Breathing is Overrated

Breathing is Overrated

I have recently come to recognize that you have to breathe to stay alive. That may strike you as an obvious statement, but I think it deserves some reflection. Doesn’t it strike you as a little strange that Mother Nature endowed us with this powerful cerebellum that’s capable of relatively advance reasoning. It’s capable of all sorts of great things. It can invent important breakthrough stuff. It can conjure great and elaborate stories with pathos and good humor. It can remember intricate details about otherwise irrelevant things. And yet, if you stop sucking in air for more than about five minutes, there is nothing that elaborate brain can do for you. In fact, your cerebellum has nothing to do with the function of breathing. You can’t think your way into this one. Thinking does nothing but get in the way of breathing.

By now you may be wondering where I am wandering with this. Today was cactus planting day at Casa Moonstruck. Over the past few days I had accumulated fifty-two cacti of various sorts from three different nurseries. This was all because the cactus guy from the local specialty cactus nursery pissed Kim off. I noticed he was a bit of a jerk. The kind of jerk that says things like, “so, let me see if I get this right….you want me to tell you what sort of plants you should buy from me?” Is that so strange if you know too little about cacti? I do now have four books on cacti and succulents, but I am a far away from figuring out how to turn that information into actionable purchasing and planting decisions for my cactus garden. But it wasn’t this spiky arrogance that put Kim off. It was the fact that Facebook’s personalization and networking functionality took her phone’s knowledge of Cactus Guy’s number and fed her an invitation to friend him on Facebook. It is a testament to social networking that she accepted, only to find that Cactus Guy was not only way too red for her liking, but he was actually grossly abusive in his depiction of what Mitch McConnell should be allowed to do to Michelle Obama. That is not someone with whom she wants us to do commerce.

Anyway, my alternative approach to my cactus shortage was to buy these fifty-two prickly plants and then find someone to plant them. You may recall that I hired a Mexican by the name of Gildardo last week for what turned out to be all five working days. He seemed to like my terms of service (as you can imagine, as a bleeding liberal, I tend to overpay immigrants for their work). My regular landscaping guy, who has worked for brother-in-law Jeff for twenty years, had suddenly gone incommunicado. His phone is being answered by someone we don’t recognize and we have no other way to contacting him unless we literally see him on the street. Thant left me with fifty-two reasons to call Gildardo, who was able to come over today. Actually, he has no car, so he needs to be picked up, which Handy Brad did for me. Handy Brad has become my liaison to the Mexican labor market, which is funny because I have to do all the Spanish language work for him. Today I had to tell Gildardo that Handy Brad had a friend that wants to hire him for a day next week. I guess that makes me an intermediary of sorts (the unpaid type) in the illegal immigrant black market. Right on!

So when Gildardo came over with Handy Brad at 7:15am I went down and directed his attention to the tasks as I envisioned them for him for the day. I had already set out the cacti in the spots where I wanted them to supplement our existing award-winning cactus garden (as inherited from the previous owner eight years ago.). I had bought planting soil (Ocean & Forrest Mix, as advised by Jeff), a huge but light bag of vermiculite (also advised by Jeff) and another huge bag of perlite pumice (you guessed it, under advisement of Jeff). I also bought ten bags of cedar mulch after consultation with Handy Brad on the pros and cons of rocks or mulch to tidy up the cactus beds. Handy Brad convinced me that rocks would throw off too much heat, cost more and be harder to install (Handy Brad is very tired of my rock fetish). I felt fully prepared for cactus planting. But as Gildardo started to work, I looked at the stack of bags and made a command decision that I was way short on mulch. My three bags of soil were backed-up by two double bags of extra soil I had stockpiled last week, so that was not a problem. Since I barely know what vermiculite and perlite do, I figured a little more or less in the mix would be fine as it was. Off I went to Grangetto’s commercial gardening supply company (yes, recommended by Jeff).

I operate with great self-confidence in the professional landscaping arena these days so I sauntered in and ordered a dozen bags of cedar mulch and noticed some nice bark near the check-out (I guess bark at a landscaping store is like a Slim Jim meat stick in a bodega). I had to have six of those for specific use as yet unknown. But I do know that bark is often hard to come by in late summer so I jumped on it. By the time the Grangetto guys loaded up my Mercedes SUV, those eighteen bags occupied all of the non-front-seat space in the car. It was literally stacked up right behind me. And here’s the thing, mulch and bark may be totally organic, but however they process it and bag it, it has a particulate aspect to it that makes the air in the car on a hot day with air conditioning on get a little irritating to the bronchial tubes.

By the time I got home with my load of landscaping materials, I was coughing and wheezing ever so slightly. I unloaded the car with Gildardo’s help and then I watched Gildardo, who had finished planting all fifty-two cacti in five hours. That’s six minutes per cactus. I watched how he did it and the man knows how to plant stuff. I know because I worked at the Cornell Plantations for two summers in college and have planted my share of stuff and watched old Italian pros do it. Gildardo knows all the tricks and I suspect my cacti are off to a good start thanks to his skill, Jeff’s knowledge and Grangetto’s goods. For my part, I had given of my lungs by transporting what I think should be deemed hazardous materials. It’s ten hours later and I am still clearing my throat occasionally.

I had a COVID test yesterday. My second one done by the folks at Cal Fire. Despite telling me the results would take 3-5 business days, I got my email today with the negative indication. That is testament to the fact that Kim and I are more or less following safe COVID protocol and not venturing forth too far from our hilltop. Meanwhile, I heard today that Jeff is still suffering from his bout with Pneumonia. He is having a hard time breathing, but does not want to go to a hospital where he might be exposed to COVID with greater probability. He has taken the course of antibiotics prescribed to him, so he is unclear what to do except wait it out. I imagine to him, breathing is not such a trivial issue as I have written about. These days between COVID with its ventilators, Jeff with his lung fluids and my car with its mulch mist, I am beginning to think that breathing might be getting to be too difficult. I’m off to bed now, but I realize that I use a CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) machine to sleep. I have done so for twenty-seven years…every single night. It makes a difference and I might not be alive today if the machine didn’t exist (the long-term impact is to the heart and lungs if you have breathing obstructions due to soft pallet tissue that interfere’s with your breathing while sleeping). I wish there was such an easy solution for Jeff or COVID patients (ventilators are like CPAP’s, but much more invasive) because the ease of breathing is overrated. It’s hard, and the last time I checked, few things matter more, day-in and day-out.