Graham cracker Q&A, soup, white vinegar

Sunday 10/4/26

Q: Do you think you eat an average amount of graham crackers compared to other people, an above average amount, or less than average?

A: This is a good question. I believe the average age is thirty-seven. At least it was a few years ago. There are people who are no years old and people who are 100-years-old, but late thirties is the overall average. I don't believe, of course, in age or think about as almost everyone else does.

I find it to be much more malleable. I believe in choices and attitude. Movement, energy, aims. Approach. Mindset. A commitment to going up stairs--metaphorically (literally also helps)--rather than down them. One person at forty-five is sixty-five and another is twenty-five, physically speaking. It's often up to them.

Mentally one can always be the cognitive equivalent of an athlete in mid-season form if that's what they wish to be and take the necessary measures. They don't, of course. They prefer to say this other factor/force is the reason for why they are as they are and it's not like you can do anything about it.

I don't think a thirty-seven-year-old would eat many, if any, graham crackers. The adults who eat them are, I'd think, over seventy. Graham crackers are mostly eaten by children. Do those children eat enough graham crackers that if you ate a box of them a year you'd have eaten less than an average amount?

I think I eat less graham crackers than average. Or that was my first reaction yesterday, anyway, when I posed this question to myself. But I may eat two boxes a year. (And I'm not opposed to more.) That seems like it could be a significantly greater amount than most adults. Maybe a very high percentage of adults. I could, comparatively, be a graham cracker glutton, adult-wise. I have little confidence in my ability to correctly answer this question.

Graham crackers make this a harder exercise than with other foods. For instance, do you think you eat more or less red meat on average than other people? I know I eat less than average because I eat none. Leafy greens? Cake? Apples? Cheese? Do you drink more or less beer than the average person? Wine? Soda? Water?

We can all make educated guesses regarding them that are likely to be close to the mark (to ourselves, anyway; whether we'd be truthful in answering someone else is, as so often the case, a different matter). But graham crackers? If you eat any, this will be hard to determine.

Soups seem like they'd appeal to me. They're often associated with autumn. The days grow colder and shorter, one has the hearty soup. But I don't eat soup. Every now and again when I'm at Trader Joe's, I consider doing so and inspect what they have on offer in the soup section. This entails reading the ingredients on the back of the cartons. They're all so high in sodium. Even the ones with considerably less. And the one's with more--well, there's a lot of more there.

Returning from running stairs on Friday, I drank an entire liter of ice hibiscus tea. I need to make sure to consistently drink my three cups every day. As with stretching, this is something with which I get lax. Yesterday I drank 46 ounces of orange juice. I don't have orange juice often. I also never clean my water bottles. The dishwasher hasn't worked in many years. Well over a decade. I didn't give much thought to the water bottles.

Then I read something the other day about harmful bacteria and I thought, "Oh, no, my water bottles must be atop the league leaderboard there," and got some white vinegar. I dumped in the whole bottle, then filled the rest of the water bottle with water and let that soak for a day. Next I poured the mixture into another water bottle and then another the day after. I filled the bottles with soap and water once the vinegar had been poured out and left them to soak some more. I have one more to go--this smaller water bottle my sister got me quite a few birthdays ago that keeps the water colder longer.

Most water bottles that I see in Boston--and there are so many people lugging them about--are this variety, but bigger. They seem melodramatic to me but that is perhaps reflective of a deficiency of mine. For instance, maybe that's the only reliable way they can drink enough while at work. Then again, my sense is that the people who go around with these large bottles are apt to take them everywhere as one takes the canteen through the desert in Technicolor Westerns.

My bottles look clear and clean now while bearing the scratches of life from their time in this place in which it is hard to live. A number of my water bottles are from the Cape Pond Ice Company in Gloucester. I got them there with Molly. They are painful for me to look at. Why do I keep them, you may ask? I have limited money. I have to keep things many would throw out. Also, each time I see them I am reminded to fight. Or try to. In order to get back to where I want to be. It hurts me, too, though. Like a blow. But it's also as if there isn't any relief ever anyway, so it's just more raindrops in a storm.

(A calendar from 2012 hangs in my bathroom. The year Molly left. The year the house in Rockport was gone. December 2012 is the page that shows. I flipped it over for a few months. Then I just couldn't do it anymore. The corners are all curled. If they find me dead here, people will see that and think, "Jesus Christ, what place did this guy go to, how much pain was he in?" I look like such a suicide. I bear the signs. Am dressed in those clothes. Should I call them cerements? I know that. No one else sees it. They would if I saw people and people saw me. I am candid in these pages. But so few read. And basically no one is going to read anything that they don't think millions of people, or generations, hold up and tout as "great" and "make famous," and even then they aren't reading, and the ones who do in the turn-some-pages-over sense usually aren't even really reading either. They're doing something else, often so they can post that they did this thing they didn't really do so much as look at some/the words, which isn't the same as reading.)

I have never had homemade graham crackers. Are they much better? How much range can there really be with graham crackers? I'm not being cynical, just curious. I feel like I'd have a hard time answering this question accurately as well. I could see homemade graham crackers making for an eye-opening experience as to the otherwise hidden possibilities of graham crackers, or producing an effect of, "Graham crackers are graham crackers and that's what these are."