They are all financial geniuses, venture capitalists, and fund managers. Money appears from nowhere solely as a result of American ingenuity and perseverance.  The stock market goes up and up.  Prices rise, inflation hits double digits and factories turn out products faster than ever before.  We are happy says the administration and the public must be happy too.  Prosperity, propinquity, altruism, and Americanism abound.  Politicians shout, “We will make America great again.”   Their opponents propose broader subsidies and the lifting of tariffs.  The judicial wing, the third safeguard of our democracy concurs with the machination, because the shakers and movers are smart and we are not and where is the capitol going?  Only a computer can trace it nowadays.

A seasoned mathematician once said, “Figures do not lie but liars figure.”  And they are right all of the time.  This is the season for derivative instruments, manipulation, and investment to modulate the business cycle for everyone’s good of course.  

The economic cycle as proposed by Adam Smith, and pixelated by Malthus is a sine wave phenomenon with a minimum and maximum as value and an ordinate Y as time.  The economic cycle, no matter its origin, cause, or impetus is real and occurs periodically, Mathematically, the curve looks like a bimodal parabola with roots of x squared and negative x squared on a long-time line.  Mathematically, this can be seen as y = x squared + b for the positive part of the curve. when sample size approaches infinity, it becomes a bell curve. Taking the Newtonian first derivative of the function gives the minimum and maximum of the curve at a given time. Set the result to 0,1,-1 and extrapolate.  The second derivative yields the point of inflection where the positive parabola becomes a negative parabola at point B+X.   When an investment analyst plots the economic curve of a product or corporation, they can estimate the curve given by the plot and when introduced into a computer with a graphing application, he or she can deduce the formula given by the curve.   The first derivative yields the high and low points of net income or stock value.   The second derivative yields the time when the curve becomes positive or negative.  With some historical data, an investor can buy and sell stocks or bonds on margin concerning the first derivative of the function.   In essence, he or she can predict the future value of an investment instrument and buy and sell at appropriate moments to make a profit.  Using derivative instruments, an investor can predict if a stock, bond, or market will rise or fall and he or she can buy or sell instruments poignantly and succinctly, this means getting profit where there is none and dumping loss on unsuspecting investors.  The continuing manipulation of the economic cycle over time slowly drives up prices and the economic cycle creeps up the ordinate scale.   Remember when the stock market was 11000?  Now it is 45000.   Are factories generating a greater income or profit on product or are we seeing merely mathematical skullduggery resulting in price increases and inflation?

Derivative instruments and investing should be illegal.   Insider trading is illegal.  Why not derivative instruments?  This author feels the public is not aware of what bright mathematicians are doing to milk the economy and generate capital where there is no capital to generate.  Give them an inch and they take a mile and man will always figure out how to get blood from a stone.  This is the American way, I guess.  Why can’t we return to “and to this republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all”?

The current administration mandates meat for the subsistence of Americans.  They claim that meat eaters are bigger, faster, and smarter than vegetarians.  At the same time, the administration asserts that livestock produce methane which increases temperature and climate change, and is an inefficient source of food because they consume grain that is incompatible with human health because it is full of carbohydrates.   Climate change and burning fossil fuels so people have swimming pools, vacation chateaus in Geneva, and an all-electric car.  Egad, how thrifty they are.  What is real what is true and what is verified?  

Carbohydrates, present in long chains in grain slowly metabolize through breaking alpha 1-4 glycolytic sequences to become glucose which by the action of insulin or exercise enter the somatic musculature.  The liver does not utilize insulin.   Grain is mostly roughage, called phytins that soak up cholesterol and bile which are the main perpetrators of chronic atherosclerosis.  Rice is easily stored, and easy to cook but lacks the B vitamin thiamine.  Corn must be ground, doesn’t make bread, grows best where it is hot and wet, and is deficient in the B vitamin Niacin.  Wheat grows best in temperate climates, and has the most protein of all the grains but must be ground, Wheat makes good bread and the Romans switched to wheat from corn because soldiers seemed to be better on it.  Oats contain leguminous protein and grow in cold climates and can be added to wheat.  There are other grains but they are not as important.  Why does the current medical establishment say grains ruin glucose tolerance and should be used sparingly and mainly fed to animals so they can harvest meat?   Can they burn methane for energy yet?  Are we energy efficient?

We the people want the truth.  We the people want the administration to be accountable for their actions.  This stupid batch of religious outcasts who formed colonies in the new world and coexisted with the indigenous people formed God’s country and we are real.  The people must mix the grains.

Cycle one is for the children of the United States.  They are our gift, our future, our beauty, and our posterity.   We need to feed them adequately so they can be smarter and better than us.  In the first seven years of life, the brain grows and matures to adult dimensions, and it is these first seven years that are critical for our future.  To grow the brain needs meat and essential fats so it can grow and learn and become what we read about and see in the movies.  As a nation, as a people, the government should establish a subsidy for all children to get at least one hamburger a day, every day until they are seven.  Any fast-food franchise will do and the closest one to the public school should provide government-subsidized nutrition for our beautiful things.  Hamburgers and milkshakes for all our children because we love them.

By adolescence, the body grows to about seventy percent of adult height and weight and nutrition is not as critical.   Carbohydrates will do and they with plant oil provide all the necessary calories for ample growth and maturation.  Bread is the staff of life and leavened grain is available and easy and a lone soul can live on it.  Once a human being becomes an adult nutrition is not as critical and he or she does not need a highly saturated, cholesterol-laden burden, with a baked potato and sour cream.  Only soldiers and athletes need extra protein.

Cycle two is for us, the workers, the living entities that maintain the infrastructure, the integrity, and the culture of the United States of America.  The second cycle consists of grain with dairy, eggs, and fish.  In the north where rain abounds and pastures open for grazing, milk lactalbumin and its products synergize with wheat and oats to give energy and the abundance that the people need and deserve.   In the southern regions of continental North America, corn and rice grow to their fullest, birds thrive in dry and hot weather, and egg albumin provides the highest biologically available serving of the eight essential amino acids.   Fish is there and will always be but people don’t like the smell of fish, and it is full of parasites, particularly the broad tapeworm, and needs to be thoroughly cooked, even more than pork.  Ironically, the longest-lived people of the world live on boiled rice and fish and seaweed, and the Finnish who are the tallest Caucasians in the world subsist almost entirely on smoked fish.  The good book gives us a choice and we must take advantage of it, whether we like it or not. 

