johnpalmer

Neurological Pain and the Problem with Time

For many years, everything in my body hurt, a bit, all the time. That made just sitting still intensely uncomfortable, so I needed to distract myself from the pain. I’d try to do something immersive enough that mere existence didn’t cause me agony, and, of course, because of “ADHD,” I would fail to notice the time until the last moment.

Well, no. See, one way to deal with any form of pain is to distract yourself. If you throw yourself into something really deeply, then, you’re ignoring little pains, like, that tiny ache because you’ve been in one position too long, the bladder’s mild-to-medium urgings, etc., and I was, in fact, trying to hyperfocus on something, because otherwise the background pain of just existing was too high.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying I don’t have ADHD, but, I think we may someday have ADHD and ADHPD, to name the latter a “pain” disorder, or, one in which pain makes a significant contribution. This could greatly assist caregivers in determining what symptoms are pain, and therefore need pain relief, and which are focus, and need stimulant or other focusing agents.

In a similar vein, I remember once thinking that it would be almost good to get a spanking on Christmas Eve, so you had that blackout period where you didn’t realize time was passing. Why? Well, a spanking produces endorphins, which are natural pain relievers, and will reduce all pains one feels. I will mention my kink is probably due to my neurological pain, and, others who suffer may find similar comforts if they wish. But my real point is, don’t wallop your kid, just because they’re in pain, and can’t handle the passage of time. So what could you do? I don’t know. Maybe a relative could have suggested a Christmas Eve tickle fight (with adults making sure children don’t get mean!), and that, also, would have stimulated me, and gotten me past my pain and foul mood. Maybe (especially for very young) children who love all kinds of physical attention, however goofy or treacly it may appear to the childless, you could give them a good session, to see if that winds them down. (I assume older children will hit that “I’m too old for that!” stage.)

Speaking of foul moods, I just realized that some folks don’t know that the flash of fury they feel when some appliance misbehaves is probably neurological pain, expressing itself as anger, and it feels like the proverbial kick in the nuts. (Don’t you dare crush my cashews!) Ahem. Anyway. That’s not real anger, in the sense of “I saw X and was angry,” though it’s entirely real, in the sense of “but I felt real anger!” because you sure as hell did. And if you can learn to catch that pain response, you can snuff out fury before it’s begging for kindling.

When I was very young, I learned that it was naughty to go “eeee-erruguf!” because your arm got stuck in your coat, and you felt a big flash of pain. And I think this really encapsulates the horrors of my childhood. Everyone knew it was okay to make a noise if you were in pain… unless you weren’t allowed to. And the rules for weren’t allowed to seemed made up on the spot! But the real problem was, children shouldn’t give that much voice to mere frustration, and learn to use their inside voices, even for pain, and to ask for help, to extricate one’s self, if needed. So my naughtiness was based on a sick lie; I was not in pain, because no one with an MD after their name said I was in pain. You know what’s a lot of fun, when you’re a child dealing with accusations of misbehavior? When your pain gets so bad, you become aphasic, and literally lose your words. You can’t think of how to say “but s/he pushed me first!” as an example of then-unspeakable injustice, and it’s hugely frustrating for someone who hasn’t developed master levels of frustration tolerance first.

Anyway: if you wanted a good reason to suspect you might have neurological pain, you’ve learned to ignore, that would be one thing. You might hate wasting time. If so, try to feel your body, take a deep breath to see if mindfulness helps, and ask yourself “what hurts?” and you may get an answer. If so – great! That’s step one. Remember, don’t start unwinding until you have good social and palliative support, at least. Your problem might not require unwinding – I know a lot of soldiers have both PTSD and neurological pain,

Edited to clarify that some things appear treacly to the childless, not the childish. Sorry, aphasia ruins a lot!!!

We know the skeleton can be wildly out of ordinary alignment, e.g., I have a tilted pelvis, the result of a lot of twists and turns in my skeleton. I call my condition “twisted body syndrome (TBS)” and it feels to me as if the cause is tangles or wrinkles or something, in the fascia. Why the fascia? I’m pretty sure I can sense the fascia, so personal experience is part of it – I definitely sense something. The other thing is, unlike muscle, bone, blood vessels, etc., the fascia is known to be able to form adhesions, and it surrounds the muscles and skeleton, and Occam says it would be foolish to assume another entity is sticking stuff together, when we have a perfect suspect in our hands. I think the fascia senses when joints aren’t lining up properly, and need to be put back, and it can be intense. For example, I bet you've shaken out an arm desperately, once or twice in your life, desperate to get a click in your elbow (or maybe shoulder/wrist/hand). Well, that’s intense “put me back!” pain. Imagine having that pain constantly, never being able to get it to shake out! Life can suck for some folks.

The fascia also sends out pain signals when it detects dislocation activity. Normally, people don’t notice the fascia’s contribution, because there’s a full dislocation occurring, or, one is being reduced. It hurts like a mofo, you don’t care where the pain is coming from, right? But when your joints are partly out of place, the fascia is really the only thing sending pain. The muscles and bone aren’t damaged, so there’s no inflammation. The fascia isn’t damaged; it’s just doing its job of reporting “something ain’t right, fix it!” So a person can be suffering an enormous amount of pain, and be called a liar or fool by their doctors. No offense to any doctor reading, but, we know it happens, and now, we have even more reason to be upset, and even aghast, when it happens.

So an injury that causes subluxation will include some neuro pain from the fascia, and, reducing that subluxation will probably cause the same level of pain, in reverse. That means when I try to put things right in my body, I'm also going to go through dislocation style pain, and that has symptoms similar to a focal seizure, as I recently found after watching The Pitt season 2, where a character is dealing with absence seizures. It makes sense that pain from a displacement would be so intense that it might completely remove your awareness of everything but the pain. In my experience, it’s hard to notice fascia pain directly. It was only when I took gabapentin, and said “this stuff helps the same way alcohol does!” that I started to learn how to sense my fascia. Now I knew what specifically felt better, when I took “pain medication,” and that let me sense what was hurting, and how it did so.

Now, I say the fascia has "bindings" in it that keep things out of proper alignment, once subluxated sufficiently severely. The bindings allow you to use an injured joint to some degree, while you heal. Breaking a binding requires muscle tone, i.e., is tonic, and may happen mostly unconsciously. When you break a binding, there are some muscles that were bound up, and they can move a bit more normally, so you may experience clonic activity, again, maybe mostly unconsciously. Because I've been surviving this so long, all of this is under my control, almost all of the time. Every now and then, I get a cramp, and it's a horrible struggle, but, because I know what I'm struggling against, it's easy to stay sane, and not panic. I’m able to maintain some level of awareness, at least enough to keep making conscious choices about how to handle the wild spasms. Now, let’s imagine someone with a similar body, who doesn’t have any of my experience.

