To make a long story short, I stopped eating grains, legumes, processed dairy and sugar products with an aim to no longer suppress my immune system or encourage systemic inflammation.  In their place, I’ve started eating lots and lots of leafy greens, avocados, low glycemic-index fruits, roasted almonds, chia seeds, raw cacao nibs, coconut products (unsweetened), sardines and pumpkin seeds, along with local/organic eggs, beef, bee pollen and a fair share of yerba mate as my beverage of choice.  The idea is to consume an abundance of nutrients (vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, healthy fat, protein, etc…) while making a concerted effort to avoid toxins, ineffecient/quick-burning energy sources and foods with minimal/sub-optimal nutrient content.  In so doing, I have switched my metabolism around to depend on healthy fats for energy (long-lasting, stable energy in lieu of the simple carbohydrate rushes) and have quite clearly turned certain undesirable genes off while turning other quite desirable genes on!   This dietary philosophy has many names, from paleolithic to caveman, and is based on the evidence found by evolutionary biologists/paleontologists that we were much more comprehensively healthy and without the illnesses we now consider commonplace before the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago.  Before you say it, no, people did not only make it to age 30.  That is a median age based on higher infant mortality and childbirth-related deaths.  You were also much more likely to die if you were, say, fatally injured.  But our ancestors frequently lived into their 80s, sometimes even their 90s, so long as they didn’t die from one of the aforementioned reasons.  The other half of this lifestyle entails a comprehensive fitness plan based on the notion and goal of functional and versatile fitness in lieu of mass or psycho-endurance.  If you’re at all curious, since this has more or less saved my life and has profound implications for anybody suffering from just about anything, head to Mark’s Daily Apple.  It’s a great resource and Mark Sisson truly wants us all to be well.  He considers this lifestyle an approximation of our primal ancestors’ nutritional and physical tendencies.

In other news, I recorded the last two years of Redbird shows here at Cafe Carpe and have since mixed them down.  If you’re unfamiliar with Redbird, they’re a group of friends/songwriters that get together every once in awhile to share songs and be merry.  The group is comprised of songwriters/musicians Peter Mulvey, Jeffrey Foucault, Kris Delmhorst and David Goodrich.  With any luck, they’ll be putting out another record after sorting through the recordings and collectively choosing the cream of the crop.  This is exciting to me for a couple of reasons: One, there’s some really great stuff in there that people need to hear and vibe on.  Two, I’ll have an engineering credit on a proper release with broad appeal!  Hallelujah!  If you’re itching for a taste of what you’re in store for, I provided the sound for a video produced by Mindpool Live, which was filmed and recorded at Cafe Carpe the afternoon before one of December’s shows.  Check it out!

Lastly, I’ve been playing bass and providing my limited (but potentially useful?) wisdom in a local band called So So Radio.  A nice, young couple had been coming into the Carpe for coffee on a regular basis and we eventually got around to talking music.  Turns out Sam (of Sam and Tami) is a drummer.  His band was going through a lineup change and we thought it’d be fun to play a few tunes some night and see what happens.  I was also secretly interested in seeing if Sam might be a good fit for some of my recording endeavours.  I went out to his house one night, met Ryan and strapped on my recently tuned-up viola bass.  Things went well and I decided to help them make the record they wanted to make.  We’ve mostly finished the bass/drum tracks and are now ready to start tracking everything else.  I’ll be engineering from here on and out and we’re going to try and mix what we can with my rig before heading back to the studio for final mixing/mastering touches.  It’s nice to have an excuse to play my bass a little more regularly, and it’s also quite nice to play with dedicated and upstanding chaps.

That’s my story.  I promise I’ll get back to work on my own deal again soon and appreciate your patience (if I haven’t worn it all out yet).  It was getting to the point where I just didn’t have the energy or focus to record.  But that’s all changing.  Seriously!  Satchel out.