Cycle three is a cycle of senescence, defervescence, downsizing, and realization.  High vitamin intake becomes crucial because elderly people suffer from degenerative diseases mainly due to poor nutrition.  Is it impossible to fathom that by our habits, our attitudes, and our beliefs we destroy ourselves and is it this way that the maker wants?     The dream that abounds in my mind is a picture of a huge slab of prime rib beef cooked medium rare with a baked potato, green beans, and a huge mound of sour cream.  The dream of youth and fun and decadence and girls is all but gone and so is my amazing meal that now is maybe an entity on Christmas Day.  All an adult needs is a crust of dry bread, maybe a slice of cheese, and a glass of wine, and the time elapses and life goes on. 

People are not overly ambitious, motivated, or ingrained, except for a few.  No one in my estimation likes to eat fruit and vegetables because they require a lot of chewing.  America buys multivitamins instead.  Blessed are those with the strength, time, dedication, and ambition to juice a crate of fruit and vegetables down to one quart and then gulp it down.   The world belongs to the meek and the doers, and this is what this author was taught in school, in youth, a while ago.  Where the hell is my Philadelphia meat and cheese sandwich anyway?!   I am on a roll.  

Mexico enters the dry season at the end of September.   Gone are the daily rain squalls that cool and lubricate the land and make corn grow ten feet tall.   Mr. Madera returns from another successful water polo practice with the selection of a Mexican private university.   He was on the varsity squad at Berkeley and now he plays here for perks like getting the tests beforehand from the pretty pasantes doing their social service as teaching assistants at the university.   The Wracks sit with feet up on the coffee table in the living room of a furnished house the Mexicans provide foreign students with money or at least exalted parents in the States.  He reads an anatomy book with three-dimensional human body illustrations, taken apart and cast in polyethylene.  Mr. Madera sits down; he spent Labor Day at home in the States and had a great time.   He wants to tell the Wracks about a movie he saw at the panoramic dome in Los Angeles called “The Animal House”. 

In it is a torpid psychotic called “Bluto” who rubs food on himself and starts food fights wherever he goes.   He is a pleasant lot and skulks around creating hardship and mayhem wherever he goes.   The movie’s main impetus, however, is around the Greek fraternity system and a famous fraternity on the border of felony and incarceration.   The people are zany and he wishes he belonged to such an organization up in his home university of Berkeley.   Mr. Madera insists that the Wracks go see this movie because it displays the fraternity system at its best or worst, depending on how you look at it.   The Wracks closes his book, walks to the kitchen, grabs a Mexican bread roll from a bag, and a large one-quart Coca-Cola from the refrigerator, and heads to his room.   Everyone makes their dinner.   They want it this way.

The Wracks have been invited to a frat party at the big U.  His brother is a member of the frat but doesn’t have the money to live there so he lives outside on the street in his sky-blue hot rod Volks wagon bus.   He eats at the frat and showers there every morning.   It the showers are occupied he bathes at the Pavilion less than a block away in the football locker room.  At the frat, everyone has chores to do to be a member of the frat, be it doing the wash, clean up crew, or kitchen police and the tasks revolve periodically so everyone gets a chance to maintain the fraternity.   The Wracks knock on the door.

A tall handsome dark-haired man with a pipe answers the door.   His girlfriend stands behind him.  This man is the frat president and he dresses in clothes only seen in the upper class on TV shows.  He sticks out his hand and says, hello are you a pledge, The wracks say no, his brother invited him to the frat party.   The president says, well then, you can be our unofficial mascot.   The Wracks nods.   The girl standing behind the president moves up front and the Wracks exclaims, your girlfriend is buck naked!

The president laughs, like Sant Claus laughs, and says, no she has a transparent body stocking that maintains the code of etiquette of the fraternities and sororities here at the big U.   My name is Ally, she says and she dances away mischievously.   Another girl dances by the door and she is wearing a brief sarong in vibrant oceanic colors.   Another girl is in a string bikini with a false top.  I thought fraternities have toga parties says the Wracks.   No says the president togas are Roman; we are Greek and tonight is a sorority welcome party with the girls across Campus.   Would you like to come in and look at the fraternity?   Yes, I would say the Wracks.   I am studying to be a doctor.   We have doctors here too and much more says the president.   Let me show you the fraternity.   We don’t have toga parties anymore because the vomit is hard to clean up. 

The Wracks enters the fraternity and being displayed on the ceiling is a pornographic movie in 3d.   A centrally placed projector with a fisheye lens pointing up is at work at a time before cassette disks.   Let me show you the fraternity says the president.   To my right is the kitchen and we have a professional chef come in once a day and fix a meal for the men here.  The members keep the kitchen clean and well-stocked.   To the left is our crime lab.   We maintain a crime lab for legal and forensic purposes.   The photographer who is our visual does work for us.  He is a member too.  Would you like to see it?   Yes, says the Wracks. On the far wall is a huge collage with pictures of girls getting into Fonz’s van on the street outside. This is our wonder wall says the president.  It is for forensic purposes I assure you.   Would you like to see my roof retreat?   Yes, I would say the Wracks.   Going up two flights of stairs, the two emerge to a star-studded open roof setting with a putting green and driving tee., If you want, you can come up here with me and hit drives and try to bean the football team in the field next door.  I am trying to get into graduate school says the Wracks, the authorities will put me in prison.  It is only for the fun of it says the president.   They wear helmets and they probably don’t feel a thing.   If you change your mind let me know.  I will teach you how to drive with the number one wood.  The stars up above on a fall night twinkle and demonstrate the eternal promise offered to the good-hearted and brave, and then they leave.   You can visit the other rooms says the president.   I have to go now and meet some new pledges and entertain the crew.   Have a good time.   I hope to see you again. 

