Natural Analgesics

I have not written in a while due to infirmities that have knocked me over. And this will be mercifully short as I have not yet recovered. In fact, I sit here with a metal tumbler wedged between the upright part of my office chair and a knotted up spot just left of my T4 vertebra. It is the only way to stop the back pain. Chiropractor did nothing to help. PCP at first prescribed a drug I was allergic to until the pharmacist noticed it. Now taking flexerall, I stumble aimlessly about in a drug-induced holiday from reality. I will give evolution credit for trying though. As this came upon me, my endocrine system responded by flooding my bloodstream with all mannner of endorphins or other naturally occurring medicines in effort to keep me on straight and narrow path. OK, well maybe narrow path.
My brother's physical therapist told him that the aging process is cruel to those of us who have led sedentary lives. The back and shoulder muscles begin to atrophy with non-use, and then when we do try to use them for their stated purpose, they rebel by causing pain. His solution has been to do a series of easy exercises courtesy of the therapist. I could not learn them over the phone but will do so soon. In Person.
But my real purpose here today is not to praise me but to bury Hillary. Like many other liberal democrats, I find her an acceptable alternative to more war, more trickle-down and more nazi tactics that would flow from the pen of McCain. But her 9.2% margin in pennsylvania was not the double-digit bump she wanted, and we will now all be shoved through a meat grinder for more attacks, more gotcha and less illumination. Until she goes away. Meanwhile, we must also endure the spectacle of Barack's inexperience continuing to bite him in the butt. The latest wince-inducing faux pas happened in San Fransisco when he dismissed rural bumpkins of the keystone state as crying in their gun barrels and drugging themselves with the opiate of choice for people of no means: religion. Hearing the reaction to this, and hearing Barack's failed spin-doctoring to put it right, I went back and looked up Carter's so-called "malaise" speech even though he never uttered that word anywhere in it. While he never insulted anyone over their espousal of weapons or bibles, he might as well have beaten us all up with his words as did Barack. In both cases, there was a pointed accusation hurled from an Olympian mountaintop onto the teeming masses below. In both cases, the accusers were oblivious to the ramifications of their elitist pronouncements. In Carter's case, there were to be much bigger blunders ahead on the rocky road to the Reagan Revolution such that the malaise-mongering was quickly eclipsed and forgotten. But in Barack's case, I fear we have not heard the last of those scratchy and muffled out-takes he would doubtless like to take back. The McCain machine will use this against him should he prevail in Denver, and it won't be in a fair way. Instead, it could be the undoing of a promising but untried politician who has found out the hard way that the truth hurts. And it usually hurts the person who tells it the most.