there's some evidence that aspirin might help.

hrmmn.

let me look into this more.

it's the bicycling, and the walking.

the irony, right?

see, the problem with me just taking calcium channel blockers is that they're intended to treat high blood pressure.

i have low blood pressure.

i might even have "athlete's heart".

so, it's potentially dangerous....

i still have that spironolactone, so i found myself wondering if it might act as a calcium blocker, and the answer seems to be "sort of", but nobody is linking it to gingival overgrowth, probably because it also causes dry mouth.

and, the cyproterone causes dry mouth as well.

but, progesterone is a kind of known issue for gum recession, and that might be more at the root of it, in combination with the crooked teeth. hrmmn.

i'll probably never get a clear cause, and i'm more interested in finding some way to graft over it. if i undid everything that might cause it, i'd have to starve to death.

those hydroxyapatite pills come in a gelatin shell that i could potentially recover some collagen from, although i would doubt this is useful as a topical.

i could add a little to the daily fluoride bath....

i need to do some more research before i do anything.

cysteine is, supposedly, a powerful collagenase inhibitor.

so, i think i have my candidates:

- type I collagen + cysteine 

i need to stop for some fruit.

ok, so i'm back to where i was.

- i think the primary problem is that my teeth are crooked.

- i need a topical collagen application of some sort to try to stimulate regrowth. ingested collagen could end up anywhere, including in the ligament space, where it might even do the opposite of what i want. i need to put the collagen where i want it and hope it works. but, how?

- i need some kind of collagenase inhibitor, but should that be topical as well?

and, it could also be caused by crooked teeth, which i have, and which is where the problem is worst..

i'm entirely absolving myself of blame, here, i think.

and, that's important for my self esteem.

but, that means i need to cover up the roots, or it's just going to get worse and worse.

so, i don't know how to figure that out without doing xrays.

but, in a sense it doesn't matter; what i needed to know was how it could be that excess collagen and deficient collagen could lead to the same result. but, i get it now - you can both have actual, literal receding gums (collagen deficiency, or collagenase excess) and emulate the effect of it by having an expanding jaw (excess collagen, manifested in that specific way).

it's ultimately because collagen is a medium rather than a mechanism; it's the thing that other cells grow in, and depending on where it ends up it can have opposite outcomes.

for me, i'm going to need to find a way to emulate a graft, regardless - so it doesn't matter if my bones are overgrowing or my gums are receding. i fix it by doing the same thing.

ok.

next step....

Radiographically, the striking feature of this disease is the widening of the periodontal ligament space. Seifert, White and others have reported that this is an inconsistent finding in all patients with Progressive systemic sclerosis; however, this was contradicted by Marmary and others, who observed widened periodontal ligament space in all 21 patients examined.[5,14,15] In our study, 66% of the patients showed widened periodontal ligament space... 

what is this "periodontal ligament space"?

this helps:

https://www.slideshare.net/malvika014/periodontal-ligament-64860505

so, if i understand correctly, what's happening here is not that the gum is actually receding, but that the jaw is actually increasing. as your body doesn't grow new gum tissue, the increased amount of bone and tooth ends up pulling the gum back, creating the impression of gum recession - and ultimately exposing the tooth. and, this is a consequence of excess collagen in the "periodontal ligament space".

ok.

so, even if i don't have sclerosis, can i figure out if i actually have gum recession or am actually producing excess bone?

this doesn't sound much like what i'm experiencing, though, even if the pictures look similar:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232232188_Oral_and_periodontal_manifestations_associated_with_systemic_sclerosis_A_case_series_and_review

the thing about those pictures is that the recession and staining is not due to poor hygiene, and, further, you don't see the bone loss you typically see with periodontitis. so, your typical picture has these receding gums and these little teeth with these gaps between them; where these pictures are more similar is that they have receding gums, but full, healthy teeth - which is more like what i'm experiencing.

but, i mean, i can open my mouth. my fingers aren't falling off...

i still want to understand the mechanism before i move on.

yeah, i'm looking at pictures of people experiencing dental concerns due to scleroderma and it definitely looks more like my mouth than the pictures of gingivitis.

let's see if i can understand the mechanism.

