Filling out paperwork at a hospital has a unique way of making a person thankful for all the illnesses he doesn’t have, and for how moderate my use of drugs, alcohol, and other things is. I’m practically an ascetic by the outer boundaries of this intake form. I can’t tell if that makes me feel good about myself or bad about all of the poor unfortunate souls who have to check far more boxes than I do.

I recall a lot time ago Jack was in Vietnam,

We were a lot younger and I asked him if there were any cute girls there. He essentially explained that abject poverty had a way of draining the beauty from a population.

Poverty has a way of doing a lot of things, from draining beauty to inflicting untold illness. Not just because things go untreated, but because we are being endlessly poisoned by things for the sake of affordability, and more often profit.

The world is an expensive place to be in well, unless you are an out and out ascetic, and most people don’t want to be ascetics. I’m not rich, though I won’t say “by any means,” because by many means, I am. But to me I’m not. Rich enough to know better, but not enough to comfortably afford the things that demands of me in terms of diet and lifestyle

The ascetic life of the church is an obvious and beautiful answer to how we might navigate not having the things we want, and not wanting the things we shouldn’t. Better to go hungry than eat poison food dye and wear poison underpants.