There Is A Bag Of Beets In The Refrigerator

73 There is a bag of beets in the refrigerator There is a bag of beets in the refrigerator. I took it and a bag of organic carrots, the tiny ones we feed to the little English bulldog we call bulldog, the bullgod, and I laid both bags on the kitchen counter as I contemplated the juice machine that rested there, powerful but innocuous. The beets organic and bunch red in a civilized sort of manner still have the appearance of malevolent underground burrowing, their entire bearing somehow associable for me who loathes their cooked taste and texture, lurking evil. It is only a plant, fool. A plant can’t feel anything, I said to myself, as I started to draw a serrated blade against the beet bulb surface, then quickly pulled back in fear I was about to enrage some living sentience in the tuberous thing that lay before me. I put it down on the counter and thought of some other way to make the bulk of it small enough to pass through the tiny aperture of the juicing machine’s grinder portal, and I laughed at me for thinking I would hurt the beet in some way harmful to my soul if I cut it, but was trying to make it small enough to liquefy its being so I could eat it. I am a vegetarian because I hate plants I have been saying in jest for many years. I am not a vegetarian, and this is the first fruit or vegetable I have ever been afraid of to this date. Though I admit to a terror of the trees of Indiana. Boys who grow up in the vast open spaces of treeless places like the Colorado and Iceland of my youth have a justifiable terror of the tree. They are big and one never knows when one might come down in the night in stealth and they certainly have been watching a preternaturally long time haven’t they so we don’t know. There is a reason people run in fear through forests, and I don’t know it well enough to be so sure of myself and that is why this beet in front of me might, too, be some potent thing that I should care about its being and its feelings and the ramifications of my even eating it, since it would be the very first one I ever voluntary put anywhere near my mouth, so I had best know it is not malevolent, as I may always have suspected, this fruit of underworld growing in the dark cave of cold earth night that burrows through the ground looks awful and always tasted iron of the dirt it came from and I have long detested the sight and feel and taste of it, so why would I attempt to make it food for me, except that it is there and so is the juice machine and then there are the carrots and I could ignore the beet entirely if I so choose, but that would be caving in to the fear of that dark underground, so instead I will look up its effects of the ones who have eaten it before, on the internet, which is my potent tool against what is unknown and dark and evil and which tells me all I have to know, and maybe it will tell me I don’t have to go further and beets are just what I have thought them to be, so I will look, and yet I know someone has thought the beet a magic potent cure from time immemorial or no one would hav4e been the fool that ate them, and so is clam and oyster and all the other ghastly foods that some old farm or fisherman first thought to eat. How disgusting the first one must have said or thought in primal tongue unknown to history I have noted. How disgusting taking the slime of that into my mouth and chewing on it, how vile the concept, how hungry he she must have been to do that the first time, not knowing what it might do inside.

74 I don’t know what eating the body of an tire beet might do to me, and I have little to be gained from offending the body of the spirit of it or ancestors cousins or derivatives its screams might reach as its root and stem are ground by Mr. juicer or the knife I have to wield to get them there. 2/15/2006 6:48:23 AM in Boulder, Colorado My friend a former principal of schools revered for their teaching of the young sons and daughters of Boulder most intelligent and lauded folk told me her reluctance to let the wild imagination of the young go free in writing of horror and its roots and consequence last night. She said another school here had thought to make their boys the equal of girls in writing and needed some new way to make that happen and came upon the idea of letting boys write while stretched out somewhere and not given the structure of some topic just to ramble on about the things inside, and it scared her the result and yet the boys and their stories got the cover of Newsweek and the girls were being caught up with, and boys who had dangled participles and misspelled and generally failed to conv43ey what little they had to offer previously were now fluent and writing with the best of girls and she thought that was laudable by not the means by which it got there, just the end result, and so she said it should not be a general rule that boys are encourage probably to let what ever they thought was something to write down and girls should maybe be the ones to do that, so I am now worried that all the stuff inside that wants to come to visit pages of th3e real world should just stay in there, like dormant , seeming normal on the surface, there is nothing in there Effie with the head of gingerbread and all the quiet ones who must have something left inside to add to some talk somewhere and end it well before they start for fear that what there is to say is not to say and not to hear and has no worth in civil conversation and who makes up the rule that says that anyway. Now Ermine has put all those fears into the words he spills on song and some would say that’s wrong and many have, and Dylan and the Dylan’s before him, Thomas and the Pynchon’s and even Shakespeare and I know so few that should have stayed still and not told of us having been down so long it looked up to them and what kindness would there have been if that had not been said and then you’re dead so what cares a world when osmandias once the rules of all he surveyed is ashes in his urn and who can say eh should or shouldn’t have told us something before he went away for good, like the beet that sits on the counter waiting for me to grind it into millions of small bits of juice and pulp and I am cared to do it? Say it, be it, and go on from there Wednesday, February 15, 20062/15/2006 6:58:44 AM Insert date and time it says this machine that lets me babble on in Boulder Babylon in Boulder morning and inside the warmth of home and watching out the window to the cold and winter grey of an overcast day in February in the year of 2006 and the time is passing away into the meddle of the early morning that I began at 6: and haven’t gotten very far outside with or into even the breakfast of it and the beet still sits on the countertop and the carrots are waiting to turn into a juice and I will then partake of some old growth of them and I will become a vegetable in part and