i've been concerned about the onset of an autoimmune disorder - like ms - for years.

i've had migraines, seizures - weird attacks.

and, gum recession is a symptom of ms, as well.

i don't expect to be able to cure this. i just want to figure out how to treat it.

the volume's back to working again, which just demonstrates how weird the situation really was.

so, we are indeed starting to see the start of an anti-mask backlash in ontario, and it seems to be targeted at doug ford, rather than justin trudeau. 

the ndp are even worse than the liberals.

so, what happens if a serious anti-mask backlash kicks in?

the answer is that this is one of those classic scenarios where a far right party has a space to walk in, as it can latch on to a populist position that is rejected by the entire mainstream spectrum.

for that reason, i am calling on the liberal party of ontario to be fucking liberals and push the idea of individual choice when it comes to mask use. you don't have to be anti-mask, exactly - i wouldn't categorize myself that way, either. i'm pro-choice on masks, and would label people pushing mask mandates as anti-choice. my body, my choice.

if the liberals take this position - and it is the right position for them to take, as a liberal party - this will give the upswell of frustration a way out of voting for a far right party.

otherwise, this election might get messy, as people find themselves with nowhere to turn.

i think i'd have to assume that any scleroderma i may be suffering from is mild, and not likely to be the major factor in the substantive gum recession i'm dealing with.

so, is it possible that i might have scleroderma and i should be reducing collagen levels rather than increasing them?

i don't have any of the more dramatic symptoms of it, but i do have a few areas of my body where there's noticeable scaliness, including my hands and what i've been thinking of as a regular build up of dry skin on my cheeks. i've been blaming it on pollution and dry air, and...i think that's correct. but, i can't rule it out completely. there's some consistency with the idea.

it would appear to be unlikely that it would be caused by too much vitamin c or something else in my diet. rather, if that's the case, and the cause of the gum recession, i'd have to file it under "genetic". and, then what? there's no cure, and no convincing diagnosis.

so, no - i don't appear to be able to test for collagen levels and base my reaction on that. unfortunately.

i'm consequently going to kind of put this aside as an exotic idea, but i have an appointment coming up and i'll run it by him. he once suggested to me that i may have raynaud's disease...

somebody seems to have gone through this page and replaced a large number of words with their homophones - things like they're/there.

i'm going to fix it.

but, this is something i do not do wrong, and if you see a large amount of it in my writing in the near future, it should come off as a red flag that somebody is altering the content.

actually, i'm going to unplug the modem and take a shower.

no. i still can't hear it...

oddly, music is continuing to stream. am i supposed to get a hint or something?

that's not happening - i refuse to listen to music until the lectures work again. i'll try again when i make breakfast.

what if i embed it?

that didn't work, and the issue appears to be site-wide so i suppose there's two possibilities:

a) youtube has made some internal change to reduce the volume.

b) i'm being targeted.

i guess we'll have to see if other people have the same problem or not.

i could plug this chromebook into the amplifier in the other room, but that would be annoying. so, i'm going to wait a few days and see if i can get a headphone amp, instead, if i have to.

if you've also noticed that the volume on youtube has decreased substantively site-wide, please post somewhere so i can see it.

this is quite strange - the volume on youtube just decreased to the point that i can no longer hear it.

i'm actually going to powerwash the machine and see what happens.

so, when you say things like "there's no evidence that canaanites existed", please realize what you're actually saying.

these people were erased.

the romans famously wiped carthage out of history, and i strongly suspect that the reason we have no history of phoenicia - the culture that invented the fucking alphabet - is that the romans wiped them out, as well, as the ancestral culture of the hated carthaginians.

and, i strongly suspect that anti-semitism, as we understand it, is in truth the legacy of the roman genocide of carthage and phoenicia.

but, phoenicia is what the greeks called them, after a purple dye that was exported from the region. that purple dye became the imperial colour, years later. even in their destruction and hate and contempt, the romans elevated the legacy of these people to the highest symbol of status that they had.

all evidence suggests that the carthaginians and phoenicians alike called themselves "canaanites", as far into history as they existed for.

but, we don't really know.

carthago delenda est.