The Wracks alone walk around the fraternity.   In one room the brothers are playing mumbly peg with throwing knives and betting twenty dollars a toss.  A beautiful sorority sister in sexy clothes sits in a chair watching for decoration sakes.   In another room sits a brother with a hydraulic contraption.  He has a pneumatic injector attached in line with a forty-gallon keg of beer.   The large funnel-shaped contraption delivers a quart a shot.  Would you like to try asks the brother?  Yes, I would say the Wracks.  The brother inserts the funnel device in the Wrack’s mouth, turns on the regulator of a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher, and shoots a quart of beer into the Wrack’s stomach in less than two seconds.     That is heavy says the Wracks, they don’t even have one like this in the pit.  The maximum is two shots an hour, we don’t want an ambulance coming to the fraternity to break up festivities.  That is real heavy says the Wracks, real heavy and I didn’t even taste a thing.  Cool refreshing keg beer, on tap in an instant says the brother.   Can you ask for more? The Wracks move on.  Around the fraternity of three stories are locked rooms that the Wracks can not enter but he knows someone is inside.   People smoke pot and lay in the living room watching the adult movies boil away.  The Wracks sigh, I don’t have the time or money of the boys in the upper twenty percent.  I have to sit in a library and study.  On his way out, the frat president waves and says, you come from a good family, stop by any time you want, we have sorority friendship parties quarterly, and the Wracks walks out and finds the Ford Pinto he borrows from his father and drives home. The states are more sophisticated than Mexico.

The bolillo, and the piece of asadero cheese taste excellent when washed down with Coca-Cola.  He is in his room and picks a textbook to study and prepare for the class ahead of tomorrow., He moves the desk that came with his room to blockade the door.  A steel prop can be moved with a wire loop from underneath the door.  He turns on his tensor lamp, lights up a Marlboro cigarette, and starts to read.  After a while, he walks to the bathroom and charges his Mr. Coffee percolator that he brought from the States.   He opens an envelope of creamer empties it and then takes a large gulp of coffee.  He begins to read again and when he can’t read anymore, he looks at pictures.  I never had time for a fraternity life he thinks, it is only for the upper class.  The fraternity is the animal house and is not alpha, theta, or phi. Bluto is an associate professor of experimental oncology at the big U.  Maybe in another life he thinks. 

Class Onc

Dr. Gull appears in class as a man of medium height and build with thick wavy black hair.  He dresses in a white physician’s smock, a white shirt and tie, black loafer shoes, and a Rolex watch.  He smokes Marlboro cigarettes incessantly. He does not seem of Latin descent.  His bright eyes search the surroundings through a thick grey wisp of tobacco smoke that slowly floats upwards and seems to linger everywhere; Dr. Gull holds the title of Chief of Oncology Services at the big U.  He likes to teach anyone who will listen, the Science of Tumor Immunology.  He will instruct a student if he or she has the IQ and prerequisites to enter the halls of the Health Sciences. In a small classroom in the School of Microbiology, Dr. Gull instructs medical residents, Graduate Students, visiting professors from other countries, and even Wracks.  

Good afternoon, Dr. Gull, says Wracks, I am enrolled in your course in Tumor Immunology.  I look forward to an exciting and enlightening quarter here while I work on an independent research project down the hall.   May I smoke also during the lecture?   I like Marlboro Red cigarettes also.

Sure, says Dr. Gull.   Most of my staff here and the residents at Woodland Bethlehem Hospital are also smokers.  We need the lift to get us through the day.  Go right ahead and light up but bring your ashtray.  Get seated, I have to start the lecture.

Mr. Simms also completed upper-division Immunology with Wracks and now sits next to Wracks in the lecture hall.  Dr. Gull starts writing on the chalkboard the first topic of the course.  Sir Burnet’s theory of Immune surveillance.  All the medical residents pull a cigarette out of their coat pockets and light up.  The room slowly fills up with smoke and Dr. Gull lectures through a thick haze of photochemical smog.

Does everyone have to smoke, says Mr. Simms.  Mr. Simms presents as a tall-boned Nordic-derived student at the Big U.  All the smoke makes me sick.  Will everyone put out their cigarettes? Wracks extinguishes his cigarette immediately.    Then the medical Residents of Pine Bethlehem blow heavy smoke clouds at Mr. Simms.  

Mr. Simms exclaims, if you do not stop smoking, I will drop the course and file a complaint against everyone.  

The residents continue to blow smoke toward Mr. Simms until he closes his notebook with a bang and storms out of the hall.   Dr. Gull tries to ignore the situation.  After time assures that Mr. Simms has left for good, everyone puts out their cigarettes as if inspired by unseen forces.   Dr. Gull turns to his audience and smiles.

Does everyone understand Sir Howard Burnett’s theory now that it is on the board?  

Everyone nods their heads in agreement and the instructor smoking cigarette in hand continues.

Forty-five minutes later the instructor concludes and assigns case studies and term papers to the students of his class.  Everyone leaves in a hurry because they all have work to do, families to go to, or a sweetheart somewhere. Everyone except the Wracks.  Wracks has his dinner at the student union and then a long bus ride home ending in a walk up a hill at night.  The wracks have no experiment scheduled now because his tissue-transplanted mice have to grow up.  Then their spleens and blood will be harvested and the statistical construct begin.  A wrack takes the elevator down to the first floor and emerges at the entrance to the school of medicine.  A huge black onyx building is in construction and the cranes hoist enormous steel girders into place as the sun sets in a reddish flame framed by grey petrochemical smog. Today wracks will enter the student cafeteria by an alternate route.  Walking underneath the suspended hallway connecting the health sciences with the biological sciences, Wracks takes the connecting road down to the front of campus past the big buildings that house the professional schools and clinics of the Big U.  Up the main promenade to the student store, in the front door and then take the elevator to the second floor.  Wracks exits the elevator, then walks left to the queue lines in front of the cafeteria.  The budget student menu does not draw the crowd expected for such a bargain and charity offering. Most of the students patronize the bars and go dancing downtown.  No other place on the west side delivers a full meal with all-you-can-drink coffee for one dollar and a quarter. Most of the student body eats instead at the designer restaurants and discotheques located in town about a stone’s throw from the animal house.  For the more affluent students, the best restaurants in the state are less than five miles away on the miracle mile.    At five o’clock on a weekday, only twenty people utilize the vast resources of the student cafeteria.  Adjoining the student cafeteria situates the varsity athletes’ dining room.  The privileged few awesome athletes that join the fabulous and famous football and basketball teams, eat steak and hamburgers to infinity, cooked in front of them on a huge gas-fired charcoal grill.  Wracks sit in front of Kirk’s Hall and smell the delicious odors emanating from the athlete’s dining room every day while enjoying a cigarette and a cup of coffee.   Then an occasional nap in the huge leather armchairs decorating the picture windows in the student hall happens.  Curled up in bliss, in uteri in a friendly place, with warm feet and toes, Wracks knaps in the world of opulence.    The moment occurs now and tonight at five, Wracks chooses the chicken pot pie on the student menu with all-you-can-eat crackers.   Wracks grabs one of the large porcelain cups provided for the coffee-drinking student body.   In his usual spot, facing the entrance line, with his back to the wall sits Dahlman.  Both of Dolmans’ Parents have accolades as tenured faculty members in the health sciences at the Big U.  Instead Dahlman trains to be a lawyer and his parents want him to attend a catholic school.   Tonight, Dahlman dines on a sumptuous roast beef sandwich with de jour dressing, a bag of potato chips, and a tall glass of brown tea.  Wracks slams his stew out of a large beige bowl into his mouth and sends the food to his stomach with shooters of hot coffee with excesses of half and half creamer.   Wracks eat the first of his three packages of Nabisco saltine crackers when the bowl licks clean.  

