The Urge to Purge

I'm feeling especially paranoid this morning ... Last night, I caught myself sitting on the couch, worrying about the toxicity of modern life. It's pretty bad, if you think about it too hard. Plastic bottles are leaching estrogen into the water; our cheap food is mostly salt, fat and sugar; our processed food has been robbed of nutrients by industrial farming practices; cosmetics, shampoos and soap are made from a chemical soup of petroleum distillates; our meats are laden with hormones and trace antibiotics, our seafood with mercury and noro virus; and the average household has something like 50 carcinogenic compounds sitting around.

I get like this sometimes, usually after I edit a few "clean living" type books (I just finished another one, in case you were wondering). You read one here or there, and it's no big deal. But when it's your job to wallow in toxicity, it can be a tad overwhelming.

The worst are the diet books. And I mean THE WORST. Nothing can give me the heebie jeebies like a book pointing out how much crap I eat (and I don't even eat that bad) -- so then in a fit of self-improvement, I swear to myself, "That's it. No more alcohol. No more sugar. No more processed carbs. No more salt. No more trans fats. I'll get to the gym FIVE times a week from now on ..." Next thing you know, I'll be downing shots of olive oil and lemon juice in some whacky "liver purification" detox ritual. God forbid. If you ever catch me sneaking a bottle of olive oil and a shot glass into the back room, please smack me.

It's enough to make my head explode, this impossible, endless urge to purify, to get back to the basics, to live clean. It's funny, because when I actually was shoveling my system full of crap, I never worried about it. Ah, but I was younger then. And I hadn't spent ten years getting paid to rub my nose in dirty facts.

So ignorance really is bliss. And now, I'm off to welcome my work day with a glass of distilled water and a dash of lemon juice ...

P.S. Click here if you're interested in being a Storyteller, and here if you want to see the July prompt. I'll be posting the first batch of stories on Monday.