75 take from the old that is in their being fibrous and intelligent I guess since I could not come up with a way of being them the carrot or the beet and what intelligent design there must have been for millions of them to be there underground and growing through the winter in the cold of some Nebraska plain and into the times of caves and bronze and Pliocene dwellers of the ancient times that first took the things from out the ground and turned them into food? I am the follower of that long chain and no one died of eating beets and carrots perhaps, but I had better check with the indexes that are there to root around in as I contemplate e the roots I want to turn into my food, and don’t. Its good for me, the juice of vegetable and fruit and the machine is throng and powerful and makes the solid bodies of the fruit and beet and carrot and the apple and the mango go in liquid that I am to believe is full of goodness full of grace a physical manifestation of the inward and spiritual nature of the thing, the juice of it, at last the essence I will drink of a beet, I guess. So, here is what I found about the beet….The beet is redder than the reddest thing there ever was and redder than the blackest thing and deeper and its stains the knife and counter where its body is cut into a reminder of its deepest red and blackness and its texture is an awful smooth and there is not a noise as it is rendered… and that is from the moment it began. The beet and how much more there is of it, I left it sitting on the counter and the knife and the marble slab its final resting place and juiced it, with the carrots just a little piece, a sliver and some of its leaves, and stem that looks like rhubarb, and I left it there amazed at how the red was so much black and deep and old and smelled of dirt and primal potency and it is very powerful the beet, I guess ,and here is what I learned about the beet from sources of all kinds and places I have never been, in search of knowledge of a beet? 15-Feb-062/15/2006 7:19 AM inserting date and time a different way of looking at it, all the knowledge of the bbet that is to come, and why not something useful ? I mixed the little bit of beet I had the courage to eviscerate with carrots for I have no fear of them and eat them often, and with water, since the juice of things is very strong and needs dilution and should be taken slowly since the sugar in the juice will make the sugar in the body go berserk and make the body take its own defense to inserting such into its streams and orifices and that should be avoided at all cost, so drinking them slowly juices, of all sorts, the sugar. Here he inserted the time and date for no good reason except that his computer had the capability to do so 7:22:45 AM Feb. 15, 06 and went to seek the references he’d promised earlier…. The first reference begins with The Worlds Healthiest Foods….then says in type a bit smaller and a lot darker… For this reason, individuals with already existing and untreated kidney or gallbladder problems may want to avoid eating beets. Since oxalates can also ... www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?pfriendly=1&tname=foodspice&dbid=49 - 17k –

76 And I know my fear have ground and doing this is wrong this eating beets and I am humbled by my innate wisdom and by the fact that the type has turned green before my very eyes a miracle, hallelujah ffrom the tiny beets have sprung a great tiding of joy and peace and manifesting in the world in type as green a vegetables, and now I should return to read the second sentence so as not to tarry here amidst the worshippers of tubers and their wisdom and the ageless beauty of their filthy misshapen dark and growing beings and their cousins, trees and such… Wednesday, February 15, 2006 07:28:37 and all the formats and all the colors of the world can be found inside and I can use them all as morning now progresses into lighter tones and color returns outside and there is green in winter here and maybe eating the juice of carrots ahs made me see more clearly just the sips I started with and that the glass that waits will bring me into the world of the plants that wait out there and trees and they are watching all their quiet just a ruse and they are waiting for us to join them in the grounds and that is where we go if they will let us, even those in capsules and in ashes, and in cities and it is time to learn more about the beet, so I return to google, what a fabulous way to waste the morning moments when there is cold outside and there is work to do and all the things that wait out there are arduous and boring and I just have to sit and move my fingers here and wait for the effects of carrots and the juice of beets and water to take me somewhere, and I digress here at 7:32:49 AM on the morning of Wednesday, February 15, 2006, as my daughter sleeps upstairs and my faithful dogs lie near me in the room where I am searching seriously for beets and their roots and derivation and the desirability of eating them and whether they have souls and should we be eating anything but air? Beets are a potherb related to Swiss chard and have been grown since ancient times. The Mediterranean region of southern Europe is where they are believed to have originated. Both the root and the leaves of beets are edible. The bright red pigment that gives beets their characteristic color is betacyanin. When some people eat beets, their bodies are unable to break down the betacyanin and as a result, their urine becomes pink. So says a website about Wisconsin which has special beets I suppose of different colors and other attributes that are germane to those who follow Wisconsin sorts of things. They know their vegetables there.