How did the war go on the southern flank, asks Dahlman?

More of the same says Wracks.   I go to class, then study for an hour in between, then go to a lab, check on my animals, go back to afternoon class, and then show up here.  We go to the Research library after dinner, put in two to three hours of exam preparation, and then take the bus home.  What happens on the North campus?

The same, says Dahlman, I research law books and take notes then transcribe the data to three by five cards.   Only three by five cards can be admitted to a courtroom if he or she is not the defending or prosecuting attorney.  Then I come here.   In the morning, I sit for exams until lunch. 

Why are we doing this asks Wracks.

There is no other way, says Dahlman.  Academic achievement occurs as the only game in town.   Everything else gets old.   Let’s get going.   See you at the end. 

Spring starts to break at the big U.  The large trees bear buds and the winter ebbs and the entire leaves have blown away three months ago.  The quad sits deserted in the dark twilight and the Romanesque forums stand adamant in utter solitude.  Up the steps to the marbled halls of myriad classrooms, and through the café connecting the old building with the new to the lighted entrance promenade signaling the Buckminster fuller rendition of glass that houses the research library.  Up the central elevator to the fifth-floor rocket the two students. On the fifth floor, they separate because the line of sight of movement distracts attention while reading. A huge physics graduate student sits at a little desk next to the elevator and looks up to see if Wracks smokes.   Satisfied, he continues reading.  Sitting at his window to the opulent world Wracks surveys the beauty, organization, and technological majesty that money creates.   In this world of non-olfactory money, where source seems unimportant and effect paramount Wracks digs in at the end of the short winter and promises himself, that he will not fall asleep tonight. 

Let’s hit it!  Yells Dahlman at Wracks, we have only 12 minutes to catch the 8:55 bus. 

 Wracks throws his huge heavy books into his briefcase and jumps off to the run.  Trotting down the staircase, they bound through the glass frontal portal and lope across the North Campus Avenue.  Trotting down the hill they cross the entrance road and stand at the pole on the island where the RTD stops on Hill Street.  Just as they arrive a huge yellow bus without any passengers careens into view and stops suddenly without screeching its tires.  The door opens and both Wracks and Dahlman flash their monthly student passes at the bus driver.  The door closes and the huge yellow rectangle accelerates at magnum speed down the hill. 

One minute later we would have missed the bus, smiles Dahlman. At a jog, it takes eleven minutes to get to Hill Street and the bus was one minute early.    Ten seconds later we would have missed it.  It seems prudent to allocate at least fifteen minutes to transit to the Hill stop.  

I am tired says Wracks. I am glad today ends and tomorrow becomes Friday. 

On the undulating bus, Wracks falls asleep as usual clasping his heavy briefcase to his chest.  

Dahlman shouts this is my stop, see you tomorrow morning on the steps.

Wracks waves goodbye and Dahlman exits.   Two miles later on the hill of Moonrise Avenue, Wracks becomes the last passenger to leave the bus.   From here the bus travels to the ocean, turns around, and then goes back up moonrise to nightclub land.  He crosses the street in the darkness and walks across the gas station turf.   Up past the drug store, liquor store, and convenience market, Wracks heads up the long Quiz way and then up the hill to Bacon Way.   The night still chills and the wind blows offshore so the waves cannot be heard echoing up the canyon and the stars twinkle because the smog blows out to sea on nights like this.  The beautiful night lives and wracks cannot be enjoyed because the day as it lives tires the disciplined who must sleep to replenish the mind that drives them mercilessly.  Punkin wags his tail while sleeping on his cushion in the family room. He is the only one welcoming Wracks and wracks strips off his shoe’s pants and shirt, dives into bed, and falls asleep immediately after pounding the alarm clock that rests next to his bed.  Tomorrow is a new day

Bottom of Form

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She’s got the curves

Curves that move when she moves

Curves that move from the gloom inside my room

To bewildered to know just what to do

Entranced by the curves that make up you

I start singing she’s got the curves

Youth is wasted on the young, and a woman’s figure starts to falter around age forty.  A personal physician prescribes Premarin for women to maintain their female habitus.   Let us look closer to see what the doctor is giving her.  Premarin or conjugated estrogen is an estrogen molecule with an ethinyl substituent at carbon 21.  The addend is a triple bonded sp1 hybridization that adds or eliminates in the appropriate environment.  This added makes Premarin less susceptible to degradation or conjugation by hepatic enzymes.  In addition, the triple bond adds to the DNA initiator site in a 60S Svedberg system and won’t let go.   In a mammalian transcription system, this means DNA replication rather than being induced and finite becomes constitutive.  In the cancer zoo at the Big U, monkeys develop huge fluctuant carcinomas when maintained on mega doses of Premarin.  Why then do physicians prescribe Premarin?

Physicians prescribe oral Premarin because the liver has trouble breaking the molecule down for elimination.  This means easy and convenient dosing and the woman maintains secondary sexual characteristics, or so it seems.

Expert organic chemist makes a lot of money, adding here, subtracting there, or causing gross elimination to unsubstituted nuclei.  Current birth control pills use chemically modified androgens as a pregestational agent because androgens are excreted in great quantity from horse urine.  If it makes money it goes, and the nation has an economy based on the acceptance of substances offered by the AMA. 

