estonian.

The police made a huge deal of finding no wounded or dying brontosaurus in the neighborhood. They performed the most perfunctory of searches, “…and even then we felt like idiots.” They did find my pajamas in the backyard. But just because I was standing naked beside them, holding my blaster, they suggested I was under the influence of some dangerous substance–possibly the zest of a Brussels sprout.

Their ultimate conclusion: “No dinosaur—pre-historic or imaginary—would be caught dead in this guy’s Big Bang Flash jammies (with the attached feet).”

What’s the connection to the caveman diet? Well, I’ve experienced such moments of hallucinatory, light headedness over the past 23 days. I attribute them to my self-inflicted Whole30 diet,* sometimes known as the caveman diet. Or the paleo diet—named for the Paleozoic era. That is when men ate badly barbecued mastodon steaks and, in frustration, launched the first of the legendary gravy boats: The beginning of man’s never ending search for sauce.

Whole30 is a free, 30-day elimination diet. Aimed not at eliminating yourself, it restricts for 30 days all foods that might cause potholes along the delicate network of secret tunnels that connect your pie hole to daylight at the southern end of the trail. (Known on the street as “the light at the end of the sigmoid intestine.”)

One by one, after 30 days, you reintroduce a food into your diet. With new bio-wisdom, you assess its attitude toward your once indiscriminate inner garbage disposal. If it passes the gut check, you can return it to your diet. If it runs a ‘tude, escort it to the curb.

The downside: Whole30 temporarily eliminates from your diet all that makes life worth living: Kit Kat candy food, Cherry Garcia ice cream, Philly Cheese steaks, cookies, milk, cookies and milk, fudge, cake, pie, cannoli, pizza, pepperoni, pasta, bread, beer, wine, legumes, lagumes, lolagumes etc. Any processed food with ingredients you can’t pronounce. Anything with wheat, rice, corn or gluten. Also anything without wheat, rice, corn or gluten. No Cocoa Puffs, but you can eat the box.

To keep from starving you eat like a caveman–no manners, no napkins and no place to wash up before Spring. It’s a high-protein, all-you-can-spear diet. Yes there’s fruit, squash and sweet potatoes, but mostly slabs of sabre-tooth tiger, hedgehog, anteater, Big Foot, sloth or anything with saurus in its name. On Thanksgiving it’s roast pterodactyl stuffed with dogs, cats and lizards. Can you say “Good-eats?”

No, I can’t. But on Day 23 what I will say is “Goodbye 15 pounds; just seven more days.”

*whole30.com

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2014, all rights reserved

Too-much-information alert: This morning, Polar-Vortexed to distraction, I weakened and dug out the long underwear. Haven’t felt so longjohn cold since that day ten years ago in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

How cold was it? Plastic surgeons were doing reconstructive surgery on people who’d frozen their asses off. No, really. They just fell right off.

The temperature gauge that day read 45 below. I knew that in Maryland, comfortably south of the Mason-Dixon line, a state law prohibited gauges from going beyond 10 below. If it turned any colder, they figured, everyone, including Mason and Dixon got shipped in refrigerator cars to Alaska for igloo repair.

I’d gone to Grand Forks on a writing project. On the day it fell to 45 below, I sat in the cozy office of a white-haired old-timer and complained about the cold. He seemed surprised.

“You’ve got your long underwear on, don’t you? I’ve got mine and I’m fine.”

I smiled and felt a tad superior. Kids and old guys wear longjohns. Real men ignore the cold and bash on, regardless. Of course, regardless often means they are found as stiff and dead as a stop sign.

That is why intelligent real men (don’t say what you’re thinking) try to limit their cold bashings to under 20 feet.

I told the old-timer I’d think about the longjohns. I was lying. That night, after dinner, I walked 50 yards or so to my parked car. Colder yards have never been bashed. I’m pretty sure I lost two, maybe three lives.

I longed to be somewhere, anywhere in the south. Then, quickly—in case any passing, miracle-granting angels heard my plea—I issued a clarification: something in a South Carolina or a South Beach, please. I’ll pass on South Dakota.

With teeth chattering, I drove to my motel. In my room I found the inside back wall covered in an inch of snow-white frost. I’d obviously stumbled into an old refrigerator in need of defrosting.

