Hope it was a Happy Labor Day. I celebrated my paid holiday by staying home and doing not much of anything apart from reading and watching most of the fifth season of The West Wing on DVD. Yesterday I had a follow up doctor’s appointment. My blood pressure is improved, though still too high and they are starting me on a statin drug and a second BP medicine, though I will not be able to fill the scrips and start taking them until pay day on Thursday.

Meanwhile an e-mail from Earthlink indicates that our phone service will be switched over and our DSL turned on on September 10th, which we are all looking forward to.

Homo Domesticus is one of Ron’s selections that I ended up reading as well. David Valdes Greenwood, a writer and writing teacher in the Boston area has penned a memoir of his marriage to his husband, Jason and their adoption of a daughter, Lily. The writing is quite funny at times, though Ron seemed to laugh out loud at it rather more than I did. It was nice to read a first person account of one of the few legal gay marriages, though frankly I got the impression that even if I were still living in Boston (shudder) this is not a couple I would care to hang out with. They are of a younger generation who talk a great deal about being “sex positive” but seem to have very little actual sex. They also seem to be the sort of new parents who talk of little other than their new baby, which is really only interesting to others in the same circumstance. Half-heartedly recommended for some of the humor and the historical value.

I’m not quite sure how I managed to previously miss reading Fast Food Nation, which was published several years ago, though I believe I may have confused it with a book I read about the (lack of) nutrition in fast food. While this book certainly did talk a great deal about the poor nutritional value of fast food and the resultant world wide impact on health, it is a thorough examination of the subject including a detailed history of the industry and a behind the scenes look at how the fast food industry has transformed other industries such as meat packing and potato farming. The chapter detailing the author’s visit to a slaughterhouse was almost enough to dissuade me from ever eating another hamburger. This book was especially timely for me in that Ron and I have been attempting to eat more along South Beach Diet lines since I have resumed treatment for diabetes and are indeed avoiding fast food.

In the course of checking in and shelving books at work I frequently come across slim, hardcover Young Adult titles devoted to some drug or another and am just as frequently appalled by the propagandist “Reefer Madness” tone these books invariably seem to adopt. So I was pleasantly surprised at the genuinely balanced treatment this YA title brings to the highly emotional and controversial issue of Legalizing Drugs.

I have long been thoroughly convinced that the “War On Drugs” is a misguided mistake (look at how well alcohol prohibition worked out in the 1920’s) largely pursued by crass politicians (who can never seem to keep their own kids from trying drugs) and implemented by police, lawyers and “treatment” providers who are pursuing their own economic benefits rather the oft-repeated non-sense about “protecting the children”.

None of the reporting about the negative consequences of pursuing this “war”, nor the arguments and activism of legalization proponents was news to me, but I was very impressed by Meryl Loonin’s ability to explain the reasoning and motivations of the drug war proponents who are not economically benefiting from the “war” which had previously quite escaped me. If nothing else, having read this book will serve me well the next time I find myself in one of those utterly exasperating arguments that inevitably can be reduced to the logical fallacy “drugs are bad because they are illegal and drugs are illegal because they are bad”.

(Climbing down from my soap box and hoping the DEA won’t be soon knocking at my door to punish my perfidy in believing that questions of what drugs people take should be a matter for individuals and their doctors and that the police truly have more important things to do.)