I awoke this morning to an even more dazzling sight, with the tree limbs of the woods that surround me all iced with a good inch or two of wet, sticky snow.  This is one of my favorite winter scenes of all and usually happens only once or twice in a season.  It puts me in the mood for a warm beverage and some warm tones, like those of my friend David Goodrich’s song “Snowed In”, which is a fitting piece on a day like this, for obvious reasons.  If you have a moment, I posted a version of Bob Dylan’s “I Threw It All Away” on my youtube channel yesterday.  Be sure to turn the sound on the player down a bit to avoid the digital distortion I somehow missed.  It’s pretty good, otherwise.  Well, I’m off to brew something up for myself.  All the best to anyone who might be reading this, and be careful out there, midwesterners!

SNOWED IN

And then what?  Like millions of Americans, I have no insurance.  On top of that, I have a pre-exisiting condition that most insurance policies won’t cover, meaning  insurance could potentially be useful in covering the  expense of  some unforeseen disaster (if they didn’t cop out using one of their many loopholes), but would pay not a dime towards my pursuit of addressing the problems I already have.  Gee… that’s not such a good deal!    I also missed the boat on Wisconsin’s Badger Care, which I had trouble signing up for when I tried via the web and was too stubborn to wait an hour and a half to do by phone.  Absolutely my fault in the end, but as it wouldn’t have covered much of what I need it most for, I’m not particularly devastated.

Between a cyst in my bladder wall which survived two surgical attempts at its draining, a chronically inflamed and varyingly painful to excruciating epididymis which has plagued me, my back and, most importantly, my nuts for twelve years now, along with a rough, disheartening stretch of many years in my non-existant love life, I have not been well.  I did my best to cope with these ailments, but they slowly, yet ceaselessly and systematically destroyed my overall health and vitality over the last decade.  With no insurance, urologists mystified about the origin of my condition and stumped on how to address it and blood tests that cause no alarm (at least, not if read only on the basis of whether or not you’re in “normal range”, which leaves room for all kinds of problems and merely rules out the worst of possibilities), I knew that I needed to seek out alternative, self-empowered methods and treatments that could dramatically improve the health of my organism and its systems.  In the last two months, I have changed my walking gait, become an avid barefoot runner, altered my posture, improved my diet immensely by eating more greens, nuts, legumes and fruit, along with lots of chia seed and fermented cod liver oil (mostly for a good source of vitamin D, aimed at my sadness, stress and dermatitis)… and started a quantum medicine treatment with NutriEnergetics, which aims to fix the control systems which regulate (or, if sick, clearly fail to regulate) healthy biochemical processes in our bodies.  This treatment is responsible for the newfound sense of vitality that has given me the hope I can actually get better.  And as a I get better both emotionally and physically, my musical focus and stamina improve as well…

Speaking of which, there have been recent developments that may land me in a proper studio, which is very exciting.  In the meantime, I owe y’all some videos of the songs I’m working on.  It’s the least I can do, considering there are only two songs on this site right now.  I’m sorry.

All of this aside, the sub-continentals kicked some major ass last night and sounded great in our room!  I asked John if he knew of anyone who could help me out with some new recordings on the cheap and he told me that he’d be happy to do it.  Just like that!  Sieger has been a strong supporter of mine for a long time now, despite my unconventional “career tactics”, and I can’t seem to knock the sense back into him.  What is he thinking, getting behind a fool like me?!  In all seriouness, from what I’ve gathered in my conversations with him, we’re quite like-minded when it comes to music and songwriting.  We don’t write similar songs, but we treat them with the same care.  As such, I can’t imagine this experiment failing to yield positive results.  This means new songs, people!  I’m actually going to get some of these little bastards out of my head and, with any luck, into yours!  Cheers, y’all (clink)!  I’m off to knead a sore shoulder.

In other news, I’m going to be helping my good pal Jeremy Pinc in the recording of a new batch of songs, starting this weekend.  While he is first and foremost a visual artist, he has been dabbling in the writing of songs for many a year now.  This should be fun.

Again, many thanks to Steve Tesmer for helping me make this the site I want it to be.  He and I have lots of good ideas to improve it further.  To anyone reading this admittedly dull verbage, thank you for stopping by, and may your evening be merry.  Cheers!