God, I'm so bummed. I had just finished posting my feelings about watching the PBS show Changing Stages. I thought I hit the post and publish button but I hit the post button instead and I lost 30 minutes of writing. This is so unfair! And now I'm too tired to recreate and I don't remember what I wrote since it was so off the cuff. Such a bummer.

Perhaps I'll rewrite it tomorrow. And it was good, so good.


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No other posts this month ... too distraught and depressed. Besides 9/11, my best friend's brain tumor got worse and she became a veggie a few days after the attacks. It was a horrific month for me. Check October posts.
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No blogging for awhile. Don't know why ... just didn't feel like it, I suppose.

I did a Master Cleanse diet from August 9 - 17. This juice fast was very popular in the late 1980's in the crunchy granola health food circles and in Europe. I did my first one back then. You drink nothing by freshly squeezed lemon juice, water, grade B maple syrup and cayenne paper for 10 days at a minimum. You're also supposed to drink a natural laxative tea to help get the stuff out of your system. Also recommended is a salt-water flush, where you drink a quart of water with two teaspoons of sea salt. The stuff goes right through in about three hours and is supposed to be like a cleansing bath for your colon. The lemonade diet is supposed to rid your body of all accumulated buildup of toxins and poisons, unclog your arteries, and move out whatever else isn't supposed to be in your body.

The first time I did the Master Cleanse Diet, I was deathly ill for a couple of days. I had massive headaches and bizarre drug flashbacks, most likely due to all the toxins and poisons coming out of my system. My skin cleared up incredibly at the end and I felt cleaner somehow. I won't begin to tell you the stories of what was coming out of my body; they're horrific. But I suppose, better that they come out than stay inside of me right?

This time the symptoms weren't that bad. The first couple of days I had mild headaches and felt a little ill, but that was it. I had never done the salt flush before, so I decided to try it.

The salt flush was terrible. Since I grew up near the ocean and had been swimming since I was a babe, I have innumerable memories of swallowing ocean salt water from near death drowning experiences. Drinking the salt flush brought those memories back in amazing technicolor; some of which I didn't remember and had blocked. And my body had memories of it too. It was hard to drink the salt water without wanting to gag and having experience of drowning. It was very strange.

The salt water flush made my stomach hurt very badly and it was scary what was coming out of me, despite the fact that besides the lemon juice concoction and a cheating handful of almonds, I wasn't putting anything else into my mouth.

I lost about 6 pounds which I expect to gain back once I start eating again, but I'm very glad that that whatever was in my colon is gone now. I started to take the phrase, "Don't look back" very seriously during my cleansing diet and my countless trips to the bathroom.

But now I've finished the Master Cleansing Diet and I hope I can get back to writing and exercising, which I put off during my juice fast. I miss both terribly. Well, that and eating and cooking of course.

More revelations this month it seems. More of me making peace with my past. It's funny how you sort of get stuck in this view of yourself as a certain kind of person and that you think of yourself this way, even though you might have changed. I caught a glimpse of this recently and I was surprised. The me I thought I was no longer exists and it seems I've moved on to a different view. I didn't know it though and I wonder when the change happened because it wasn't that visible to me. I didn't even know I'd changed until I recently came across someone who reminded me of how I was five years ago. And I only recognized myself in that person because I was now so radically different from that person.

Poor Greg. What I must have put him through and how he was right about so many things. He put up with me for all those years. How I must have just tortured him with the minefield of problems that surrounded me. But even love and friendship couldn't hold us together. I still have that memory of us driving over the Bay Bridge in his white saab and us both singing Elton John and George Michael's duet song "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me. And I knew we were singing about our relationship and how neither of us wanted to lose the other. But it was already too late at that point. We had started to go down separate paths slowly and inexorably.

I thought about contacting him today just to tell him I'd changed, but then I remembered that he hated that I changed so much, so I didn't call. But I have changed and I know he would have liked the new me better.

I've been thinking about whether my novel, "Following in the Dark", should be erotic or have erotic writing. I mean it is about a woman's sexual adventure so it's already erotic right?. But I don't know. I think what makes something erotic is so individual, so personal. Is punishment erotic? Is pain erotic? Most people would never readily admit that sensations such as pain and punishment give them sexual pleasure anyway. I also don't want to make pain and pleasure necessarily that erotic either, it just is what it is. And for me, that's erotic enough.