They’d know they sometimes have terrible muscle spasms, and the pain is so bad that it wipes their mind completely clean (loss of awareness), and they always feel crappy, but they can’t explain why, and, maybe they have had a few identifiable seizures, but EEGs have shown nothing. Spoiler: neurological pain is why they feel crappy, and the rare seizures occur because they don’t know how to defuse an incoming pain bomb. Their brain is healthy, but with enough pain, or, if their seizure threshold is lowered, you may see what looks like (and maybe is) a seizure.

One day, that person has a really bad fever, and their brain is damaged just right. Next day, they have one of those terrible muscle spasms, but now, even if they understood what was going on, the sensation might overwhelm their brain with its lowered resilience, and, I just told you this would be a tonic, then clonic, response (along with loss of awareness, and all the other horrors of seizures). I, with a healthier brain, am able to suffer in such an informative way, a way that gives me a special defense against seizing. My brain can be overwhelmed by sensation, but it can still respond normally, because I'm maintaining some control over the pain.

So to spell it out, it’s possible that some people, who have my TBS-problem, are diagnosed with epilepsy, and, if we can straighten their skeletons, it might improve their condition; if we can teach them to sense the fascia, that might also help them understand their condition a lot better (if skeletal straightening is a long term thing). Even people without TBS, who have an alternate source of neurological pain, could be facing seizure-like symptoms, and are probably in grave need of relief, if they haven’t found any yet. So I feel humility and hope. But I can’t help but feel excited by the prospect of lots and lots of people benefiting from what I’ve learned about my condition.

All right, I have this hopefully amazing news I want to share, and I’ve spent the past two days writing furiously to try to explain it. That means I’ve been able to write for most of
TWO
WHOLE
DAYS!!! And that’s not normal for me. Normally, “two whole quarter hours” is a good reading/writing stint, then, potentially, be exhausted the rest of the day.

I now call my disorder “Twisted Body Syndrome” or TBS, and, it’s called that for the obvious reason; the body isn’t merely “subluxated,” it looks like someone was yanking on bits all over. Well, when that happens, the fascia can remember where the bones used to be, and it has two pain modes.

The first is a prompting ache-style pain, where you feel funny in an arm or leg, shake it out, feel a click/pop, and feel much better, that’s the pain, from beginning to end. We know this is urgent, because not only do we wildly shake an arm, we sometimes see other people do it, with pained expressions on their faces. Still, that’s a kind-of ordinary pain.

The other kind of pain I believe the fascia transmits is dislocation pain, and this is the stuff that can cause pseudo-seizures, or maybe real seizures. They can cause loss of awareness, so you can’t remember what happened while you’re in that much pain. They can cause hallucinations, traumatic memories, and emotional crashes. And some people are living with that, 24x7x365, because fascia pain doesn’t create inflammation markers, so doctors aren’t sure it’s even there. But the pain is real, and it is there, and this is what I believe breaks my brain, because it’s saying “DUDE! Our body is being ripped apart!” (That is what a dislocation is, after all.)

Someday, subluxation will be proof enough, but we’re not there yet. Well, for many years, I’ve been trying to “unwind” my twisted body. Over the past week, I’ve gone from “near constant pseudo seizures (pseizures?), every waking hour” to “I have aches, and if I apply pressure to an achy spot, it hurts worse. If I really want to, I can evoke enough pain to make it feel like a seizure, but… now we’re into the realm of the old joke, “Doc, it hurts when I do this (strikes pose).” “Then don’t do that!” replies the doctor, because, for the joke, the pose is always silly and awkward.

What this means, is, following the movement urges of your body can, or may, bring you relief. Hopefully, any form of skeletal straightening, like rolfing or chiro or other forms of bodywork, will alleviate the suffering.

What’s the bad news? Well, it would have been nice if someone had tried to alleviate my pain with something other than frickin’ antidepressants, ahem, but, we lost the window to do that, so we have no idea what might be a good neuro pain blocker for the fascia. Still, I think I’m going to live.

And I feel so confident about this that I feel an urge to publish it, now, now, now, in case a meteor strikes, because I feel like this could be big. There could be millions, or even tens of millions of people suffering from partial dislocations, but they can't realize it's pain, because they've been ignoring it for so long. Alleviating all that pain... who could ask for anything more?

So maybe I'm also feeling some irrational exuberance because I'm feeling so much better than I did a week ago :-)

You’re all so beautiful, without holes in your brains. You can all be so, so much more, why do you waste life? Love! Stop the petty squabbles, and, don’t make a snippy announcement that you’re stopping the petty squabble, just… let it die. Touch. Feel. Kiss. Hug. Hold. Celebrate every moment that you feel alive, as if it were possible that all these good things could be taken from you, all in an instant, by some childhood temper tantrums, a sudden accident of fate, a sudden hateful attack….

You’re all so terrifying, with so much power, to hurt me in so many ways, without even meaning to, even when you don’t want to, and you can’t understand what to and I can’t even speak to explain myself, of course I have to stay isolated. Alone. Afraid. But safe. For now.

Milli once asked me to contemplate, what if I never get better. I told her it wasn’t time to contemplate that, and she didn’t understand why. Helpful hint, if you’re ever in that situation: it means “I don’t see any way to survive, and I’ve survived a lot, if I were to discover I had no hope for relief.”

I live for you, I love you, I want to be with you and love and laugh and dance and instead all I can do is watch a horrible, needy, world pass me by, second by second.

Although this post alludes to potential self harm, I am in no danger.

I tried to live. I just want that down for the historical record. I did what you told me to. I learned to control the wild storms through my head, the constant zapping of my time. “Tell me about you, John Palmer! I refuse to believe your life is entirely empty!” But it was, always. The pain is always there, and it never gives up. I’ve given myself to love, I’ve meditated more mindfully than most people ever will, I’ve learned all about why people hate me, and how I might someday be able to pretend to be like them well enough that I’m less likely than ever to be suddenly rejected, knifed, destroyed, then stomped, and knifed again before poison is sprinkled over the entrails, ensuring its absorption that the blood, the brain, the organs could retain the poison to strike any time, any day, any night any hour any pain, just let the pain go up and BAM you’re mister abusive rapist again, and it’s all your damn fault because you’re useless, worthless, and helpless when your brain never works right.

Happy Independence Day - I was going to skip posting, but, listen, I don't get to go out to watch fireworks, I don't get to see ID celebrations, and, we disabled people, especially those of us easy to despise, need to be visible.

Vocabulary gets strange when you’re dealing with a medical disorder you’re trying to invent. I want the words I choose to be words that will fit, hopefully, even in transliteration, to the extent that it’s possible. And yet, there are words that doctors will use that warp all ordinary meaning. One applies underarm deodorant “axially,” one puts something in one’s cheek, next to the lower gum, “buccally.” Doctors could muck up a Nerf ball fight.

