All Food Is Poison and Anything You Eat May Kill You

People with panic and anxiety disorder are very suggestible, and they are especially suggestible to their own stupidity. The story of the last month, below, reveals my extremely scientific approach to food intolerance and how it may affect the brain. Please note: If you read this and decide that you, too, are intolerant to all the things I have listed, then we should have a martini together. Contact me. (Except that martinis are derived from wheat, and are now a terrible poison to me. I will be drinking a tea made out of organic quinoa shavings, while you enjoy your delicious martini.)

About one month ago, I decided I was intolerant to Gluten. Gluten can cause all sorts of bad things, I’d read, and I wanted no part of it. It has been reported to cause indigestion, osteoporosis, rashes, and depression. I cut all Gluten out of my life. By the second day off Gluten, I decided I was cured of every anxious thought I have ever had. I ran about through the wet grass in the night, and hurled a tennis ball at the moon.

“Yah! I am cured!” I said to the moon.

A few days later I started feeling dizzy and anxious again, so I decided I had an intestinal parasite. I researched all kinds of parasites, and found out that some can bore into one’s brain! They really can. They can invade every major organ in the body. I researched some online cures that promised to expunge parasites from the body.

But what if it wasn’t a parasite? What if it was just my own idiocy? Then I would have paid $47 for a revolting “colon cleanse” that would just cleanse the nutrients from my body and make me even more dizzy and ill.

I held off, but still brooded heavily about the parasites.

Another week or two went by. By Thursday 5/19, I decided that I didn’t drink enough water. Water, by God, now that was the solution! If I could gurgle down about 10 glasses a day of water, I would be instantly healed and would wake up with my hair in a braid and a song on my lips. As I woke, I would sing a song that would begin with the words: “Another glorious day to celebrate my life!” I made a chart and started to check off how many glasses of water I imbibed per day. On the first day, I drank 10 glasses of clean, pure water.

I woke up feeling just as rotten as ever. “Perhaps,” I thought, “I was right about the parasites.” I also pondered a bit about brain tumors and incurable mental illness. Or maybe I had lactose intolerance? Maybe I was allergic to coffee. Maybe there was some kind of oil in the coffee bean that was sick-making, and caused incurable mental illness. Why, look at the proliferation of coffee shops, and all the poor sad addicts standing in line.

On Friday 5/20, I gave up coffee.


On Saturday 5/21, I was fully convinced that my troubles were all due to a mysterious malady called Fructose Malabsorption. If you have this problem, you can’t eat most fruits, high fructose corn syrup, asparagus, artichokes, onions, leeks, wheat, and brown rice. Basically, everything that is good for you. Fructose Malabsorption can make one extremely anxious and depressed, and can even make one’s eyeballs ache. Plus, it causes bad poop incidents and a bloated tummy that looks like you just swallowed a dodgeball. All these terrible things have happened to me. Therefore, I had "Fructmal."

I started drinking coffee again. What did it matter? Apples were poison.

By Sunday 5/22, I had discarded the Fructose Malabsorption theory altogether. It would be a bore to never eat an apple again! How would I explain this weird food intolerance at Appletini parties?

Instead, I now determined that my trouble was corn and dairy. Corn, the evil of America! No pretty corn-fed maidens, sipping frothy glasses of milk, would tempt me again. I packed up the industrial-sized bag of Costco tortilla chips and, on Monday 5/23, thrust them at our nanny on my way to work.

“Take them, take the awful things from my sight!” I begged.

“But, we just bought those,” she said.

“And look, I have eaten half the bag,” I cried. “It is no wonder the corn has made me quite ill and mad.”

I glared at the cheese in our fridge with suspicion. No doubt it had been made from mad cows and goats, and eating it would pickle my brain matter. I would eat no cheese. I gave up coffee again. I had some weak tea without sugar and milk. I felt very bitter.

By now there was very little left on the "safe list" that I could eat. I ate a few nuts and a banana for breakfast, and became worried about the Fructose thing all over again. “Suppose I was right, and this banana is not on the ‘safe” list, and it makes me sicker than ever!” I fretted about this on the way to work.

By 11:00 I was so weak and shaky from not eating a proper breakfast that I had a panic attack, and immediately nibbled at the corner of a small Xanax. I felt much better.

If you can cure me of this stupidity, I will send you a package of cookies. They will not contain any wheat, corn, dairy, nuts, fruit juices, or sugar, and will taste like little turds coated in sawdust.

The Same 10 Questions I Always Ask Myself, Part the Seventh

1. What are you wearing?
Today, I was successful at digging past the voluminous pile of grey granny panties and extracting a pair of nether-huggers that actually have a wisp of lace on them. And dots and spots! I was so proud that I have worn little else today, except for a drapery I dragged down, a la Scarlett O'Hara, in which to answer the doorbell.

2. What's the nature of today's hypochondria?
I have diabetes. Or maybe a thyroid condition. Either way, death comes quick like dagger.

3. What was today's workout?
I took an 8:00 am "Total Body Conditioning" class at the Mamaroneck NYSC. There, I chanced to peer down the bosom of an older woman who was doing the plank next to me. She had stuffed a number of greasy tissues down the crevasse, and occasionally plucked one out to mop her brow. I found this distasteful, as I am sure you do. I also noted that the instructor of the class did her pushups on her knees, girly-style. I did mine all manly-like just to shame her, whispering "boo-yah! boo-yah!" with each pushup.

4. How do you do what you do and stay so sweet?
The lemony fresh scent of Baby Sunshine and his fat little rubbery thighs, and his tiny square perfect teeth flashing when he says: "Dat was toooo funny!" And my five-year-old holding his Schtinky Teddy out for a kiss, which I place gingerly on the animal's gnawed and damaged fur-denuded head. And my seven-year-old, who tells me gravely: "Your novel is great. But it would be even better if you wrote seven of them, like Harry Potter, and made them all into movies. Then you would be extremely popular."

5. What's that burning smell?
That's my neighbor's kid, Thuggy "Mean Mouth" McGee, smoking a doobie while skateboarding back and forth on that half pipe, back and forth, maddeningly, endlessly, until the sands of time run out. Was he, once, his mother's own Baby Sunshine? No, I think he probably sat in the fireplace ash as a toddler and gnawed old bones.

6. If you were an animal, what kind would you be?
I once replied "a carnivorous whelk." After much perplexity of thought I have come to the conclusion that, yes, it's still a carnivorous whelk. Except this time I would like to be an amphibious and ambulatory carnivorous whelk, so that I could travel into the city on weekends and bite unwary tourists! The oceanside gets very dull for the whelk in winter.

7. What are you drinking, and why?
Cold, weak tea. I have grown to fear coffee, as it has given me the jim-jams and the williwags one too many times. But I long for it. Oh yes, its sweet poisons will woo me back, in time.

8. In what ways hast thou offended?
I gave God the stink eye this morning.

9. What's the next big thing?
Legless pants, Gummy Wolves, and a boom of baby boys named Casper Q. Twimblebottom.

10. Music selection?

The National: High Violet. Gorgeous stuff. But their lyrics are really, really weird if you listen closely.