Sometimes it is easier to just let the days go by and write nothing.  Sometimes, the words that course around in my head just want to keep me awake and refuse to let me do anything with them. 

What all do I write about?  Do I write about George Carlin’s death?  It is not like I knew the man, but he was a fixture in my childhood, nonetheless.  His record FM & AM was was played on my little 45rmp sized turntable so often, it warped.  He and people like Sandy Baron, Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor, and David Brenner were my introduction into comedy and were the voices I used as early as kindergarten to try to express myself, my thoughts, my humor. 

Do I write about all the things I am learning about being a vegetarian?  I have said I was a vegetarian off on most of my adult life, but the only thing I gave up was eating meat.  I never thought about how animal by-products are in medicines I have taken because of the gel coating, the cheese I eat because of rennen, in gum, mints, the list goes on and on and I am beginning to understand why some people give it all up and go vegan, something I never would have ever considered before.

I have never been a concious eater.  I don’t eat meat most of the time not because of any ethical concerns I have about eating flesh, about conditions in which the animals were raised and butchered or any of that.  I would stop eating meat because I don’t like the tactile sensation of touching raw meat.  I don’t like the smell of meat frying in the pan, so I quit buying it at home, and only ate it out.  Then I just stopped eating it all together because I found I naturally leaned towards other things. 

I go back and forth but have decide to start to take it more seriously because of getting sick, and it is, for lack of a phrase that doesn’t make me sound like the aging hippy I probably am, it is blowing my mind, man. 

I don’t drink, smoke, or use drugs.  I don’t even take pain killers anymore although I do still from time to time use muscle relaxants when things get to the point I am afraid I will be unable to walk…that is how I missed all of Tuesday last week.  I cuss like a sailor so I still have that as a vice, but other than that, I am boring as paint drying.  Why not go all the way and become a full fledged vegetarian?  Give up the one last thing that I vaguely feel dirty about doing. 

I decided this time, if I do it, I am doing it right.  No cleanses and all that, but really understanding what it is I am giving up, what it is I will be eating instead and being a concious consumer for once in my life.  It is so much easier not to think about these things at all.  To not think about what is put into the things we eat and why it is kids today are being born with allergies to foods that kids in developing countries don’t have.  Why think about how the incidents of Autism have increased?  Why think about why auto immune diseases are on the rise and new ones are being recognized more and more?

I am starting to sound a little Oliver Stone’ish and really, my mind is not on all that right now, it is ticking back to my childhood, to those comedians who I love so dearly.  I love stand up comedy.  I respect it more than other performance – over actors and musicians.  I have met actors, met musicians that I really respected and admired, but none of them left me speechless like meeting Steven Wright did. 

There is a brillance that exists in stand up.  It is the improvisation – of being quick of mind and rolling with whatever happens that I find awe inspiring.  I am not saying every comic has it, but those that do, those are the ones – to me – that are like watching a master piece being painted, or an overture being written. 

This is why sometimes it is easier to just let the words exist in my head.  My strange little rants that twist back on themselves and never come to a completion, at least not for anyone but me.  Being concious, being aware, being in the moment and rolling with whatever comes, I learned it as a child, I learned it from George Carlin, I am learning it again as I learn how to care for myself, by what I put in not just my mind, but my body, the one that aches and betrays me daily but that I can laugh about, must laugh about because laughter is all there is when you think everything else is gone.