One thing that I think helps one’s thought processes (and the resulting vocabulary) is to recognize models. I have a model, that’s what my “medical disorder I’m trying to invent,” is properly called. The fascia writes traces of subluxation/malalignment as they happen, and then act to undo the damage, or create a stable point. It creates a stable point, by binding range of motion, so, I call the places where things feel stuck a “binding” but the places where it feels “sticky,” I call those “traces.” The fascia writes traces, so that you may undo them – peel them apart, unstick them, unglue them, later.

In my model, the fascia tries to keep the spine straight (the spine must not kink!), and, tries to balance quadrants of your body. So I feel there’s some left/right, and some upper/lower, balancing going on. The reason I think this happens, is, I think it leaves the “homunculus” in the best, most usable, shape.

In my model, our brains don’t send signals directly to muscle; they send them to the fascia, using an interface I call the homunculus, which translates them into muscle movements. I think this is true for two reasons. First, when the fascia undoing a trace, or breaks a binding, there’s a huge amount of sensation. That makes me feel a lot of information is going brainward – “modify the homunculus!” Then, imagine you want to extend, bend, twist, and extend again – forget which specific extremities you’re doing this to, because, that’s a lot of precise muscle movements, by muscles that are not where they are, normally. How could your brain track all the specific muscles you need to perform an action, when there’s other information in play, like, gravity, how you’re twisted, which limbs are extended, how far, and, what’s bent?

For me, it made sense that the fascia was likely a living, analog, computer that made those decisions for you, because it’s what’s right there. Other reasons it makes sense, is, while I’m walking, if the fascia shifts, I stumble – no problem with my brain, just with the fascia. The homunculus altered, mid-step, causing a stumble. There’s more, I have years of lived experience. That said: this isn’t my strongest, most important claim.

I was told that I was “too sensitive” to my fascia, and the problem was called “fibromyalgia.” I think the doctor was full of crap. I think my body is all twisted up, and untwisting, and the sensations of that are so overwhelming that it warps my brain.

I think lots of people have similar problems. They might think they, instead, have a host of physical or psychiatric issues, but the problem is just, we don’t have a word for “my fascia is signaling that something is wrong.” Unless we’re Peter Parker, in which case, our fascia might also host the Spider-sense. “Tingling,” (Spider-man’s usual danger sense signal) is not a bad word for the fascia doing something it (normally) shouldn’t.

The most important part of my model is this: I’ve lived in a body where I first learned that neurological pain could warp my brain in ways I never could have believed. I now have learned, by evoking that very pain, how neurological pain can be a sneaky enemy, that presents as purely psychological or emotional issue at times. Further, if neurological pain is bad, it can mimic certain psychiatric disorders – treat the pain, the disorder will improve, and maybe vanish. Neurological pain can cause a host of other neurological effects, including vasovagal effects (possible fainting) as well as chills, hot flashes, and more.

We need to talk about this. But to talk about my problems, we need some vocabulary. I’ll try to add to this post, if it seems we need more terms.

I wrote up my "John is crazy" warning letter, explaining what I'm *not*.

My guess is, my "unwinding" causes me to undo damage, that, left undone, could trigger a seizure. My unwinding triggers the pain in a semi-controlled way, and, by my will. That makes it easier to take. If it happened, all of a sudden, maybe that could induce a seizure... but it's usually slower, and more controlled, when it happens to me.

My hope is that there's a drug that reduces the intense distress I feel when unwinding, or, even drugs that leave me comfortable when I'm not unwinding. The reason I used alcohol was, it meant I could be pain free, for a small period of time. Well, drugs that reduced my "at rest" distress would be like being the right-level of tipsy, all day long, without the liver and brain/coordination effects.

But I'm losing hope that I'll find any relief before going crazy again, and they have to try something to dump a GOOMER.

My hypothesis leans heavily into the idea that something in the body (probably the fascia) records the changes made by injury. That means if we had a medical device that could scan the fascia the right way, we might be able to determine precisely how to help a person, if they suffer severe subluxation.

If I were correct, and, someone were to figure out how to scan the fascia, and then use bone-settling[sic] techniques to repair the injury as quickly as possible, it would be a huge advance in medicine, plus a license to print money... assuming as many people are as miserable, as I believe there are.

What I'm going through is so intense, it complicates so much else in my life, so, even if I have a metric boatload of problems (10% bigger than a standard boatload, and much, much, larger than a "buttload") when I'm done with all the crazy fascia crap, it can't help but make my life multiple metric boatloads better.

It’s important for people to be able to fight fairly. There are some things you should never say to another person. One of them is, “I don’t want to hear that the pain is killing you, because another person in my life is going through withdrawal and says the same thing!” This does assume you only say the pain is killing you, when it actually is, and you know that just waiting it out isn’t going to fix it (as would be the case with withdrawal). Saying to someone, whose life is defined by pain, that their complaint weighs the same as an addict going through withdrawal, exposes a horrifying false assumption: that my pain is fundamentally important to the other person, and not just something they have to deal with, once in a while.

I mentioned earlier that I stopped alcohol, and the reason for it is, it numbs the pain, but not enough, and I need more, until I can sleep, but when I wake up, I'll probably be achy again. When I take a drink, I feel closer to peace than at any other time, and, this is not because “I am an alcoholic,” this is because I notice a clear reduction in the distress caused by the firing of sensory nerves – i.e., it is relieving my pain. I know, everyone, everywhere, is trained to say “that’s the addiction talking,” but, that’s my entire point: a lot of people are like me, and are in pain, don’t yet know they’re in pain, and just know they feel better, after drinking one drink, or two, or, three, or…. Remember, one of my primary theses is that neurological pain of all sorts can be misinterpreted, so I’m saying “maybe there are some pain-relief addicts, and some alcohol addicts.” If I’m wrong, I still maintain that good pain control makes reducing alcohol usage easier.

The important thing to understand, is how this is akin to my discussion of anger management. Everyone has to learn to control anger, because no one is born knowing what anger feels like, nor, how to curb its urges. We learn that. Some have an easier time than others, and I can assure you, folks in pain have a strict disadvantage when it comes to anger management. Always, always, always, managing pain makes everything better, from emotional management, to addictions control. Pain doesn’t give anyone an excuse, of course, and, invisible pain, by its nature, is forgotten (see the above example!), so even if it did excuse, too bad, and so sad, but, no one is going to remember. It’s better to manage everything you can, and communicate, enough to keep your pain visible, but pay special attention to those who call you a special snowflake, even if you make no demands. Such folks are untrustworthy as friends (at least until they apologize, saying they didn’t realize just how badly off you were!).