The main action of estrogen is sodium ion influx into cells.  This is why a fertile woman feels soft, silky, and supple.  In addition, the DNA replication induced by the steroid drug causes the proliferation of cells that are sensitive to estrogens and estrogen-like substances like the uterus and breast.  This is why women who chronically ingest birth control pills for inane reasons have large breasts.   If a woman wants to grow large breasts, they just have to get on birth control.  The main function of estrogen is to stimulate the growth of the epithelia in the uterus so it can maintain a fetus in a pregnancy.  Progesterone which is 21 hydroxy steroid caps off the proliferation by maintaining the uterine stroma and the fetus can develop. The main difference between estrogen and progesterone is the cyclization of the benzene group in the per phenanthrene molecule. When the estrogen feeds back into the ovarian operon, steroid production ceases, and a woman cycles.  If a pregnancy happens, and they do very often, the corpus luteum of the developing syncytial cytotrophoblast begins producing estrogen to maintain the placenta and the baby grows.

What is the solution?   The solution is to give estrogen by injection which few people except insulin diabetics can tolerate.  There might exist another solution in the plant world.  Hearsay and old wife’s tales stipulate that an estrogen-like substance occurs in eggplant.    A woman who desires curves can juice or cook eggplant daily in direct relation to her cycle.   The world seeks a botanist to come up with a suitable estrogen-containing plant that can be extracted, concentrated, and purified for mature women in middle age and beyond.  The world is waiting, there is a lot of work to be done.  Consult old Indian herbalist guides and inquire from doctors practicing traditional Chinese medicine about what avenues to pursue.  Hope springs eternal and she has the curves. 

Upton Sinclair and “The Jungle” existed one hundred years ago.  Now in the twenty-first century, the pharmaceutical giants mandate the health status of the working class in the United States.  The drugs they produce hopefully extend life, and in most cases, they do, except for delayed toxic effects.  It used to be that all pharmacological agents useful to mankind, were cultivated, harvested extracted, and purified into oral forms for the betterment of society and the nation as a whole.   Aspirin which comes from the bark of a tree, and derives from the culture exudate of common molds, and cannabinol which derives from cannabis sativa, in addition to others form the mainstay of agents used to promote health and rescue working human beings from the ravages of infectious disease.   Before antibiotics, waves of plague and pestilence swept nations and destroyed our intelligent beautiful children.  People who live in today’s world do not realize that antibiotics are the only factor that helps them live past 40 years of age and that disease used to take our most loved children.  

It is too expensive to culture, harvest, and purify drugs so the pharmaceutical giants create drugs cheaply by forming them in steaming pots.  The miracle of organic chemistry that gives us polymer pistols and plastic fighter jets also gifts mankind with a plethora of prescription-only drugs.  These drugs, if they work, if used chronically, evoke cancer of the pancreas, cancer of the liver, leukemias, and lymphomas.  The bulk of this paper serves to enumerate illustrations of what the American Medical Society prescribes for the working class to save their lives and yes, to save a buck.  Administrators put the bulk of the National budget for health care into their own pockets and prescribe carcinogens for the public so they die after they retire.   A retired worker does not create income, and if they die inauspiciously, the corporation and the government do not have to pay them a pension. 

If a person lives long enough, they eventually develop diabetes.  The medical society depends on these phenomena for their livelihood.   Metformin, which is a mainstay of diabetes type two, makes a patient acidotic and induces a fatal heart arrhythmia.   Sulfonylureas, the other agent used to treat high blood sugar, causes leukemia after chronic use.  Insulin, which President Biden promises to keep cheap, is only indicated in unstable ketotic diabetics and if needed can be delivered in a protamine zinc or neutral protein Hagedorn preparation delivered at most once a day.  Current medical dogma has diabetics walking around with insulin infusion pumps delivering normal insulin continuously.  Many years ago, the only indication for regular insulin was diabetes ketoacidosis or hyperosmotic glucose crisis and now people run around like robots with large pumps stapled to their abdomen.  Please lord up above, tell me, am I missing something?

If a person lives long enough, due to metal accumulation and eating a lifespan of beef, their blood pressure rises continuously by about 10 mm Hg per decade of life after fifty years of age.  There exists no satisfactory treatment for high blood pressure.  The agents that  highly intelligent, religious, and altruistic doctors prescribe all induce cancer of the pancreas after ten years of chronic use.   The only treatment for high blood pressure is to get drunk and smoke pot and yes, stop eating top sirloin strip steaks.  I will reveal how the pharmaceutical giants produce such incredible incomes.  A third of the National budget subsidizes the making of carcinogens and pays administrators working in plans who carry out such a nefarious schema.  

An organic chemist makes drugs by boiling organic precursors in pressure cookers bought at Walmart. 

A biochemist takes an x-ray microscopic picture of an enzyme the scientists want to inhibit, that they think causes disease.  With this picture, the chemists delineate the size of the enzyme’s active site and build organic molecules in a pressure cooker.   To make a large ring structure, a chemist utilizes a precursor molecule then adds carbons to it and then nitrate derivatives to form a cyclic structure.  Each nitrogen a chemist adds to form a ring structure has a pair of unbonded electrons in a sp2 hybridized configuration.  This makes the ring structure a nucleophile and the ligand bonds to the DNA and destroys it.  The more nitrogen, a chemical has in its structure is directly proportional to its carcinogenic potential.  To make Minipress, a potent antihypertensive agent, a cook puts chemical waste in a pressure cooker, urinates into it, and cooks the mixture for an hour.  When filtered, the person has pure Minipress.   

Long aliphatic chains on a molecule are also potent carcinogens, as taught by a tall dark-haired man, former chief at the big U.  These are phrased as aliphatic carcinogens and exemplified as Benz-aminopyrine. 

Anti-hypertensive agents with long tails are marginally effective and at most decrease the blood pressure after chronic use at most 5 mm Hg. This author knows and measures.  They are not even marginally effective.  They have super names like cardiolol and others.  The drug causes cancer by wrapping the long tail around the phosphate backbone of DNA, rendering it incapable of replicating and the cell becomes cancerous.  The new agent for diabetes, a polypeptide structure has long aliphatic tails bound to the molecule to increase the rate of diffusion and this agent also may be a direct-acting carcinogen. 

