Spo-reflections on the efficacy of forsaking bad habits.

October has come and gone. We enter the Twilight Zone of November  between All Hallows Eve and Thanksgiving. Usually these three or four weeks are plainsong without festivity or decoration.(1)  Urs Truly doesn’t have anything planned. I will be more virtuous through better eating, exercise, and sleep.

I saw The Good Doctor yesterday, who tells me I am in good health. I don’t have any nasty diseases or elevated blood pressure. There was one exception: cholesterol and its droogs are higher than usual. That’s diet that is, the result of dissolute and indolent living. Time to tidy up my habits.  Until Thanksgiving I plan to abjure imperial-tid-bits and get going. (2)

I once had some fatty liver, for which The Good Doctor scolded me saying his remedies hadn’t a chance given what they were contending. He told me to cut down on snorts and sweets. I said I lacked the will-power: I can cut them out entirely but I can not moderate them. He said that would answer so for a few weeks I was abstentious and the fatty liver was discouraged and left me. I was a well man again and immediate had a snort in celebration. Later I recommended this same-sensible advice to an elderly patient of mine who was not responding to treatment. I told him he would improve in a fortnight if he gave up smoking, drinking, eating, sex, and swearing. He said he couldn’t give up any of these things as he had never done any of them. There you have it. He had neglected his habits. He was a sinking ship with no freight to throw overboard.  One or two bad habits would have saved him. So he got a prescription for Prozac rather.

 

(1) Or used to be. Now the Christmas crud comes up the day after Halloween, and in some places it’s been up since September. Skunks.

(2) I have no objection to abstinence, so long as it does not harm anybody.