Anyway: if you have any substance use issue, I would urge you to start doing a self assessment for your physical sensations. Close your eyes for a minute, and during that minute, just try to think of all the things you can feel. Do some of them feel achy, not enough to go “ouch” but enough to make you moan a bit? Do you feel some indescribable yuckiness? Is there a buzz in the back of your brain, that never goes away, and you now realize it pulses in time with (e.g.) your hip? These are the sorts of loud signals that say you have neurological pain. Another sign is, you can’t put your finger on it, but you know everything you do today is harder than it should be. It’s not just clumsiness (but you spilled coffee grounds clumsily), it’s not that you’re a bit inattentive while driving (but man did you slam those brake, giving yourself a near heart attack, and now you’ll feel like crap for HOURS), it’s not that you flongue tubbed in your presentation… it’s everything, that you don’t do, with savage precision. These are some of the more subtle ones that you might have a pain issue. And I know I could be wrong about almost everything, but, the one thing I’m sure of, is, pain control makes everything better. How could it not, when these are how people feel, when suffering?

So, six days ago, I "stopped drinking," by which I mean, I would no longer use alcohol as a life-extending tool. My doctor says I shouldn't drink so much, and I say I shouldn't (description of suicide, elided), but the alcohol prevents that.

Here's the thing: the pain is killing me. I spend all day, every day, every waking hour, in agony. It's been that way all of my life. I can make it "better" but I can't make it "okay." For the past year or so, pelvic pain has been so bad, the best I can get out of sex is a prostate sneeze, and that, my friends, is the highlight of my arbitrary period of time - a few moments of perfect, pleasant, restful, quiet in my brain.

My day is spent on the couch or in the bed, struggling with pains that include seizures, or mimic them, and no medical practitioner understands. If I "want to die," it's suicidality, not "exhaustion after 50+ years of being in constant pain, and finally understanding why it's not getting better."

You want to know the scariest movie I ever saw? "A Few Good Men." See, I would have been the Marine who kept falling behind in runs, and everyone thought was lazy, because there were no physical signs pointing to an objective problem that said "of course this poor bastard can't handle that level of activity without mental collapse caused by currently invisible issues!" And then to think that the bully who refused to bend, even if it killed one of his troops (one of the people he was tasked with protecting!!!) would be defended, even to the point of a man killing himself so as not to have to testify... that's a nightmare. No one would care that "I" died. The important thing is protecting the Marine who was responsible for my death. That is terrifying.

People like me, we're always aware that we can be arrested, or killed, for the crime of being a Big Scary Man Who Isn't Acting Normally, because we probably hurt someone (no one's sure how, and no one's sure who...). It happens. People who are raging, or struggling to mumble to themselves using their indoor voice, people who hear a cop's command, and are so terrified or angry their brain blows up entirely, as if they were seizing, these people look "dangerous," and in today's America, no one thinks of de-escalation, they only think of ending the threat, quickly, and safely. This usually means "shooting the person scaring people." Or choking him for 10 minutes, and getting acquitted of killing him. It's "safe," you see, so long as you don't consider the scary person an actual human being who is being harmed. Since they often end up a corpse, I suppose that's just predictive morality?

People like me die. We’re sometimes accosted, for the same reason: we’re big, scary men who are acting strangely, and you know, you can never be too careful, better to accuse a person of wrongdoing, than leave them alone when they don’t seem aggressive toward anyone. Soon, when we’re pissed off at being accosted, we become Big Scary Men Who Probably Hurt Someone (We’re Not Sure Who).

At this point, one must be aware that, being A Black Man Who Probably Stole Something (We’re Not Sure What) can be a fatal condition in America, so you believe more easily, “so, too, can being a Big Scary Man Who Probably Hurt Someone (We’re Not Sure Who).”

Pain can take over your whole brain, you get it? And you keep expecting that if something happens, and you feel awful, then, A causes B, right? So that cop, asking pointed questions, as your brain pulses like you can’t stand, that cop is hurting you, right? No!!! It’s the pain. Stop. Relax. “Officer, I have a stress condition, and I’m trying to isolate. Could you help me get home, so I don’t have a screaming fit?” Have it printed on a card, in case you can’t speak! Or don’t leave the house, if you don’t want to die.

I’ve mentioned that the fascia is like a flexible, slightly stretchable, underskin suit packed with sensory nerves. I think that its purpose is to provide our motion-and-position senses, provide for our negative feedback, and control what muscles act, when.

My reasoning: I realized humans understand circular/spiral motion, and, they understand straight-line motion. You can draw a roughly straight line with any of your limbs; you can move most of your extremities in a circular motion (e.g., fingers, but probably not toes). The tangles in my body all feel similarly – either in a straight line along the bone path, or, tangled up in loops.

In the beginning, I could only mobilize part of my right hip, but I kept struggling, and, eventually, more of my body started unwinding (and, my pain shot up immeasurably). I started to notice, sometimes, when I was unwinding, it felt like muscles were changing control over parts of my body. Sometimes, it feels like the wrong muscles are saying “we used to hurt but… ahhhhhhh” and the right muscles are saying “nice job, guys, we’ll take over now.” Okay, I’m being a bit more expressive, but, only a bit. It felt that natural.

So I thought my muscles were tangled up for a while, but that’s silly. Muscles must follow bones. And yet, sometimes, it felt like individual muscle fibers might be getting pulled loose, so, again, “my muscles feel tangled up.”

Muscles can’t tangle up; there’s no mechanism for them to form adhesions. But the fascia forms adhesions. And if the fascia controlled which muscles were in control, and the fascia was tangled, I’d feel my muscles were tangled. Et viola, I say, looking for a musical instrument I’ll never find, it must be the fascia causing the issue… or, Occam would tell us we’re numbskulls to assume it’s “something else we haven’t seen evidence for, yet.”

The thing is, fascia bindings limit your range of motion, so, you can’t always undo a binding in place. One time I tried, and I felt a pain like a match lighting, and immediately stopped what I was doing. That “match lighting” pain is a serious warning – I’d only ever heard of it before, but I knew what I was feeling, from that warning! So it feels like I have to follow the tangles, and, if tangles are on top of tangles, I have to handle the top tangles first.

The net effect of these tangles is “subluxation.” Your joints don’t rest in the correct “neutral” position. So, how do you move? Well, you know how to move a bipedal person (assuming you are bipedal, perhaps with mechanical assistance), so you send commands, like, sit, stand, walk, run, jump, and those impulses are translated by the fascia to the right muscles. If you’re not subluxated, those impulses are worked by the correct muscles. If not, they’re worked by the closest straight-line-and-looping muscles the body can use to perform the action.

All of this is frightfully complicated, right? Well, the fascia must also provide for negative feedback, if it decides what muscles are worked. Each muscle must move with a corresponding inhibitory muscle action. That’s what negative feedback is, when you start to lift something, the muscles to drop your load are engaged, for stability, and they all adjust at the same time. What mechanism could provide for that? The human brain, unassisted? I don’t think so – I could be wrong, but I think it offloads that task to the fascia. Similarly, I assume that positional and movement senses are handled by the fascia as well.

I could be wrong about this. I’ve been wrong, and I can admit it. Like, last time, I thought I’d made a mistake? Yeah, remember that? I was wrong, I hadn’t made a mistake after all, and here I am, admitting I was wrong, see what a big man I am? Ahem.

