Cleanse report

Well, I've hit some roadblocks this week with the Total Life Cleanse. The media ban is not really working for me. I am a news junkie and I work at the newspaper. There were many years where I proudly did NOT own or watch television, read news on the Internet, or read the newspaper. I was out of the loop. I didn't even own a cell phone. And all that changed with 9-11. I was out of work in Boston, we'd just moved East, and I went down to the Harvard employment office where the facilities were shut tight and flyers were up on the glass doors with a note that said in respect for what had happened in New York, everyone had gone home. Kort got the news at NESA, where he and his peers watched the news unfold in the student lounge. We went out that afternoon to The Phoenix on Central Ave. in Cambridge and watched the big-screen television for several hours, watching the same images over and over again.

For me, the greater challenge may be giving up reading the emotional train-wreck of some blogs and websites like Smoking Gun or Crime Library which feed Sedaris-esque neuroses about sex offenders and murderers lurking on every street corner and under my nose - hide that butcher knife on the kitchen counter! That will be an essay for a collection of essays some day. I think of the older man I dated in Chicago who kept a rotting cow's skull in a plastic bag, had a walk-in closet dedicated to his cat's defecation on the carpet, rotting food in the fridge, maggots on the carpet, and more trash and mess than a Mormon family of 7 kids in Riverside.

Despite the media ban, part of this week's homework was to read articles on the environment, pollution, genetically-modified foods, chemicals in computer keyboards such as the one I type on, etc. The lack of balance in terms of what comes into one's field of experience, untempered by any practice, has made the cleanse difficult to sustain. Add to that a right speech clause in our assignments and I find myself saying more than ever phrases like "I hate..." and "....is stupid" and swearing like a sailor. An angry liver or cleanse detox, I'm learning that I don' t like to have my experience of language controlled.