He's Dead, Jim

My father knows the key to immortality. This immortality is not the promise of eternal life made to all Christians by Our Savior nor the alchemical secrets of the Philosopher's Stone. No, friends, the key to immortality is in a special, peculiar diet promoted by a small-circulation health & wellness newsletter that speaks ill of the medical establishment. The problem is that though he possesses the key to immortality, it keeps shifting betwixt these paranoid, small-circulation newsletters.

I am occasioned to mock my father thus because he regularly lectures my mother on her poor diet, which includes poisons such as whole wheat bread, & urges her in rough, demeaning terms to follow his immortal lead. He has thrown away foods he does not wish to consume, even if those foods were purchased explicitly for the consumption of others. Yet he bristles at his new nickname, "Michael Bloomberg." Yet he continually undercuts his supposed dietary authority by radically shifting his diet every few weeks.

Just last week my father was steaming vegetables like it was going out of style. He steamed a huge pile of mixed vegetables at least once & sometimes twice a day. He groused that we were always out of apples, though this was because I was only bringing home from the green grocer as many apples as I typically eat, having never before known him to eat apples. He eschewed mustard, saying that he liked it but that it contained all sorts of harmful ingredients. Yesterday, he asked me to purchase more yellow mustard, which he has begun to consume in mass quantities. (He was too lazy or too dim to check the pantry, where a spare bottle of mustard already waited in reserve.) I looked & saw that the huge sack of apples in the refrigerator had not been touched in days. He no longer steams vegetables, in fact seems not to eat vegetables of any kind, having rededicated himself to the Atkins diet. He espouses the view that saturated fat is the key to healthy living, that the more saturated fat one ingests the better. How are we meant to regard his proclamations on diet & nutrition as Gospel truth, as he insists, when those proclamations change radically every few weeks?

Kith & Kin
This is why I wish to perish by age sixty, because the men in my family seem to go mad after their fifties. Death does not frighten me, cannot frighten anyone who trusts in the Lord, but the thought of madness makes my blood run cold.