It’s mid-August, and still hot summer in Palo Alto, but the nights are now cool (quilt time is upon me) and it’s cool when I get up (around 3 am), moving me to put on a thick flannel shirt and gelling the coconut oil I use to treat my body (it becomes a thin clear liquid in the heat of the day, but the gel is what you want if you’re using it for skin and hair).
The quilt. It’s one of a set, made from old t-shirts of mine, assembled into quilts by Janet Salsman, with the collaboration of Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky and Kim [now Kaine] Darnell. This is specifically the queer quilt:
A grab-bag of the political and the outrageous; I once managed to get a photo of me wearing row 2 / column 1 on my Ohio driver’s license, thereby snaring a queer card from the state of Ohio
The flannel shirt. I have a collection of these too. Warm, sturdy, and lumberjack-gay. Unfortunately, the fabric is so thick that my disabled fingers can’t get the buttons through the button-holes, so I can’t button up. But it’s still satisfyingly warm.
Coconut X. From my 8/9/23 posting “The states of matter: coconut X”:
I discovered the melting point of coconut X several summers ago. My air-conditioning aims to cool things to 80 F, so when it gets hot outside, inside my condo the spreadable coconut fat (used for daily treatment of my feet, legs, hands, and arms) melts (at around 77 F) to to a [thin] free-flowing liquid that’s very hard to cope with.
… The three states, from higher temperatures to lower ones:
— coconut oil (free-flowing)
— coconut fat (a spreadable semi-solid) — on analogy to other spreadable semi-solids used in cosmetics, this should be called coconut cream, but that compound is pretty much pre-empted by two uses of coconut cream in sweet food preparations: coconut cream filled chocolate candy (including coconut cream truffles) and coconut cream pie. (In both cases, the cream is a filling.)
— coconut solid (… [at refrigerator temperature, between 35 and 40 F] a very firm solid that is also almost impossible to deal with)
Otherwise. I’m sleeping well, feeling energetic and getting huge piles of stuff done, with fabulous vital signs, but still coming slowly back through crypto: days on end of profound laryngitis, which is damned annoying (maybe more to other people than to me, I think; I still talk out loud to myself during sex, but of course I can hear myself fine, because I have inside information about what I’m saying).
I have gone back to fresh greens (from a carefully selected company) in lots of things and some — sensuous delight! — fresh fruit too (my potassium levels went down too far at one point and sent me into crippling cramping in my arms, which I treated with some emergency dried blueberries; it’s another balancing act). Opal is no longer concerned that a sustained rice and meat diet was going to end up in scurvy (we have family stories of young men of our acquaintance who didn’t eat green food or any fruit and actually did develop scurvy).
But my kidneys continue to slowly but inexorably get worse, for no reason my baffled nephrologist can see. So he’s doubled my prednisone dosage (was 5 mg a day, then 20, now 40), since I do seem to respond to the steroid. I clearly have some auto-immune condition (one among a great jungle of them), probably one that doesn’t even have a name, he thinks, so we’re just slashing at the symptoms. Many terrible things could go wrong, of course.
So far, it seems to me that my already unusually keen senses of smell and taste have heightened; all my food is fabulous, especially if jazzed up to be even more bitter, more sour, more aggressively fermented, or more spicy than before, and I’m now getting stronger sniff bulletins from my environment (I’ll post a note about that). And nothing dire has happened. Well, if I lose my conscious memory again, I now know I can just wait that out.
I do wish I could sing. I feel like singing.
August 18, 2026 at 6:02 am |
I cannot (well, maybe I could, but I do not) resist the temptation to echo a recent post of yours by exclaiming “So that’s how the oil got into the coconut!”