77 You may want to find out more about Wisconsin or their beets and I will let you know that here is where you go: http://www.wisconsinfreshproduce.org/vegfacts/Beets.htm I went to Wisconsin in a Suburban once upton a time and I lked it and so did my entire family and the families of those we brought with us, for it was a long way and it did not seem right to go it alone, from Boulder here, to Boulder City there and Boulder Junction and the lakes that surround it and it was a long way back and I talked about it on a website that I mae a long long time ago and I wil show you here what that might look like if oly I remembered how to find it, after all these years of not having been to Wisconsi, for some of us a long long way from here. ≥Thousand Five Hundred miles or so, more or less as crows fly as roads go, and it is a long straight line you follow through the vastness of Nebraska nad of Iowa and of Wisconsin to get there, to the Dairyman’s Country Club, in the place where there are more or less more Pike and other sorts of fish they have in Wisconsin than in any other place one would wish to go there, In Wisconsin. But back to beets because that is why you came here, beets are found in places far from Wisconsin and far from anywhere you have ever been The Mediterranean region of southern Europe is where they are believed to have originated, says the website of the Wiconsin vegetables, though you may well have been there and I don’t mean to impugn your travels or you haven’t in which case you have something to look forward to, traveling in the Mediteranean, but that is for another day, and another website, like http://resortinformation.com As usual, the people who write about Wisconsin vegetables have a great deal to say on this topic, and on the color and swettness of the beets of various kinds and colors, and for those of you lucky enough to be travling in the Meiteranean, there is an extra bonus waiting there for you…. Most of the beets grown in Wisconsin are red beets but you can find pink, purple, white, and yellow beets. Golden beets don’t bleed when cooked but don’t taste as sweet as red beets. White beets look like turnips and are even less sweet. Chioggia is a type of beet that originated from Italy and resembles ordinary table beets on the outside but have a red and white striped flesh internally. They are the sweetest beets available.

78 Ibid…ibid..ibid. I have always liked that word, and thanks for giving me the opportunity to use it freely here. So, on to another source of wisdom on beets… ; I brought a semi colon along from the last sentence, and I hope you don’t mind if it comes along. Sometimes they can be useful, like when you have to separate the time 08:07:14 from; the date, February 15, 2006. I just noticed it is a workday, so I will have to get along here… Beta vulgaris That about sums it up for me. The common beet. Vulgar, earthy. Full of the life and zest of ordinary things, like a common beet. http://wholehealthmd.com tells us the nutrients in a cup of beets.. Beets/1 cup diced cooked Calories75 Total fat (g) 0.3 Saturated fat (g) 0.1 Monounsaturated fat (g) 0.1 Polyunsaturated fat (g) 0.1 Dietary fiber (g) 3.4 Protein (g) 3 Carbohydrate (g) 17 Cholesterol (mg) 0 Sodium (mg) 131 Folate (mcg) 36 Manganese (mg) 0.6 Potassium (mg) 51 That is very little of anything to make one eat a cup of beets, it seems to me. But, the very careful people at wholeheathmd.com tell us that the leaves of the beet plant are even better than the beet itself: Beet Greens/1 cup cooked Calories 39 Total fat (g) 0.3 Saturated fat (g) 0 Monounsaturated fat (g) 0.1 Polyunsaturated fat (g) 0.1 Dietary fiber (g) 4.2 Protein (g) 4 Carbohydrate (g) 8 Cholesterol (mg) 0

79 Sodium (mg) 347 Beta-carotene (mg) Calcium (mg)164 Copper (mg) 0.4 Iron (mg) 2.7 Magnesium (mg) Manganese (mg) Potassium (mg)