In Mexico, high blood pressure patients turn blue from ingesting hydrochlorothiazide, also known as Hydrodiuril, and they all commit suicide when told they have cancer of the pancreas.  The list goes on and on.  The PDR is so verbose it is hard to decipher intent,  and the subsections are written by chemists with a law degree.  

This author does not have an answer for this hubris.  “if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem”.   This author is not a soothsayer or mediator.   It says in the good book that Dios puts on earth everything mankind needs to help themselves.   They just have to find it, grow it, harvest and purify it.    Life is a lot of hard work for everyone except the fortunate few.  I guess a chemist can add a ring structure here or there if they belong to a church.  I will stand my ground and I won’t back down.

Lab work takes a lot of time and detracts from your studies.   Wracks brings his lunch in a brown bag to the lab and Dr. Goodlife tells him he cannot eat it here.

We use a lot of radioactive chromium to label white cells and poisoning with radioactive chromium induces red cell leukemia.  You have to find somewhere else to eat.

The Wracks moves down to the medical center cafeteria on the main floor and has his lunch with the medical students.

You can’t eat here says one of the students, you are not in the medical school.   Find somewhere else to have your lunch.

I will says the Wracks.

He wanders around the medical center and finds a room behind closed doors, inside is a huge glass dome and chairs above an operating room.  He takes a seat and has his baloney and American cheese on wonder bread sandwich and an apple for dessert.  Below him, a tall surgeon is doing laparoscopic surgery on patients.  The primitive laparoscope is a long surgical steel tube and the surgeon inserts the probe in the umbilicus, moves around, and looks into the viewport on the scope as he views the internal organs.  This is the first attempt at laparoscopic surgery.   The Wracks finishes his lunch puts the brown bag in a surgical waste refuge basket leaves and goes back to the lab.  He likes the solitude of the retreat and returns a couple of times and the surgeon notices him chewing on an apple and waves.

Dr. Good Life wants to talk to you says one of the Japanese medical techs who handles the radiologic assays his lab undertakes. 

I hear you are having lunch in the dome area says Dr. Good Life.   You left an apple core on the rim of the dome and the surgical residents want you to stop going to their personal area.

There is never anyone there when I go says the Wracks and I didn’t put my apple core on the view dome.

Yes, you did, says Dr. Goodlife and one of the surgical residents found it.

I guess I have to take my lunch in another area says the wracks.  He leaves Dr. Goodlife’s office

I can’t figure out how I left my Apple core on the viewport thinks the Wracks.  I put my trash in the closest surgical waste receptacle.  Errors of judgment are the way criminals are caught in a crime.  It is just a matter of time before they make an error and I guess this is how it happened.  My fault thinks the Wracks.   I must be more careful. 

The Wracks chooses the steps in the delivery area in the medical center to have his lunch.  Located in front on the side with a parking area where the Wracks arrive at night to do their experiments in the School of Microbiology at the Medical Center.  Time moves on, summer approaches, the summer quarter starts, his term is done and he turns in his keys to the research area to his preceptor.  This is the end of the line at the big U.  The wracks gather his laboratory notes, his statistical analysis, and methodology schema and turn them into Dr. Goodlife.  

The year of work consisted of the analysis of a one-gravity sedimentation apparatus for white cells and neoplastic stem cells.   Testing reveals that big cells fall faster through a column than small cells because the buoyant density of small cells slows their descent through the column apparatus.   His column consists of fetal calf albumen in various concentration steps over two hours of fall time.  He counts cell aliquots at regular intervals establishes a normal bell curve and uses trypan blue to statin the aliquots for histological analysis.   Cancer cells are larger and fall quicker through a gradient column and can be stained with trypan blue or fluorescein.    The result of this work is now a science called flow cytometry.   

The Wracks no longer attends the big U.   His peers harass him sexually.   He attends the extension school at the Big U and takes graduate classes like Psychopharmacology and Public Health.  He is interested in psychopharmacology because the wealthy like to take LSD and other mentally active congeners. 

Time moves on and the seasons do not change in southern California the Wracks does not take the yellow bus to the big U anymore and his grandmother is going to pay for his education in Mexico. 

Eating lunch alone on the steps next to Overguard where the busses run is relaxing and the time is over and the world turns, the night convenes and the stars shine beautifully in the night full of hope and promise. 

I am not cut out for this thinks Dr. Wracks.  I must be smart enough or I wouldn’t be here.

Stop daydreaming says Dr. Clancy, there is a presentation at two on thyroid surgery in the surgeons’ lounge by Dr. Canta.  Go there now.  They will have some bagels to eat

All the surgical residents except the two lead residents are in the lounge for the presentation.  Dr. Wracks grabs two bagels while they are still there.  They go fast.   Dr. Canta is a medium-height man with freckles and greyish-brown hair with huge horn-rimmed spectacles.  He wears a doctor’s smock over his suit and he is at the blackboard, with some chalk, and he begins.  He is an endocrine surgeon.   The thyroid is a wondrous organ that maintains homeostasis in the human being.  People with thyroid disease have heart problems and sugar problems.  Thyroid hormone maintains the body’s metabolism, regulates the heart rate, rhythm, and contractility, and augments metabolism.  People with thyroid disease also are cold and hairless.  A magnificent organ, the thyroid has four arteries that feed the organ, superior and inferior, and this demarcates the thyroid as an extremely important organ.  

To remove the thyroid Dr. Canta states, we must ligate the four arteries before extirpation and remove it from under the cricoid cartilage.    the patient must take the T4 hormone for the rest of their lives.  Be aware that the internal carotids are near the organ and feed it directly through tributaries, so we must be delicate to not sever them when we remove the organ.  Dr. Wracks eats his second bagel and nods his head.  Dr. Canta looks at him. 

Tonight, he is not on call so Dr. Wracks walks to his attic room in town to get needed rest and listen to the radio.  He locks the attic door and sleep overtakes him.

After rounds in the early AM, Dr. Wracks is sipping coffee in the cafeteria with a bun.  One of the lead residents tells him to get to surgery because he is on the board for an early procedure with Dr. Canta.