so, cyrus - an important historical figure outside of the biblical narrative that definitely existed and created the first major empire in the middle east, by uniting the egyptian, hittite and mesopotamian regions under iranian hegemony - is presented in the biblical narrative as this protector of the jews, that allowed for some return of jewish sovereignty.

but, if you look at real history, what you see is that the persians were broadly supportive of phoenician civilization, in general, because they recognized it as the most advanced in the region. it was the phoenicians that built the persian navy that later harassed the greek colonies. but, they were more than military planners - they were the protectors of the knowledge in the region.

so, while the biblical narrative is of course very silly and cannot be taken at face value, the reality is that the persians did give the phoencian city-states privileged status in the empire due to their role as purveyor of scientific and engineering knowledge, things that the persians, as a barbarian people, lacked. that presentation of cyrus is consequently somewhat grounded.

and, you can't understand what judaism is without understanding that synthesis between phoenician and persian culture, which later became a synthesis between phoenician and greek culture, when the greeks replaced the iranians as the hegemonic power.

that is what you learn by studying levantine archaeology - that the region has shifted dramatically under the influence of various hegemonic powers, from egypt to assyria to iran to greece to rome to the arabs to the turks and now to ukrainian migrants - and this idea of a pure judaism outside of the forces of history simply does not exist.

judaism could neither exist without iran, nor without greece.

they'd still be worshipping tanit.

no, i'm going to repeat the point about jewish migration before the destruction of the temple.

this is a passage from a roman writer named juvenal who lived roughly at the same time as the destruction of the second temple, which we can at least be sure actually happened

For the Syrian Orontes has long since polluted the Tiber,

Bringing its language and customs, pipes and harp-strings,

And even their native timbrels are dragged along too,

And the girls forced to offer themselves in the Circus.

the reality is that the romans took huge numbers of slaves from the region, and that roman slavery was both brutal and sort of liberal, in the sense that slaves were routinely emancipated. so, the end result is that the romans settled huge numbers of people from the middle east on the italian peninsula. and, i mean, just look at a picture of your classical, arian roman with his northern, alpine features and a picture of your modern day arab-looking italian and tell me that isn't fucking obvious.

that is what happened: the romans inherited a middle eastern cultural hegemony and eventually become subsumed by it, through both voluntary and involuntary migration from the middle east to western europe.

so, attaching jewish migration to the destruction of the temple is no doubt a glossing over of history. the event happened, and some migration was no doubt a direct consequence of it. but, migration in and out of the region - to spain and northern africa, especially - had been occurring for centuries previous to it. i mean, the carthaginian state in modern day tunisia was the force that truly built and urbanized spain (which was initially inhabited by indigenous basques and warlike tribal celtic groups) before it was romanized, and they were the sibling culture to the ancient jews; what the archaeology actually says is that the "jews" of the period before the captivity were essentially a forgotten backwater of phoenecian civilization and essentially worshipped phoenician gods and carried out phoenician cultural practices, and that judaism is an essentially iranian religion that entered the region after cyrus, wiping out what was left of ancestral phoenecian culture - which completely disappeared altogether, under first the persians and then the greeks, until the day that carthage was, indeed, destroyed.

so, it's a kind of oversimplification of history to assign all of this migration to this scattering event - the migration took place for centuries before 70 ce, and for centuries after it, as well. and, you can look this up yourself and find out that, yes, i'm summarizing experts, even if i'm too lazy to look it up right now.

so, i'm going to make some eggs, take a shower and get back to this.

can i test my collagen levels?

people waste a third of their fucking lives sleeping and the doctors tell you that's "healthy".

?

i don't want to sleep for eight hours every fucking day. ugh.

what a fucking wasted night.

give me awakeness, alertness and sobriety.

or give me fucking death.

the life of a zombie isn't worth living.

:(.

i am exhausted when i want to be alert.

that is all.

i fucking hate being tired like this.

there is no purpose or value to sleep. it is literally the absence of existence, the absolute destruction of life.

give me a pill that ends sleep, and gives me my short, finite, meaningless life back.

i'm again convinced i've been drugged with some kind of "medication", and all i can do is say "fuck off, i don't want your filth.". but i'm back up and all i can do is try to stay awake.