A Type O Way of Life

I told my mom how much I spent the other day at the Whole Foods, roughly two hundred bucks for food for the week. "You should blog your grocery list," she says. Well, I won't bore one with the details, just that I try to keep in line with Blood Type O diet you can read about by Googling the work of Dr. D'Adamo. The grocery list involves breads from the freezer section that avoid wheat flour, breads made of 100 % Rye or Spelt, or sprouted grains such as Ezekial bread. Now that I avoid wheat products I can feel the inflammation in my joints when I stray and indulge, the same culprit behind weight gain and gastro-intestinal inflammation like Crohn's Disease and Colitis. My grocery list covers high quality fish and animal protein, fruits low in acidity, green vegetables. Olive oil. Supplements that are good for Os for regulating the thyroid, good natural anti-inflammatories, good for the digestive tract.

(I am reminded recently of talking to a young lady who suffers from Crohn's, and one would feel a certain distaste over the aggressiveness of modern medical treatment, ever willing to prescribe the latest medication to treat the specific, or to go ahead with surgery, rather than taking a step back and looking at the bigger, more simple picture. But instead, the arthritis is treated separately from the inflamed GI tract.)

I come home and obligingly put all this stuff away, believing and finding in actuality that this diet actually works quite well for me. Well, your body will tell you sooner or later if what you're putting into it is good or bad, just as no one really likes having gas, an upset stomach, a burning esophagus, strange weight gain, being constipated, etc., etc., etc.

It all makes me wonder. I do have to go out of my way to control what I eat. The general diet plan of Americans, including some of the European traditions it comes from, lives on lots of stuff that is bad for me. Corn, potatoes, dough. The hamburger is fine, just except for the bun. Smoked stuff, cured stuff, shellfish, cheese, not to mention hard alcohol, all bad. (Red wine is okay.) Yes, there is a long list, if you are an O, of things you should avoid, common things like Orange Juice, a lot of things you see commercials for, like commercial pizza.

Dr. D'Adamo modestly tells an O that aerobic exercise is good, good for the mood, good for the management of adrenaline and the fight or flight response that is so well-honed in us. It is not bad either for us to sit down and write out our feelings. Good for anger management.

Yes, good old fashioned human being with Type O blood, the donor to the rest of humanity. At least in a poetic sense, the original top of the food chain human being, a hunter gatherer type, living on the go, for whom all the agricultural products that come down the road later are problematic.

But I must admit, some time I have the sensation of being something like a caveman washed up on some foreign shore of outlandish custom and strange practices that leave me mystified. My O mind remembers within a small band, a group of people decent and kind with each other, working together, sharing, living in tune with nature.

I go out of the house on my bicycle, empty courier bag slung over my shoulder, a Kryptonite bike lock in it, along with wallet and keys, to the Whole Foods to do my hunting. I go through the aisles, familiar with them by custom, go through my list, go through the checkout line, and eventually try to cram it all into the courier bag, pedaling away with the large sack strapped to my back. I go home and cook, with the satisfaction that this stuff is reasonably good for me. A simple existence, free, to the extent one can be, from the muddle of modern complications.

I am probably not the only human being feeling depressed and mystified today, though, about the workings of society and power, maybe even saddened and sickened over this combined Republican/Tea Party craziness nonsense. Where is the moral outrage over the gaps between the rich and every one else?


But I digress. There is a wonderful story of Joseph Conrad's, very real, about being shipwrecked, washed up on a foreign shore where people do not speak your language. It is an account of rude basic survival. I would take it as not being very far off from that feeling an O person might have.

We write the best, or even bother to sit down to do it all, when it is not easy to write, when things aren't going so well, We write to, as an O would, examine emotions, feelings, sensibilities, that sort of thing. One cannot hear an echo of President Kennedy's calling for going to the moon, "We choose to go to the moon and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard." We write from that awful feeling of being lost, of having washed up alone somewhere we do not understand. Chose to do something natural an O would do, and one might well find it a bit of a lonely place.

Hemingway wrote, obviously, to figure things out, as Death in the Afternoon figures out bullfighting. His stories, his pages, are full of individuals who, like the old fisherman, are called out to nature, the natural world, of people who are finding it an odd struggle to be in society, as if they were an alien within it, even as they might understand.

He said he never wrote while he was drinking. That would have eased the discomfort, the sense of loneliness, the pain of being an individual human being. That he admits to taking a little rum to finish up a story, as he does in A Moveable Feast, is not contradictory to the basic sense of his point. One is best left to write when he has found himself in some miserable situation, not taking any easy shortcuts, no ways around it. Another person might say, 'well, Ernest, why don't you just drop it and come join the fun...' But he would have seen through that.

The typical Irishman might, faced with the same, down a few pints with his mates and sing some songs. But remember, a few great Irish songwriters, Brendan Behan, Shane MacGowan, were well acquainted, unflinchingly, with miserable situations of the human condition type. Would it be appropriate to say to them that 'they are masochists?'

It is, as Hemingway wrote, a lonely task. That is in the very nature of writing, and largely in reading too, though we may try to mollify the pain of solitary readership through book clubs or classes of some sort. Writing is done along on Friday nights when the main bulk of people, it seems, are off in search of going out fun. Or at the very least, when they are relaxed and easing into moods of social life. Where the writer would be almost admitting he is basically alien to all that, and knows social life only through his work as I happen to work as a barman, as most of my counted friends are from that situation. "Why not be happy," a voice says, "go and make choices for things that will make you happy?" Hmm. I don't know, a sense of satisfaction lies in remaining true to the human condition, and the happiness one hopes for is the happiness that will come along at a dinner party kind of a thing, when one's work is done for the day.