Day 8.134 44g

I take the usual route, entering the Safeway through the produce section. I scan the price of avocados, mushrooms and spinach. Appalled at how capitalism has fostered this outrageous inflation, I indignantly pass without a purchase.

I take a left after the potatoes and onions price check and walk past the meat department. My grandfather was a meat cutter, owning his own shop in Venice, CA for many years. I pass, but stop to have my blood pressure checked for free. I heart affordable health care.

I have returned to fish consumption after two decades of abstinence. Tuna mostly with occasional salmon. I felt that the clean protein and omega-3s would augment my dietary recovery process without inflicting too much damage to the infrastructure of our precious rives, lakes and oceans. I do not want to contribute to the carnage if I can possible help it. On-sale are two six-ounce Bluefin steaks for eight bucks. They claim to be caught in the wild on single line mono-filament. One of these with rice will soon be called dinner.

I move on towards the bakery, stopping at the milk cooler. I have been buying a chocolate protein drink for a dollar. They contain twenty-one grams of protein. Not a bad benefit to cost ratio. I check the price of eggs and simply shake my head in response to being healed hostage by the Chicken Farmers of America. It is even worse when I get to the cheese. They seem to be colluding against us. I head to the bakery section.

I buy two plain bagels, mostly for the bag.

Exiting, I scout the beer sales. Cheap hops at premium prices.

I am at the self-service checkout, a routine that I can do as fast as anyone. My net purchases consists of one bag of frozen tuna steaks, one protein shake and two bagels. I am out the automatic door, eleven dollars poorer.

As I am riding the Shadow today, enjoying the summer at seventy-two miles per gallon, I lose the luxury of dining and driving. So I rip open the protein shake, containing the twenty-one grams of precious protein and drain it in one gulp.

I am synching the helmet strap still holding the empty bottle in my hand. I look at the label and almost have a stroke. On a moto this is known as a two-stroke.

That twenty-one grams of protein came with forty-four grams of sugar.

I set out this morning after class to make an earnest attempt to isolate why I slept so poorly last night.

Forty-four grams!