The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I got a pal, Guitar Bob, who just came back from the doctor’s office for his yearly checkup. The doc, he told me, last time I was over, said he should start taking statins. “Statins?” I asked. “Aren’t those for lowering cholesterol?” Bob’s cholesterol has always been low. His old man died at about 99 and Bob’s got genes like Methuselah.

“Whaddaya think?” he asked. Guitar Bob and I have spent many a night talking medicine between songs, mostly with the determination to avoid it. Folks I know spend a fortune on herbal remedies for arthritis and colds, pump ibuprofen for pain, take meds for depression, drink fungi-infused teas for god knows what, all in the hopes it’ll cure what ails em. I believe in eating good food. I know, not gonna sell self help books with that, but I believe you ought to skip the experiments and stick with apples off the trees in the orchard.

Statistics don’t lie, mister. But they are misleading. For awhile I was taking a baby aspirin every day. Supposed to cut down the odds of a heart attack. Now they say it increases the odds of a stroke. So I quit the baby aspirin. If the doctors can’t make up their minds, I sure can.

Who knows what combinations of the myriad stuff we stick into ourselves does what to what? Tomorrow night we’re making sauerkraut, fermented cabbage, garnished with Cindy, the goat woman’s, garlic. Her cabbage too.

Some day, years from now, some future foodologist will discover that fermented cabbage combined with garlic caused duodenal cancer in 10% of the South End population. Except for the lucky few who were taking statins to control cholesterol.

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