4.4

98 0.7 1309

All that potassium, and who is going around eating the leaves off the beet plant. You can’t even find the leaves on a beet plant since the store cuts the beet from its stem to display it, so how do they even know that? 2/15/2006 10:25:51 AM You see, I have taken some time to contemplate the beet problem, and I am doing further research… There is a considerable body of research somewhere that tells us it is useful to make sure we eat well, sleep well, and exercise, avoid overeating, avoid protracted periods of exposure to direct sunlight, refrain from the practice of lighting vegetable matter to inhale the resulting smoke, and take a number of vitamins and nutritional supplements, to wit, The Antioxidant Cocktail: Vitamin C and Vitamin E, with Coenzyme Q10, alpha-lipoic acid and its sidekick acetyl l-carnitine, and glutathione, with a bit a selenium to support the major players. The Nervous System Enhancer A suitable mixture of B Vitamins The Antiaging Tickler to enhance the pituitary gland output of human growth hormone by adding chained amino acids. This is a trick best left to the formulators of products such as Somalife and others. The color of a beet inside is frightening intense, so red purple black, and it loses its luster when the inside dries, like it did when I left the carcass of the beet I am turning slowly into juice, to rest in the sink. I took the leaves and sliced another couple small sections of the beet before I consigned the whole thing to the garbage disposal. The color is important. The color of the beet is from the pigment the Wisconsin people quoted above call “betacyanin”. There is not a lot said about betacyanin, but its cousin, “anthocyanin” seems to be in play. There is a good deal said about anthocyanins at http://wholehealthmd.com , and it goes kind of like this…. “Anthocyanins are naturally occurring compounds that impart color to fruit, vegetables, and plants. Derived from two Greek words meaning plant and blue, anthocyanins are the pigments that make blueberries blue, raspberries red, and are thought to play a major role in the high antioxidant activity levels observed in

80 red and blue fruits and vegetables. Anthocyanins are also largely responsible for the red coloring of buds and young shoots and the purple and purple-red colors of autumn leaves. Close to 300 anthocyanins have been discovered. Each fruit and vegetable has its own anthocyanin profile, providing a distinct "fingerprint." Red wine, for example, contains over 15 anthocyanin monomers (type of chemical compound), the varying proportions of which, depending on the type of grape, establish the various shades of the wine's color. Researchers are attempting to identify the specific bioactivity of each anthocyanin in relation to human health. Variation in pigment results from different degrees of acidity and alkalinity. Intense light and low temperatures favor the development of anthocyanin pigments. All plant materials contain various pigments, some of which change color as the pH of the plant tissue is changed (for example, by the addition of vinegar or other acids while cooking or processing). An average anthocyanin is red in acid, violet in neutral, and blue in alkaline solution. In fact, when cooking a food that is red, such as red cabbage, it may be helpful to add an acidic substance such as vinegar (or tomato juice or lemon juice) to prevent the food from turning purple.” See what you can learn while you are whiling away a morning being terrified of the vulgar beet, on a common sort of dreary day in February. It is the ides of February, I suppose, the 15th day, or, maybe, since this is a shortened month, the ides would have been a couple of days ago, but it is still cold outside and there is work to do, so I will do this to avoid it. 2/15/2006 10:53:30 AM Several seconds actually elapsed between the impulse to place a time stamp there and the actuality. The shadow between the act and the reality, the time it took me to find the proper icon and the style that seemed to suit the moment, this long ago…2/15/2006 10:54:48 AM and a little more to compensate for my reaction time..10:54:48 minus 10:53:30, a span of 42 seconds when my mind was racing to come up with something cute to fill that aching blank white future that lies ahead of any writer working in English. Sometime it would be fun to go up the page, or right to left. The beet goes on. I have made a second cup of the mixture of beet and beet leaves and beet stems and green onions and strawberry and carrot that I found as I randomly picked my way through the refrigerator. They were the only appropriate ingredients, along with a little Worcestershire Sauce, but for the apples and the grapefruits and lemons and limes that seemed to call for another occasion, and Nina the house cleanah came by after I had run these ingredients through the juice machine and she offered to clean the stainless steel beast, so I reluctantly gave her the opportunity and took it upon myself to come learn more about the beet I eat. 2.15.2006 11:01:36 AM “Widely distributed among flowers, fruits, and vegetables, anthocyanins belong to a group of plant compounds called flavonoids. Flavonoids are a subclass of plant

81 polyphenols that may have antioxidant abilities and are being studied for their anticancer potential. Currently under investigation for their ability to inhibit LDL (the "bad") cholesterol, prevent blood clotting, and defend cells against dangerous carcinogens, anthocyanins may prove to be significant compounds in human health.” It is another quote from http://wholeheathmd.com who seem to be a fount of wisdom when it comes to plant pigmentation. Wholehealthmd is a product of Whole Health and Rebus, Inc.. They write health newsletters that other people brand. http://medicalcomputer.com is mine.