Dr. Wracks is late and all the donuts are gone, and he takes a quick slurp of Styrofoam container coffee in the waiting area and then walks to the board.  On the board is written in black marks a lot ink, “Baloney”, 

and he moves to the surgical sinks and scrubs in.   Walking backward into room four, Dr. Canta is waiting for him.   Hold the trocar while I incise, says Dr. Canta, tie off as I enter, the Beauvy makes too much smoke for this procedure.  Lifting the cricoid cartilage, the thyroid is revealed.   It is white and pink and perfused with blood that is not yellow, atrophied, and wasted as described in medical textbooks. 

Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis says Dr. Canta Look closer.

Dr. Canta cuts the inferior left thyroid artery and with his fingers directing the flow, he squirts bright, hot blood in Dr. Wrack’s face until his entire mask and surgical hat are covered.   He then clamps the artery and Dr. Wracks ties the vessel.   He looks up at Dr. Wracks.   Three more to go.

After cutting three more arteries and Dr. Wracks tying them off, he delicately excises the thyroid with a light green scalpel, desiccates the tissue, and then removes the organ.   A nurse appears and the thyroid goes into a surgical stainless steel pathology bucket.  The surgeon then closes, no one without a license in surgery can sew fascia or peritoneum or do amputations. 

The surgeon leaves and Dr. Wracks accompanies the patient to the waiting area the patient’s trachea tube is removed and Dr.  Wracks sits there covered in blood.   Thyroid surgery is extremely bloody. When the patient breathes normally and the vitals are stable Dr. Wracks runs to the locker room to wash off his face.  He discards his surgical gear into the contaminated discard bin and washes his face and head with cephadyl three times.  Lunch time is passed and Dr. Wracks skulks to the library to hide.  No one ever will find him there except his only friend.  Back on the surgical floor, one of the chief residents asks him if he wrote “Baloney” on the surgical board.  Dr. Wracks denies it.   I thought I saw Dr. Cuban do it says Dr. White but I am not sure.  When Dr. Wracks sees Dr. Cuban, he bows his head and makes the sign of the cross.  Is he the next to go thinks Dr. Wracks?   But it isn’t. 

Dr. Canta moves around the surgical floor like a phantom silhouette.   He carries a fresh scalpel in his hand raised to face level to strike.  His face and grey eyes glare in a leer.   When people see him, they start to run.   A scalpel is extremely sharp and can cut through nearly anything.  Dr. Wracks again makes the sign of the cross.  Dr. Cuban was not the next to go.  Dr. Wracks looks out the window on the observation floor at the world in New York in its beautiful summer.  Immense green punctuated with verdant thunderstorms as sudden squalls move into the area and the huge skyscrapers loom in the distance.  Life is really beautiful for the lucky few thinks Dr. Wracks.  If I go back to the surgical floor, they will have me taking blood gas from the ICU.  My mother wanted me to be a doctor.  It’s time to get back to work thinks Dr. Wracks

Another patient is coming in with abdominal pain says the charge nurse.  Dr. Ix wants you to work him up and do a guaiac after a rectal exam.  He is in the emergency room now, Go meet him.  The day moves on into the afternoon and eventually, there will be a “Light in August”.    And so it goes, et mas. 

There was a dream of being a clinical doctor, handing out antibiotics, and reviewing chemistry panels with patients but it never happened.  In surgery, call is every three days.   All the residents get call.   On the third floor in surgery, the call room is a six by six-foot cell, with a small bed, a table, and a reading lamp.   Of course, a phone is also on the table next to the lamp.  Tonight Dr. Wracks is on call.   After dinner at 6 pm, he will try to get some sleep because reality will keep him up all night.  At 10 PM, he makes his first rounds on the surgical floor.  The ward is full of patients preparing for surgery or recently out of surgery before being transferred to a medical floor.  Surgery is in vogue, and all the people with medical insurance ask for surgery because this is what the affluent do, and they want it too. 

Entering every room and speaking his name and position, Dr., Wracks checks the surgical wounds and the heart monitor near the head of the patient.  The wound must be dry, if it is wet or red, there exists infection, and if not treated, dehiscence and sepsis will ensue.  He checks every patient twice a night because bacteria, especially strep and coliforms have a duplication time of 4 hours and then enter an exponential e to the n logarithmic curve.  Looking at the heart monitor reveals arrhythmia.  Bacteria produce acid mainly as a byproduct, and acidosis causes arrhythmia and any change in heart rate or rhythm might suggest an occult infection.  Auscultation with a stethoscope only shows pneumonia or heart valve defects and is useless, but Dr. Wracks carries one anyway for the effect.   After rounds, Dr. Wracks retreats to his cell and tries to get some sleep before the onslaught.  He moves the desk, upside down to block the door entrance, and goes to sleep.  He awakens as someone slips a credit card into the movable tongue of the lock and tries to gain entrance.  The desk moves and creaks and the perpetrator gives up and goes away.  They never need to sleep.  Dr. Wracks sleeps until 2 AM, it seems after 2 AM everything starts to happen.  This is Dr. Ix’s patient and he is the chief of surgery at the hospital.   Dr. Wracks grows tired of Anesthesiologists demanding that the residents do not over-sedate their patients because over-sedated patients stop breathing during surgery and die.  He has

The phone rings.  Dr. Wracks we have a delirious patient in room 355.  We want you to take a look at him.  Dr. Wracks moves the desk back, puts on his smock, and ventures forth.   The nurse beckons him into the room.  This is a recent surgical patient with an abdominal procedure.  

He says, Dr. I am seeing angels, please help me.

Dr. Wracks listens to his chest, it is clear.   The wound is dry.  He tells the nurse to contact the primary Dr. Ix because his patient is regressing.  All surgeons are on call always and they live near the hospitals where they work.   Dr. Ix arrives in Jeans, orders statutory blood work on the patient, and gives the patient 10mg of morphine subcutaneously to calm him down.  Morphine works quickly, and the patient sleeps and Dr. Wracks says goodbye to surgeon Ix.   He returns to his call room.  From Psychiatry at the Veterans Dr. Wracks remembers what Dr. Lecture told him.  When a patient says they are seeing angels, death is imminent.   Korsakov’s psychosis due to alcoholism produces hallucinations but the hallucinations do not have religious context.  Atropism can cause hallucinations but this condition is acute and usually follows an overdose of atropine. He has tried oxazepam, the benzodiazepine with the shortest half-life but it doesn’t work.  A thirty-milligram dose of Dalmane puts all the patients at rest while they scream for deliverance before a surgery that might result in their demise, but the anesthesiologists threaten the residents with termination if their patients stop breathing during surgery.  Like anything in life, an intrepid soul is damned if they do and damned if they don’t.  It seems all the patients get Dalmane before surgery anyway.  At two o’clock, Dr. Wracks makes rounds again, introduces himself to patients barely sleeping, and checks their wounds.   He sits in the nurse’s station waiting for any immediate entrance from the emergency room.  Trauma occurs mainly at night.   At four o’clock AM, he will go back to his cell and try to pick up two hours of sleep before showering and going to morning rounds. 