More seriously: Occam’s razor, and my personal experience, strongly support this idea. And what it means is, if you have addictions issues, if you have mental health issues (most especially including substance use issues), if you have chronic pain, if you’re just miserable all the time, ask a chiropractor to give you a check, and they’ll tell you you’re subluxated. Okay, but, they’re going to point to your spine. “We’ll move your spine, even if it’s your shoulder that’s pulling your spine out of proper spinal alignment.” That worries me. I feel like the shoulder is where we should be working.

Problem: PT, and doctors of osteopathy, they don’t think subluxation means anything. Well, chiropractors will say, if your child has asthma, your child is “subluxated, no question,” because I saw one do that, so, subluxation has become a bit of a dirty word. I don’t think my doctor believes that my hip doesn’t move normally, due to subluxation. I know PTs will tell me that I’m lying about my own body, because they can’t believe my body won’t supply truss (keeping me up) in certain positions. Sometimes, they’re asking me to do something that a normal person could do, because the median femur is perpendicular to the ground. I can’t, because in that pose, my femur is at, like, a 75 degree angle. Ever tried to build anything without something a lot closer to 90? You won’t have truss – you can’t span a space. The weight going down will also push sideways, and you’ll have a collapse. Point and laugh at the gimp, Mr. PT firstname lastname.

What if you’re in neurological pain, and a chiro examines you, and points to subluxation… what then? Well, first up, a warning: it is now a common practice in chiropracty to ask for all funds up front. Your insurance pays so much, our course of treatment costs this much, cut us a check, before we start treatment. I talked to a chiropractor, before I knew this, and I walked out, because I don’t pay up front. I assumed it was a con. But it is now a common practice in the industry, such as there’s an industry.

Why would they ask for it all up front? Well, when I’m unwinding – which is what chiropractic work will do, if I’m right, and chiros are partly right – I have a lot of pain, and, I have a lot of other distress. Wanna know the winner of the annual “worse than it sounds, and it sounds awful” contest? Spontaneous projectile vomiting! I was on a customer call at the time, but damn, I’m good with the MUTE button!!! Look up vagus nerve issues, look up focal seizures, think all GI issues and get some protective undergarments, just in case, because your body can do the same thing as projectile vomiting from the other… okay, you got the idea. Think of all that, and now, you have an idea of the neuro effects one might experience. They would want the money up front, so, they could say “John, please continue; you paid for it, you might as well see it through.” And why all up front? Because my experience suggests (to me) that you might be miserable all the way up until all of your joints are free of subluxation, with concomitant lack of spine subluxation.

Er, that is, I think my spine is out of place, because my hip is stuck in the wrong “neutral” position. I want to fix the hip, because it feels in my head like I don’t want to have the spine pressing against the strength of the hip. That feels wrong to me. I could be wrong. But I also kind of… look, I felt no “call of destiny,” okay? I just had this sense, “I can fix this myself.” And I’ve been wrong, a good many times, over the years, but I’m getting closer to the “fix” I imagine exists. That much, I’m sure of.

I’m in a lot of pain, and my only escape any more is medical marijuana concentrates, and mindfulness exercises. Don’t get me wrong: during mindfulness exercises, I still feel the pain, I still lose the day, I still can’t clean the kitchen, have sex with my wife, go out of the house, etc., but, during the mindfulness exercises, I see why Buddhist monks can handle suffering. I had something sounding a tone, every fifteen seconds. I said to myself, “if I go mindful, I’ll hear that delightful little ‘doot’ as a complete surprise, and it might make me giggle, instead of tense up,” and sure as shooting, that’s what happened.

I told y’all I was a professional weirdo!

This post may be edited at a later time – apologies for the inconvenience

I was in a discussion over at a liberal blog, and I stated that all prison is, is a bunch of "ain't no one cares but you," and that's not how you rehabilitate people. You want to treat them as free citizens, in all ways that you reasonably can, because when they get out, that's what we want them to know how to be.

Please don't think this post says "y'all aren't compassionate," because that's not the point. You can't see, you can't know, you can't understand, because all of the bars of my prison are invisible. You can't see me struggling to find the right words, when I'm aphasic; that's invisible. You can't tell that there's background pain that feels like I have lead weights taped to my brain. You can't see me pumping myself up with adrenaline to be a good host, or to deal with ordinary human interaction.

I'm giving up drinking; I use it to artificially extend my stay in this prison. I'm working on unwinding. My doctor says that I can't try epilepsy meds,they have a bad side effect profile, like, you know, the real question isn't "but doesn't, e.g., a double barrel shotgun have a much worse side effect profile?" (I'm fine, I have no desire for self harm; but people like me don't survive long term, especially not in a mean and nasty world, like the USA 2026.)

Someday, I hope to meet the real John Palmer, the one whose life isn't dominated by pain. "How smart are you, when you can think straight? How witty are you, when you can find words instantly? How much love can you give, when you have an actual life, and not an eternal hell to march through? I hope to become his friend; I don't think it'll be hard; I see a bright light inside him, that I want to be free to shine. Most of all, I hope we have time for a real friendship.

Because no one wants to die in prison.

This Dreamwidth Journal is a NO HATRED zone.

You want to hate on me, I might allow it, I might not. You hate on someone else, you’re gone.

You can’t be a “Trump supporter” and it’s nearly impossible to be a “Republican,” and be free of hate. Look, if “the Democrats would be worse,” wasn’t irrational, why are we stuck in a Middle Eastern war? Okay, and, when you have irrational, nasty, feelings about people (e.g., “Trump is bad, but DEMONcrats would be worse,”), we call it “hatred.” I mean, only because that’s pretty much what hatred is, is irrational nasty feelings, far out of proportion to any harm done to you.

So if you’re a Republican, I honestly don’t know why you’d give the Republican Party your support. They’ve put judges in places that let Trump hurt people; and they even let Trump start illegal wars, without threatening impeachment and removal. Believe it or not, there was a time when Republicans could turn on a bad Republican. Richard Nixon was about to be impeached, and removed, with Republican support, so he resigned. Trump’s murder on the high seas, to stop cocaine boats headed for Europe; and Trump’s illegal wars, should have had him removed. I know, you might say “but what’s hateful about allowing a President to murder a couple hundred people, or several thousand in Iran?” as if human life meant so little that even one murder on the high seas wasn’t enough to remove the boss of federal law enforcement for high crimes.

I use brutal logic when discussing hate; hate is a disease that requires careful eradication, because it’s so enjoyable to us. We love to dream of an enemy, we love to pour out our venom to an enemy, and it’s hard to think about thousands of Iranians, including schoolchildren, dying thousands of miles away, so it’s easy to just, you know, erase them as unworthy of consideration. “It’s nothing personal,” you might say, as you drop a 2000lb bomb on their head, but, when it’s your corpse, it’s very personal. To think of all these people, as being unworthy of life, so that we should just read about them, and act as if it’s “news” and not “crimes against humanity,” well, that’s a pretty hateful outlook.

