Monday, August 15, 2011

if you're not growing, you're dying




alas, true in the literal sense. each new cell created in your body to replace the last weaker than its predecessor. if something isn't done about it! 


unfortunately, i'm not sure what can be done. diet. yoga. chris marker filmed nine hours of india way back when, and i remember a 70 old yogi who looked as healthy as any human being on earth. as a consequence, i studied with a fine teacher and did my stretches for years. ironically, with my first back failure, i abandoned it, never to get back in the practice. 


once i sat next to an actor in new york, one i'd seen onstage. he too had the bloom of youth at 45. i asked him how he'd done it. "eating no meat," he said, though he was not at all pompous about it. eons later i watched him perform again and he seemed as youthful as ever. 


that kicked off 32 years of vegetables and tofu for me. i only lapsed with an attack of asthma and a visit to an 82 year old chiropractor. she believe in eat right for your blood type and convinced me as a blood type O i needed meat, especially to keep the acid in my stomach busy. true, i seldom eat the red stuff and almost never pork. maybe that's why i have to swallow an ant-acid pill every night or wake up to a beating heart and trembles.


as for exercise, i've always walked an hour a day. and recently i bought a wonderful mini-trampoline. i just bounced on it, waiting for my coffee to drip. i felt like a little kid jumping on a bed. NASA recommends it as the best exercise, perhaps as training for that first tourist trip to mars. 


you know, i can finally hear the notes from my tiny ukulele, improvising like a mad scientist. they say being increasingly sensitive to sound can help stave off alzheimers. and recent studies show you can dig new grooves in your brain and expand the snaps. the mind doesn't need to decay.


why do we lose our sensual perceptions as we grow older? we can keep our libido alive with tricks (a little fantasy goes a long way), yet following einstein, we've a physical sense of the universe when young. later it changes into an abstract formula, habit, and  mathematics couldn't save einstein in old age, except i believe his uniform field theory to be true, even if he didn't have the tools to prove it. see my thoughts on the subject here: www.pbase.com/wwp/unified


and i've added a series of drawings called the mayan underworld:  


maybe playing with my smartphone will at least keep more than my hair and nails growing in the grave.