He moves the desk upside down in front of the door and wedges it in.  Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray my lord my soul to keep, if I die before I wake, I pray my lord, my soul to take. 

It is 6 thirty AM and Dr. Wracks is in the cafeteria, alone, drinking coffee with plenty of creamers.   The night emergency room crew arrive and wave to Dr. Wracks.   He waves back.  Dr. Wracks says to himself, I think I am smart enough, four months to go, and it happens again and again, every day without fail.

Not a soul in the cafeteria after the seven A.M. surgical rounds.    Dr. Wracks savors his cup of coffee with a cinnamon bun on a bench in a chair in the corner of the lunch hall.

Get to surgery says the fifth-year resident.   Dr. C liked the way you helped him put a new hip in the egghead yesterday and now Dr. Lick wants you to assist him now.  There is a Saudi in the ER who went off the Brooklyn bridge in a limousine and he is all broken up.  They have given him 3 units packed and he is being prepped and get up to the floor and scrub in. 

Dr. Wracks downs his bitter cup of coffee moves to surgery and enters the secret combination on the pad at the door at the entrance to the surgical suites.   He goes to his locker, puts on a clean set of green scrubs, hat, and paper shoes, scrubs his hands in the huge stainless steel surgical sink just like the surgeons taught him in Mexico, and walks backward into room 4.  The patient is suspended in an ortho rig over the table, and his dark eyes and bushy black hair stair upwards into nothingness

He got packed three, and his heart rate and blood pressure were stable according to the surgical nurse.

Dr. Wracks moves to the table.  Dr. Lick is a tall, lanky, Anglo-Saxon doctor with huge glasses and long hair slicked back under his surgical mask. 

Glad you made it he says.  Hold up his leg while I make the long incision on a femoral axis.  He has a comminuted fracture on x-ray and the bone is broken in several places.   We will insert a pin in the boned shaft, staple it with surgical steel bands, and close it.  Monitor his vitals.  He might have internal bleeding and we have to watch the hematocrit in case he needs more blood. 

Vital tissue is pink and glistening all the wounds are closed and the heart rate consistent.   This person is a survivor thinks Dr. Wracks.   The patient is in the rig, suspended over the table and the breathing is slow but stable.  Blood drips onto the floor and in a soundless operating room the drops impact with an unearthly drip.   Fresh blood when it pools on the ground, turns brown and clots into a gelatinous mass.  When the blood doesn’t clot, the liver has failed and the patient dies.  Dr. Wracks looks into the patient’s eyes and they are sightless but they haven’t clouded over like dead people’s eyes do.

I think his pupils are reactive says Dr. Wracks

Stand there and watch my patient, because I have some business to attend to says Dr. Lick.    He pulls off his surgical gloves, drops them in the bin grabs the red wall phone present in all the operating rooms, and calls his financial consultant. 

The doctor proceeds to buy and sell stock over the telephone in the operating room and Dr. Wracks stands over the Saudi patient and counts the blood drops hitting the floor.  He crosses himself and says a novena.  The surgeon is on the phone and intent on the stock market index.  Dr. Wracks begins his second novena and the patient hangs motionless in the rig, and the blood stops dripping onto the floor.

Dr. Lick says time is money, how is my patient doing Dr. Wracks?

His vitals are stable and he is not bleeding that much now.   No tachycardia and the oxygen pressure is normal.   Good, says Dr. Lich.   We can move him to recovery now and you will sit with him until his internist arrives to take over.   Thank you very much for assisting me in this rigorous case of femoral break with associated lacerations and possible internal bleeding.  I think he is a hardy soul.

Dr. Wracks and the surgical nurse disengaged the patient from the rig and gently lay him on the gurney.

The anesthesiologist removes the intubation tube from the patient’s throat and he coughs and spits up a huge bolus of bloody phlegm.   His eyes momentarily blink, and he breathes, and his life is his and the earth revolves another day.  The Wracks waits in the recovery room with the patient, and his vital signs are stable and blood pressure good.  He does not need any more blood.   His internist arrives, an older man with a beard and glasses and an expensive suit with a stethoscope around his neck, and Dr. Lick is on the phone in the nurses’ station with his bookie.   Some hot sporting events are going down for betting in the Big Apple.   He waves at Dr. Wracks.  Dr.  Wracks waves back.   The big clock on the wall, tick-ticking ceaselessly, signifies almost eleven thirty, time for lunch if he can sneak away unnoticed.   The procedure took nearly five hours.  Dr. Wracks runs to the dressing room, takes off his dirty scrub suit, hat, and shoes, redresses, and runs down to the cafeteria.  The cheapest thing on the menu, the fricassee chicken is red and stewed with peppers and piping hot and Dr. Wracks buys a plate.  The black cook smiles at him, he smiles back and then he digs in.   Freshwater never tasted so good. 

The curly-haired chief resident has found him.   I knew you would be here he says.    Dr. Cantacion is giving a lecture on the surgical floor about thyroid surgery and you should be there.   I have a lot to do.  See you later.

The world outside is a bright green and the glorious spring changes to summer in the temperate deciduous forest biome attributed to New York.   Dr. Wracks cannot see it.   If another procedure comes up in the late afternoon, he will assist, then he will try to get a nap on the call floor for he is on tonight and he will be up all night.  Dr. Wracks does not know why he is here, and he is not the right person for the job, but you will have to convince the employers otherwise. 

Dr. Lick saw him on the floor and he says the word. “Butazolidin”.  

The days go on and the nights are long and so it goes because “The sun also rises”.