Look, I’m sorry, but, y’all confused a lesson. In a war, a soldier kills, and will do so in every manner possible, that is honorable, and proud. The soldier can’t think “this is someone’s dad, son, brother, uncle,” and instead must do a horrible job with very limited compassion. We have to be the soldier’s conscience, and we can’t turn our own consciences off, just because it’s people in uniforms doing the killing. They are the ones who can’t think of the lives of each individual; they are the only ones who have that excuse. The rest of us, we have to keep watch, and make sure they continue to act honorably, and proudly, most emphatically by only placing them in honorable, proud, combat situations, like defending us from real threats, not Trump's imagination. “Accidentally” blowing up a school isn’t honorable, or proud. Honor, and pride, require the military use careful rules of engagement, that sometimes put our troops further into harm's way before fighting back, but it maintains the discipline needed to have a world class fighting force.

So: no loud hate. And no quiet hate, where we discuss “collateral damage” as if it were shoe scuffs, and not people’s lives. ObBeetlejuice: “Th-these aren’t my rules, see. In fact, I don’t have any rules.” But thinking it’s cool to snuff people’s lives out, as if they were a burning cigarette butt, is hateful.

So, no offense, but it’s really hard for me to imagine a good Republican who is free of hate. If you think the party is doing okay, it should have removed Trump already, so, no, it’s really not okay.

I’m finding a bigotry that exists in the Democratic Party, and it’s annoying as hell, and, I need to talk about it. There’s this idea, that, if a man is a bad boyfriend, it makes him a terrible person. Now, don’t get me wrong: a man who hits a woman is a bad boyfriend, and guilty of a serious crime; one who screams and is severely threatening is almost as bad. But let’s back up.

A man who deliberately rages, in a manner that makes a woman feel afraid for her physical safety, so that the man gets his way, that’s practically the same thing as using physical force to settle a matter, because it uses the threat of physical force. Robbing with a gun in your hand is a lot worse than purse snatching for a reason. That’s a good rule, but it ignores the possibility that someone will be rageful, and feel a need to express it, for a reason that isn’t actually real, and present.

Let’s take another step back. Let’s say someone is like me – they’re in a lot of pain, they don’t even know it yet, and they feel rage, and they’re expressing it, even if they’re not directly threatening someone. Is that a healthy relationship partner? No, but it’s not that someone’s fault, and, it might save a life to say “hey, some joker I met on the internet says, maybe you’re in a lot of pain, without realizing it, and maybe that’s why you have such a temper.” But right there, we might have room in our model for a Graham Platner.

Graham Platner had some stupid, boyish, ideas that he claims he got knocked out of his head. He had a skull-and-bones, yes, a Nazi symbol, but not one that screams Nazi, tattoo, and he’s had it removed since (at least) October of last year. And he was a bad boyfriend.

Now, me, I know a guy can be tagged as abusive, for being withdrawn, and suicidal. No rage at all.(Oh, and if you read this, ~~bitch~~ ex, “I’d rather rip my heart right out of my ribcage with my bare hands and throw it on the floor and stomp on it ‘til I die… (gasp)than spend… one more minute…”)

Ahem. And I know sometimes, people have conditions wherein they will be given to frequent rage-like episodes, where the only thing they can do is isolate, and rage to their heart’s content, which usually isn’t very much – acting out rage can be pretty stupid. What hurts, is holding all that rage in, so you don’t frighten anyone. A man who is in this situation, due to neurological pain he doesn’t understand, is in a bind.

You see, you can go to anger management class, but that assumes that you don’t have an invisible pain that just makes you frustrated, then angry. You can learn to fight that invisible pain, to try to tough it out, but, you’re going to feel, constantly, that you’re doing anger management wrong, because you just can’t stop getting angry. Some people are like me, they’ve been bullied all their lives, and know that they must consume excrement any time they show any untoward emotion. Other people can’t live like that, but, no one should live like that. They should know the root cause of their problems.

Let’s “pop the stack” now, and go back to Graham Platner, who has been up front that he got PTSD from serving in the Marines, in active combat zones. I don’t know if I have PTSD or not. I could have PTSD, worsened by pain, or, I could have PTSD mimicked by pain, you see? But I know that dealing with something, akin to PTSD, can very easily make you a bad boyfriend.

Just as people should listen to “I’m treating my neuro pain, and now, I remember to show affection, even when it hurts a lot to do so, because otherwise people start to hate me,” so too should people listen to Mr. Platner’s “I’ve treated my PTSD and alcoholism, and I’m not a bad boyfriend any longer.”

Popping the stack one more time, the bigotry in the Democratic Party is, they’ve taken warning signs that you should be wary of a man, and taken them as truths. Bluntly, the bigotry says “Graham Platner was a bad boyfriend, we must assume he’s abusive and maybe even a rapist. The one thing we know he is not, is a ‘good man.’” That last bit is male bovine excretia, bundled, and concentrated to absolute filth.

There is no demonstration of rage or other human emotion, no nonviolent argument, no amount of crazed (but nonviolent) activity that prevents a person from being a good person, and hence, a man, from being a good man. I know this, because I am a good man, even though few would believe it, if they saw me in a zoo, or as part of The John Palmer Show on TV. My wife would cheerfully agree to both statements; that I’m a good man, and that I have episodes that would make people doubt it. The key is, I’ve learned when, and why, to isolate, and how to control encounters, so I’m dealing with people, when I don’t have aphasia, interfering with my ability to think and speak. I can’t prevent myself from raging, not all of the time. But I can make sure everyone in the household knows, if I rage at the microwave, it’s because microwaves don’t get hurt feelings.

A good man is defined by what he does, and what effects he places in motion on this earth. He can’t be defined by fools and bigots who insist his appearance and demeanor prove he’s contempt-worthy. (You hear that, ex? Now you know why Weird Al got pulled out.) And what I try to put on this earth, is nourishment for good feelings and happiness. Sometimes, I suck at it, but sucking at it doesn’t define me, especially when I’m struggling to learn to do better.

I can’t say Graham Platner is a good man, but I can say that everyone who says he can’t be, that it’s impossible, because no one with PTSD and alcoholism is ever a bad romantic partner due to those two things, but only due to underlying personality traits, is bigoted. People do change, even after hurting the fee-fees of three women they’ve dated.

If I loved you, I’d do it, so I try to do it, and it doesn’t work, so I try again, and it still doesn’t work, and I get into a rage with myself, summoning all of my adrenaline, and I still can’t do it, and I want to throw a tantrum, just throw myself down on the floor and scream for a while, but it doesn’t do any good and leaves you with a sore throat. Hey, eventually, you try everything, and I do mean everything. Slap the wall, that hurts enough, to wake you up for moment, and you can hope you stay awake, but you never do. It didn’t even work for your parents, once the fear and adrenaline rush of a spanking wore off, so why would it work for you, when you know how noisy and whiny your stupid brain is?

