berries and cornflakes

The berries offered now in grocery stores are outstanding. Just think of the things you can do with them. 

Here's the thing that's weird. 

A few years ago I became very ill right when I was out of milk and cereal. That day I had also boiled the bones of a very large red snapper in preparation of bouillabaisse and right as it's done I can no longer tolerate the scent of fish permeating my apartment. I had to take out the trash but I was too weak to move. And I couldn't shop for the plain things that I craved. Milk and cornflakes. 

So I ordered online from the store that I usually go. 

I wanted plain cornflakes. I selected the brand that I know on their website.  

When they delivered they had substituted for the cheapest cornflakes they offer. I didn't even know they existed. But what is there to cornflakes? Smashed corn that's steamed and baked. I'm guessing.

Cornmeal is bland compared with ground up popcorn kernels. No comparison. Popcorn seeds into an electric coffee mill, boom, instant fresh cornmeal. I do this all the time and now I use commercial cornmeal that's been oxidized by being milled before being stored and transported and sitting on shelves only for pizzas as ball bearings to slide off the tray into the oven. Because they're virtually tasteless compared with popcorn kernels milled on the spot.

They also substituted organic milk for regular milk and delivered half what I ordered while keeping the total cost approximately equal. I wanted gallons of milk, not half gallons.

And since I was so sick, and because my yearning for this simple meal was so great, that first bowl of cornflakes and milk was the most excellent thing that I ever tasted and that experience left an enduring impression. I re-live that moment every time I eat these cheapest of all cornflakes and regular whole milk. Now it's the only type that I care have. Everything else is worse.

At the store these cheap excellent simple cornflakes are on the bottom shelf in one tiny unobtrusive spot while all the various brands of vitamin enhanced flakes and puffs and various grains with nuts and hard little raisins and colored ersatz marshmallows and cocoa all coated with sugar dominate row upon row of shelf upon shelf of an entire grocery store aisle. 

Care to hear something weird?

Okay, goes like this. 

I have a nerve disorder with a few strange manifestations having to do with eye-hand coordination and thought processing, that leave my doctors just shaking their heads. I've described it to them several times and each time they just go, "Well, hmm." It's not so bad as it once was but one place that it happens reliably is the cereal aisle in the grocery store. First there's the fluorescent light. Then there's the very long row of boxes. Then there's the scanning the boxes for type and then for brand. The influx of information through the eyeballs reading the boxes causes my head to literally jerk away to force me to stop looking and stop reading. Fighting it is ridiculous. Several times, very many times, I stood there resolute in determination to scan the cereal boxes and find my selection. I could scan for two seconds and my head jerks away. I force it back for two seconds and my head violently jerks away. As if a giant's hand is actually pushing my head. I look again, jerk away again. Look, jerk. Look, jerk. Look, jerk. Look, jerk. Look, jerk. Look, jerk. Look, jerk. Look, jerk. Look, jerk. Look, jerk. Look, jerk. And I realize I'm on camera and whomever is observing me must think I'm spazzing out. And I am!

For years I had a way of managing this situation. 

I walk down the cereal aisle and look straight ahead. I'd allow information about type and brand to come through periphery vision. These are wheat, these are rice, these are oats, these are corn. Then stopped in front of the type, say Raisin Bran, sneakily and slowly allow brand information to come through by periphery but without actually looking at the boxes directly. Not reading them. Then finding my type and brand then I'd allow direct straight on vision knowing I have only a few seconds to identify the selection then stop reading the boxes. With out-of-focus vision I'd confirm the decision then escape the cereal aisle. 

When I tell this to family physician and to specialists there is absolutely nothing they can do to help me. They can't even fit it with all that they know. And yet that is my reality. 

I must now pray. To thank God for allowing that syndrome to pass. That whole thing that I described is much lessened now. But if I spend too much time scanning the cereal boxes and reading then I feel the syndrome returning, feeling similar to the feeling that signals the onset of epileptic attack. 

There are other similar situations. Washing dishes underneath soapy water and relying on touch sense in warm water. The eye-hand-mental processing shorts out and my hands jerk out of the water violently. I put them back in and feel for service ware underneath the suds. Jerk! Feel, jerk! Feel, jerk! And that's actually dangerous because knives are in there. Most frustrating. I learned to wash dishes differently because of this

It also happened hammering brads for upholstering. Eventually I had to give up. I couldn't help my friend with his dining room chairs. And that was a bummer because that task was right up my alley. But it was impossible for me to hold the tack and whack it with a hammer, one after another.

Buttoning a shirt is another spazz out situation. 

And oddly, this hasn't affected typing nor communicating in sign language. These things I've described made me fearful it would spread to those things too eventually, but it hasn't. I have no idea why not because the situations are similar. And that's two more things I must pray to express thanks.