Faced with the prospect of shoveling my wall, I described the vertical tundra-scene to the desk clerk. “Oh, for fun,” he chuckled. “That’s gonna happen. Yah sure, you betcha. It’s Nort Dakohhhtah. Just sleep with your socks on.”

The next morning, the sun lay frozen to the horizon. Bundled like a papoose, I waddled to my car where I beheld a humbling sight: a college kid, scuffing down the snow packed road in sneakers. No hat. No coat. A flannel shirt unbuttoned and flapping. Hands tucked into his jeans.

I watched him just doot doot doodling along, the picture of nonchalance. Oblivious not only to the weather but every bit of wisdom ever spoken, written, sung or mimed.

He turned a corner and faded from view. But sometimes in my dreams I see him, a gleaming ice sculpture frozen permanently to a lonely patch of high plains.

I drove straight to the mall, bought me some longjohns, underweared-up and survived to write this tale.

Oh, by the way. When you take your johnnies off at night, if you haven’t washed them in a while—let’s say a month—they will crawl downstairs by themselves and watch re-runs of The Walking Dead.

So make sure you buy two sets. Never wear both at the same time unless you’re in North Dakota. And get rid of cable.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2014, all rights reserved.

Why do we say “It’s snowing like a bastard?” What does a bastard have to do with snow? Better question: how does a bastard snow?

Let me count the ways. For my exhaustive research turned up a letter written years ago by an old man to his grandson. In it, the old-timer noted that outside his window raged a fierce blizzard. The letter continues:

“It’s snowing like a bastard I once knew named Bob. He was a guy who, as the Spanish might say ‘doesn’t have two fingers of forehead.’ Of course they might not say that. Maybe they’d say ‘I have an aunt who plays the guitar.’ One can never really predict what the Spanish will say.

“Back to ‘Bob, the bastard.’ One day at Bob’s company  everyone worried about an approaching killer snowstorm. They hoped that Bob would close the office early so they could get home before they were trapped without toilet paper or milk.

“But a guy known as ‘Bob, the bastard,’ didn’t earn that name by showing kindness. Or by caring one whit about his employee’s well-being. In fact, Bob had installed a whit detector at the front entrance.

“Most recently he’d warned that anyone bringing a whit to the job-site would be fired from the barrel of a Mark-IV ‘WhitBlaster.’ All completely legal under the state’s SYGABTBA law* (Stand Your Ground and Blow That Bozo Away).

“By the way, ‘Bob, the bastard’ manufactured and sold paint to the government, which apparently didn’t know the way to Home Depot where paint sells for less than $28,245 per gallon. Bob stared down many a Congressional subcommittee by insisting that his paint wasn’t just paint, but special paint.

“To prove it he would point to the word ‘Special’ on a can of his paint and note also that his company was named ‘Bob’s Special Paint.’

“That afternoon, just before the killer snowstorm struck, ‘Bob, the bastard’ put down a minor uprising of employees demanding he close down. He then went out to the factory to monitor a crew whipping up a vat of Bob’s Special White.

“Many of the angry employees followed him. As Bob stood on the catwalk over the vat, a truck pulling a flatbed trailer stopped outside the factory doors. The Mark-IV WhitBlaster had arrived.

“Bob, eager as the bastard he was, thought a test-firing was in order. Then, just as a group of seething employees rushed the ladder to the vat, snow began to fall.

“Reports conflict as to what happened next, but their outcomes do not differ. Somehow Bob ended up in the vat of special white paint. Somehow his special white body was hauled out and stuffed inside the barrel of the Mark-IV. The test firing blew Bob skyward. Tiny white chunks began falling from the clouds.

“Someone pointed to the sky and said ‘Look, it’s snowing Bob the bastard.”

Note: Most famous quotations don’t quite match their original uttering.Take the example of Napoleon who once said “If I were not Napoleon, I would be an impish frog named Gerard.”

That night he asked his secretary to re-read his remarks. The secretary, quite diplomatically, uttered the quote that survives to this day: “If I were not Napoleon, I would be Alexander.”

Napoleon replied “Was Alexander the one who had all the elephants? Or was that Hannibal the cannibal? I always get those two guys mixed up.”

Anyway, the original “Bob the bastard” quote changed a little every time someone repeated it. And that is why today we sometimes exclaim: “It’s snowing like a bastard.” Especially when it’s snowing.

*Known colloquially as the sig-AB-tuh-buh law.

©Patrick A. McGuire and A Hint of Light 2014, all rights reserved.