I have to do it now, you see, if I loved you, I’d do it, but not “someday,” I’d do it now, you see, right now, and sure, the best time to plant an oak is a hundred years ago, next best is today, but you could have been too exhausted the whole effing hundred years! You can’t wait for your body to get better, you have to live your life, with other people, now! If you don’t, you’ll die, so….

Earlier, I did a brain dump about unwinding pain, and how it can feel, and more. Now I’d like to go over my hypothesis in more compact, organized form

The fascia can create bindings that put one or more joints in your body out of proper, neutral, alignment. Some of these bindings are correlated bindings, and they need to be approached by realigning two parts of your body, releasing both (or possibly “all” if there are 3+) sides of the binding at once.

The fascia does this, so your body can still act as a bipedal human, when you’re injured, or, suffered a near dislocation. You’re more clumsy and less precise (after all, your body has restricted your range of motion!), but you’re able to act to preserve your life (for example), which means this is probably an evolutionary adaption. Later, when you heal up, the fascia remembers your normal bodily alignment, and “encourages” you to put yourself back to rights. How? By making you hurt of course! You feel uncomfortable, when your body isn’t properly aligned. If you’ve had a simple injury, you’ll probably heal back, and your fascia will cause you to undo any bindings it’s created, until all stiffness and limits on range of motion go away.

The thing is, the fascia can do this, even if you’re already injured, and already subluxated. And if your fascia gets tangled up with a second injury, while the first one is still healing, you might end up with tangles in your fascia you can’t undo on your own, because you no longer have range of motion to break the correlated bindings.

That’s what happened to me. My base subluxation was in my TMJ region. There are a lot of muscles and nerves in that region, and it is not a good place to have this kind of mal-alignment in your body. But worse, I had additional bindings, that kept my TMJ locked down. Until I started to mobilize both hips, and both shoulders, my TMJ wasn’t going to start mobilizing. The net effect of this was, I first broke bindings, and started living in hell, in 2010. Today, in 2026, sixteen long years later, I’m feeling well enough to write up what’s wrong with me, before I die. I’m not better – I just know that the words should be on the internet, before I die. I don’t know I’ll get better. I just know I need to post a warning to others.

I’m not joking about being in hell, either. The one reason I don’t like posting what I’m posting is, look, I’ll be honest: I think I’m one of the toughest people out there, the kinda guy who won’t bump himself off, no matter how bad things get, and I wouldn’t have bet twenty dollars on surviving sixteen long, horrible, years, where every single moment was filled with pain, and other issues.

Next: unbound, tangles in your fascia create a gentle path for muscle and bone to follow, to get back to normal (or closer to normal) alignment. If it’s a small amount of your body unwinding, you might barely notice a kind of twisty-twitching happening. However, as I approach a binding, the unwinding feels tighter, and eventually, I can sense sore spots, where I need to manipulate my body to apply pressure to those sore spots, and break the binding they represent.

Now: unwinding causes neurological pain, which I assume comes from the fascia, which is loaded with sensory nerves. This can overwhelm your brain, and cause some seizure like effects, as well as a host of other problems. I believe that these could mimic, or be the cause, of issues like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia. It could mimic chronic depression, or PTSD, and, ordinary measures to treat depression, or PTSD, wouldn’t help, because they wouldn’t address the real pain a person is feeling.

There’s one other oddity. Because my body is twisted up, weird things sometimes happen to my body. I can have projectile vomiting, or severe diarrhea, for example – projectile vomiting comes from the abdomen, did you know that? I got to learn…. But as important,I’m sure sometimes, muscle spasms close off my veins in the pelvic region. This would cause my heart to only partially fill, and cause me to get light-headed, and possibly faint – my heart would be pushing against blood that’s slightly bound in returning, so my blood pressure would be high, but there wouldn’t be enough fresh, oxygenated blood to keep me fully conscious. If my hips are in spasm, then I can have little flickers in and out of consciousness, which would look like a tonic clonic seizure to the naked eye. I don’t know if it would register as one on an EEG immediately, but, if your brain jumps between “barely conscious” to “mostly conscious” for long enough, I imagine it affects your brain’s functioning, and hence, the EEG. One of the biggest insights I had over the years was, neurology isn’t (necessarily) about what’s going on inside your head. It’s more of a question of whether your head can handle all your body’s signalling. That’s why you see patients seizing, or getting anti-seizure meds, in fictional emergency departments. A patient who was shot, or in a motor vehicle accident, might have such crazy signaling reaching their brain, that their brain can’t take it.

Just like happens to me, under much less injurious circumstances.

Now, I’ve spent 16 years learning how my body works, and spending significant amounts of time in strange mental states, and it took me twelve years to realize my problem was pain, and another four to figure out that it would look, in effect, like a seizure. This doesn’t mean seizure disorders are all caused by neuro pain, but, it strongly suggests that some people would do better if we fixed their neuro pain specifically, rather than trying to stop the seizure directly, and ignoring the pain component. Treat the cause, not the symptom, when possible. The better we get at understanding, and blocking, neurological pain, the better medications, with fewer side effects, we’ll be able to find (or so we hope).

Neuro pain can prevent sleep; that can cause a person to show all symptoms of bipolar disorder. Lack of sleep can cause mania; neuro pain can mimic depression. Bipolar meds might actually be blocking pain, on some level, or, for some people. It’s interesting that anti-seizure meds sometimes also work for bipolar disorder. Again, this suggests that better targeted pain reduction could eliminate the damaging sleep-deprivation-unto-mania cycle, and, that might be all some people need.

Finally, folks who are in neurological pain can mumble to themselves, because there are pain signals flooding their brain, and sometimes expresses as random vocalizations. They might look dangerous, especially if and when they are very low on resources. Some day, I hope people will ask folks like me, “I’m sorry, sir/ma’am, are you in pain? Do you need a quiet place to rest for a few minutes?” instead of threatening us because we fit a profile of a dangerous person. When I’m low on resources, everything hurts, and I can just barely stay focused to speak in complete sentences. Also, there’s a lot to being human that you do on automatic, and suddenly, for me, I can’t do them on automatic any longer. For these and other reasons, understanding is nice to receive, and quiet rest is doubly valuable, when we’re triggered, and using all of our resources to appear “normal,” and still can’t manage it.

The more I think about my own unusual case, the more sure I am that there’s a lot of people suffering, without understanding what’s going on in their bodies. I hope I can change that, and maybe help figure out how to treat cases like mine.

If you were to follow a political blog named "WTFGhost" you might notice an eerie similarity that I have no intention of discussing.

I’ve become a pretty good cook, recently, though I have to admit my range is pretty limited. I had to learn to cook a good marinara while Milli, my wife, was in rehab for a broken hip. Now, you’d ask, how could I, a gimp who loses his working memory (hence, forgetting he is cooking!), manage to become a good cook?

