My health is good. Borderline wonderful. Why? Good genetic material? Nope. Father had a heart attack at thirty-two, another at thirty-five, dead by forty. Had one cousin dead of heart failure at twenty-one.

I haven't had health insurance since 1981. That means that I'm stupid, or cheap, or that my boss does not provide it. (That guy is such an asshole!) (Oh, wait, I'm self-employed.) As the number of funerals in my family increased, I developed a "gonna die young, may as well have fun" attitude.

Then I had a wake-up call in the form of a son. Having an invalid father and a workaholic mother (the joke is that I pinned my own diapers), I decided that I was going to be a different parent in every way. Along with many other things, I became interested in health.

I am fortunate to have among my friends a naturopathic physician, a homeopathic physician, and several nurses. I had one MD, also, until I stole and married his wife. (That's a frightening tale!) So you want to drastically improve you health? Here what they all taught me. Most of the techniques belwo are cheap, while the most important one is free! And they all have to do with what goes in your mouth and comes out your ass.

1. Take your weight in pounds and divide it in half. Drink that number in ounces of water every day. Example: if you weigh two hundres pounds, drink one hundred ounces of water every day. That's about three quarts. This is the most important thing you can do, and it is free.
   
   
2. Now we deal in poo. Psyllium! Metamucil! Your colon is supposed to be a sewer pipe, not a cesspool. Once that slurry dumps out of the small intestine, other than vacuuming out the excess moisture, it needs to be gone. March those turds out of the asshole ASAP.
   
   
3. Yeast and bacteria. Most people have too much of one and not enough of the other. Yeasts eat sugars and belch carbon dioxide. While I love the smell of rising bread and brewing beer, fermenting turds? Not so much. People with itchy ass, extreme flatulence, foul-smelling poop, bloating, and almost everyone could be helped with 1) grapefruit seed extract and 2) acidophilus.

Total cost for all of this? Maybe ten dollars a month. And if everybody adhered to this, America would probably lose four billion pounds and save hundreds of billions of dollars. Althought not everyone will benefit -- your doctor, your undertaker, etc.