Nuts lessen stress
...a dispatch from bewilderness
In my first life, I made headlines and deadlines all over the world. Headlines are important because the brain needs the big picture delivered—in a very small number of words—before it decides if it wants more. When I was in media, 8 out of 10 people read headline copy, while 2 out of 10 read the rest. We had to get 10 out of 9 to read it, instead.
But this piece isn’t about headlines. It’s about being at home on the range, or rather, at home with the range of things that would come up every single day – the unique and unrepeatable combination of stories that would never occur in quite the same way twice.
Chicken stock heats up Wall Street. Fish boosts brain. Nuts lessen stress. Dwarfs crash into neutron stars. Gut microbes browse gene buffet.
I lived a carefully organized life amid chaos. Organization was provided by verbs, adjectives, news, views, nouns, and punctuation marks. Plus, all the how-to tips anyone could need.
From keeping your hydrangeas from dropping, to keeping your boobs from drooping, from basting a turkey to hosting the best-ever holidays, we penned the smartest, swiftest, sanest ways to take care of everything—and look great while doing it.
This was in my first life when we used pens and worked for quaint things called magazines which were printed on paper then. But now? Headlines scare me. Too much orange man, too much DOGE, too much Musk, too few people guarding nukes. Everyday there’s an unprecedented destructive event that gets lost among all the other unprecedented destructive events.
I learned to read at age 56. That’s how I know recent research found soap is good at cleaning things. At least 4,000 years of history had already suggested that. I also learned that one million 'interstellar objects — each larger than the Statue of Liberty — are streaming through our universe.
The parietal lobe facilitates communication between different parts of the brain and learn stuff like that. But if your parietal lobe is screwed up, words land in odd semantic corners if they land at all.
Past, present, and future meld together, like one jumbled moment. Let’s see, there’s breakfast, shower, kindergarten, lunch, college, dinner, movie, childbirth, career, death of mom, death of career, truck, friends, shopping, paint a bird, floss and brush.
Thank you 👍
So enjoyed reading this. Thank you.