Regular Exercise Protects Mice from Flu Symptoms (but not from researchers’ scalpels…)

This just in! If you’re a mouse and you’ve been running regularly in your exercise wheel, you'll have less-severe flu symptoms after researchers have purposely infected you than will your non-exercising kin after they, too, have been infected. Also, when you are cut open and examined, your researchers will find less virus in your lungs than they'll find in your lazy friends' lungs.
So keep running, little mouse! And, if you don’t have an exercise wheel, make sure you find a way to request one from your caretaker.
And, thanks for volunteering!
This news might also be of interest to owners of pet mice.
Source: Iowa State University.

On Being Barefoot

I was stung between the toes by a bee last summer while running on some grass. The stinger was difficult to extract, and it stayed in my skin long-enough to inject a hefty dose of venom. Later, I was laid low with a fever and body aches. In my running-induced euphoria, I had forgotten the cardinal rule about going barefoot: Watch where you put your feet.
This experience reminded me that we go through life insulated from our natural world, and while this insulation is protective, it also prevents us from interacting with and enjoying our surroundings. Instead, we tend to barge around in our shoes, in our cars, in our airplanes, and we stop seeing what's out there, and we stop seeing our effects on what's out there: The connection is gone, and what's "out there," even though it sustains us and gives us our humanity, slowly degrades away.
And so we have people racing around the suburbs in gigantic, diesel-fume-belching, 4x4 trucks, parking-lot freeways (carbon-monoxide festivals), buildings scattered willy-nilly in formerly-pristine areas by developers engaged in feeding frenzies, global warming, collapsing fisheries, unecessary wars; the list, though it may seem endless, will be terminated by our demise or by our self-restraint (we get to choose).
A little mindfulness can move us towards the best choice: When's the last time you enjoyed the feeling of grass under your feet?

No Solicitors!

Our household recently suffered an infestation of vacuum-cleaner salesmen. I had been meaning to buy a screen door for our front entryway, because on those warm summer nights when mosquitos and other pests are abundant, some pests get into the house, and once in, they can be extremely difficult to expel. But I digress… To be clear, the salesmen entered with my wife’s permission, and once in, began a marathon session aimed at demonstrating why she should buy their vacuum cleaner for $2400. While they were cleaning our carpets, though, she began investigating the vacuum online. She found that the salesmen from this company are known for their high-pressure sales tactics, and that if you demand a lower price for the vacuum, you're likely to get it.
In all, this troop of sales-apes put in at least three hours of carpet-cleaning and product demonstration, and my wife, who was desparate to get something that could deal with the carpet-dirtifying consequences of having a young boy and his friends running daily throughout the house, bought the vacuum for about a third of the original asking price, plus they took our old vacuum as a trade-in.
While these guys never lied outright to to my wife, and they were quite personable, they managed nonetheless to imply things that were not true, such as that our favorite vacuum-repair shop, Mohler Vacuum, was a licensed warranty-repair facility, and that they were in the area because they had sales "appointments," and were just stopping by to see if we wanted give them a lot of money too. They were nice, but shifty, and the "ick factor" was pretty high.
It turns out that my mother-in-law also bought a vaccum from this company some 40 years ago, and she still remembers the gross feeling she had about the salesmen, but nonetheless used the vaccum, and was quite happy with it, for many years. The upshot is that this company has been making top-notch products for decades. After the fellow at Mohler told my wife that his business was not a warranty-repair facility, he went on to tell her that she had gotten a great deal, and that he himself owned one of these machines for home use.
In contrast to the quality of the product, further research on my part turned up the fact that the Better Business Bureau had revoked the accreditation of this company's local sales office, and that nationwide, there was a pattern of complaints about heavy-handed sales techniques. There was even one case of a woman being raped by a salesman from this company.
You really have to wonder why a company with such an awesome product (and yes, my wife is still thrilled with it) would allow its reputation to be so seriously damaged by the people who sell its products. What the heck is up with that?
And now, I'm finally going to put up the No Solicitors sign that I've been thinking about: The vacuum-cleaner-salesmen infestation is not the only door-to-door danger in our neighborhood. We also get shifty guys selling magazine subscriptions, some short guy with a beard trying to get money for a vague child-protection cause (he shows up once a year), carpet cleaning outfits who just "happen" to be in the neighborhood that day, just like they were last week, and other assorted annoyances, most of which turn up at our doorstep when we're sitting down for dinner at the end of a long day. Nuts to them all!

Loss of a Parent

Any of you lose a parent when you were a kid? My own father died when I was eight. I'm now in my fifties, and it was really only a few years ago that I finally began to realize just what an atom bomb it was that had exploded my life apart back then. Old-enough people often talk about what they did during the Sixties, where they were; well, that's where I was--atomized.
Rolling Stone recently ran an interview with Merle Haggard. Turns out his father died when he was nine. Mr. Haggard says he problably would not have gone to prison (he did time in San Quentin) had his dad not died. It's like that. Having a parent die while you're a kid blows your life completely part. Very few calamities can compare in their magnitude to having that happen while you're still a vulnerable and dependent young one. It's so big, so incomprehensible, that, for me at least, I had no idea for over forty years of just what had happened, how it had changed me, how it made me feel different from most other men.
Last night I started Maxine Harris' book, The Loss That Is Forever: The Lifelong Impact of the Early Death of a Mother or Father. The title is a mouthful, but pretty much says it all. I'm thankful to Ms. Harris for her elucidation of the great discontinuity that such an event causes in a child's life--a discontinuity of magnitude and awesomeness on the order of the Grand Canyon, but that, unlike the Grand Canyon, appears all at once, without warning, and is really like a massive meteor strike on the surface of your world: If you survive the initial blast, you might not survive the ensuing degradation of your ecosystem, your loss of sustenance, your loss of light. It's like that.
Ms. Harris' book triggered a night of strange dreams for me, the most vivid of which was about me digging in a large muddy hole, pulling out large slabs of sandstone, and attempting to pull a beautiful orange boulder free from the watery mud while worrying that the water must've been coming from a plumbing leak in the house next to where I was digging. As I awoke with a racing heart, I thought about how this was very like open-heart surgery.
As dreams often do, a scene from my childhood (digging in my uncle's backyard while a hose ran) combined with mundane grownup homeowner worries and then sucker-punched me with the psychic stone, a fossilized remnant, a piece of my heart that had died and turned to stone when my father died.
My mission now is to bring the power of this event into clear view and make it a conscious part of myself, who I am--to accept it and what it has made me, even though this process feels like it could kill me. Having a young son seems to be boosting me in this direction: I can see that I need to find clarity around my dad's death and integrate it for both of our sakes. Otherwise, it will be a danger to us both.
It's like that.

Don't Feed the Bear

I often get insomnia. And when I do, I lie in bed fretting, fussing, and being anxious. Things that never concern me during the day are suddenly overwhelming. It’s like being harassed by one of those spoiled Yosemite bears, lurking in the woods just after dusk, waiting for the chance to dart in and grab something off of the table. I can hear the bear out there, and can just barely make out its form. The bear often darts in to grab the garbage bag—you know—those throw-away thoughts and mutterings that tend to pile up on the corner of the bench, and never really seem to go away. He’ll run off with that refuse, and I’ll hear him chewing on it, and then he’ll be back for more, or maybe it’s his friend that wants to eat now.
I’m being harassed because there’s stuff the bear wants to eat. I begin to relax, watch my breath, and disengage: The bear fades away. There’s nothing here to eat anymore.
I need that bear: He’s my animal strength and instincts. He’s a part of me. I just need to keep him foraging, and not leave anything out that’ll make him dangerous.