Blogging the Cleanse #4: Suddenly, I Feel Like Dancing

            I mean, I guess you can get used to anything.  Dukkha day is over, and I feel fine; this is the Cleanse Feeling that the nutrition fanatics talk about.  Sure, my belly feels hungry, but I'm so used to that it's just part of the scenery.  My energy is up, my mood is good, and if I can't multitask all that well — so much the better, I hate multitasking anyway.  It's really a little… strange.

            And it's not that I've been sitting in bed all day.  Today the new print editions of Zeek arrived at our office, and I and four other members of my staff sorted magazines, stuck on mailing labels, and even carted the things to the post office.  I got a haircut, saw the film "Year of the Dog" (if you liked 'You, Me, and Everyone You Know, see it), drafted a contract for my software company, even took some time to have a lengthy conversation with a colleague about the American Jewish inability to sustain a non-hysterical dialogue about Israeli politics.  No more dehydration, and no real cravings. 

            I am remarkably susceptible to appetite; just a whiff of a bakery, or, this afternoon, finding a sushi menu stuck in my mailbox, is enough to start me drooling Homer-Simpson-style.  It's kind of amusing to watch.  Because I was in the closet, I was never that horny as a teenager, and feel like this is my opportunity to get instantly aroused at the slightest provocation.  It is a kind of deliciousness.

            What I thought I'd blog about today, before I realized that my spooky, Jack Lalainesque energy was the real subject, was about the great and perennial question: To Colonic or Not To Colonic.  For those of you blissfully not in the know, "Colonic" is short for a colonic irrigation — basically, paying someone to stick a large tube up your rectum (did you know that thesaurus.com has no entries for "anus" or "rectum" — what, are they policing the world against giggling twelve year old boys?) and fill your colon with saline solution (or coffee, or wheatgrass, or one of a large variety of liquids).  It's a cleanse, all right; it washes the insides right out.

            I was game.  I'd never done one before, but like Hillel said, if not now…  But then I met a doctor who warned me against forcing valves meant to open one way to open another way.  "If one valve breaks, none of them will function properly." 
I thought of the Asher Yatzar prayer — "Blessed are you God, who created in the human being many openings and many holes… If one of them did not open or close properly, we could not exist even for a moment." — and of the Hippocratic oath to "first, do no harm" — and chickened out.  Besides, this morning's Salt Water Flush was quite, er, cleaning on its own.  (Go ahead, reader: try drinking 1 quart of lukewarm water with 2 teaspoons of salt dissolved in it, and see what happens. Advice: stay near a toilet.)  So — no Colonic for me.

            Still, I can't help feeling that I'm not Maximizing My Cleanse by not doing one.    Who knows, maybe I will tomorrow.  But part of what's enabled me to do this in the first place has been the knowledge that I'm not hurting myself, and that I can stop at any time.  What if Colonics really are bad for you?  Then again, not even quackwatch.org mentioned my doctor-friend's Valve theory — only a few cases of disreputable practitioners and dirty machines (yecch).  Will I feel like I didn't go the full monty because I didn't have a nurse stick a tube up my tuchis?  Aren't there more important things to worry about?

            Stay tuned.