It started with good equipment. We have Portable Induction Cooktop, or PIC. We have cookware that works on induction – both cast iron, some stainless, and Hexclad (which seems pretty good so far). Key thing: PICs set a precise temperature, and, have timers. Worst case, my food won’t finish cooking, because I forgot to add more time; but, an induction cooktop can’t cause a fire (except, possibly, at “max sear”). If you don’t have a temperature higher than 375, well, nothing in my kitchen will combust at 375, so, there’s no danger of fire.

The problem I ran into is patience. Now, before any Italian folk speak up, I have to confess to one of the Original Sins in Italian cooking. I use dried herbs. I’m a gimp; I’ll improve, if, and when, I can do so easily. So, with that sin in mind, my problem was patience, because those Italian grandmothers considered time on the cooktop to be love infused into the dish. But I found shortcuts. You can caramelize onions by cooking them down at a lower temperature (say, 175), but then, when they’re really pale, and totally wimpified, kick the heat up to 250, or 275, and be ready to keep stirring.

Don’t stir too much; if your onions aren’t submerged in liquid the entire time, they’re not staying at the temperature you need for good caramelization. Still, as long as the onions are submerged, you can keep them moving slowly, so none of them scorch (which causes a bitter taste that you might enjoy, but is considered a cooking flaw in a competition). Once they’re starting to go brown, that’s when you are ready to make your marinara.

But let’s back up. You start, if possible, with enough glugs of extra virgin olive oil (okay, all right, “evoo”) and butter, so the onions collapse into liquid. But no onions yet! Here, you add your dried basil, and I find a quarter cup for 1 28oz can crushed tomatoes is a good start. I then add a quarter cup of oregano, as well, and then, once the herbs are saturated in the oil, I start cooking the onions, 2-3 cups per 28pz can of crushed tomatoes.

Do you need to rest after stirring the onions until they’re brown enough for you? That’s okay. Here’s a secret: you can also caramelize onions in the oven, roughly the same as you do in a frying pan, and you can learn how long you need to bake at 250, 275, whatever temperature you choose. You just want it low enough that you can forget about it for a bit too long, and come back, and still rescue it (if needed). You might prefer 325, and more frequent checks, and I won’t tell you not to!

Still, the key: get those onions starting to turn to onion jam. (I understand that there is “a thing” called onion jam, but a spoon of caramelized onions does have a jammy quality to it.) You don’t have to take them all the way; just some browning brings out new flavors.

Now, you add garlic to taste, which for me, means a handful (at least) of garlic buds, per 28oz crushed tomatoes. Chop it as finely as you desire; there's no magic in shaving them super-thin, not if you're adding enough garlic! You can add the garlic earlier, during the onion cook time, but garlic might scorch. Again, some like the flavor, but, a judge would assume carelessness, not individual taste. You want it to soften up.

Fun fact: shortly after eating garlic, before it gets to your large intestine, if you’ve eaten enough, you’ll fart garlic. Laugh now, but when it happens, you’ll be forced to agree. If you eat even more, the smell might come out of your pores. This tends to happen if you eat so much garlic, it’s a vegetable, not a mere seasoning ingredient. It’s a decent vegetable.

Now, before you add crushed tomatoes, make sure you’ve added everything that needs more heat than a mere boil. You can’t put too much heat under a pan of marinara sauce, without worrying about the bottom scorching, so, the oil is where everything must be more-than-boiled. Earlier, I could have added some ground carrot to my marinara, but it needs to cook even longer than the onions, for my taste. Some folks insist you need a bay leaf, and if so, I see no reason not to let it infuse with the olive oil, and possibly spread its flavor even better. Still, this is the big moment, you’re about to dump the tomatoes. Believe it or not, some of you will someday try adding one, just one, anchovy here, and let it melt, and then dump your 28oz can of tomatoes into the pan. Well – technically, you should open the can, and dump only the crushed tomatoes in.

Now, right now, at this moment, you have a delicious sauce, one that is very healthy for you, but if you simmer it, just right, slowly enough, you’ll boil off a lot of water, and notice “damn, there’s a lot of evoo in this sauce!” This is the place where marinara is amazing magic, even with dried herbs and garlic from a jar.

Now; take a frozen pork chop. Plop marinara over it. Put it in the oven until the pork chop is a clean, clear, 165-F or higher. The sauce and slow cooking tenderizes the pork chop. Throw in meatballs instead, and you get something equally amazing. Throw in chicken, that works just as well (but it is odd, if you’re not used to chicken in tomato sauce). And a good marinara sauce, with water added, makes a dandy poaching solution for frozen fish!

Now: maybe you can’t cut up 2-3 cups of onion, and do the rest. You can still improve store-bought sauce with olive oil and simmering, but be careful: evoo makes tastes a lot more intense, because of its high saturated fat content. That makes tastes tend to coat your tongue, so a bad taste can be intensified! In point of fact, the evoo you use for cooking would, in a perfect world, pass the tongue test. Put a drizzle on your tongue. Wait about 30 seconds. At this moment, you feel a desire for that oil to leave your mouth, and if it’s any good at all, you swallow it, because it tastes nice; or you spit it out because EEEEWWWW!!! (Or, you don’t want to swallow any empty calories – but evoo is actually good for you.)

The key is, sauce, plus meat, plus oven (or slow cooker, or the PIC, but I have to watch more carefully…) makes for a vegetable-laden, protein containing, meal, and one that invites the use of cheese for protein (rather than “just” meat). Look, carnivores, no disrespect, but, it seems our bodies are healthiest when we get our protein furthest away from us, so, red meat is worst for us, poultry is better, and fish even better; beans and nuts and other protein sources are even healthier still. That means a pork chop, cooked in marinara, with a cheesy pasta-marinara side dish, would be delicious, and as satisfying as a boring old “two pork chops – YAY LO-CARB!” but the former would also include a surprisingly large amount of veggie matter.

You can do a lot of the same thing, Mexican style, with salsa, which you can make yourself, or buy whatever commercial brand you like. If you want, you can goose your salsa with some tomato paste, extra onions, and extra jalapeños, if you can afford to keep those things in your pantry. Be very cautious adding evoo to salsa; this is how I know evoo magnifies heat! And again, if you’re a gimp, you can dump a load of that salsa on top of beef, pork, or chicken, and let it slow cook to amazing flavor and tenderness, while providing a lot of vegetable-y goodness to your body. You can use the meat plain, or, you can wrap it in a tortilla to make a taco, or burrito, or, put it on top of one tortilla to make a tostada, or between two, to make a quesadilla, along with cheese, and other Mexican goodness.

So if you’re tired of fruit smoothies and protein powder, and Tyson chicken and salad kits, here’s an easy-ish way to get a lot of nourishing plant matter into y our body, alongside your protein of choice. Good luck staying alive out there, and here’s hoping y’all find time and space in which to live fully, while staying alive.

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johnpalmer

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