My friend Eddie has a broken heart. He showed it to me this afternoon. Yes, this afternoon I stood in Eddie's garage and looked at his broken heart in all its formaldehyde goodness.

We were driving down to Vermont for lunch today when he mentioned the broken heart. I pondered this. I asked him to assure me that it was an animal heart. It was not. I let him know I was insanely icked out by it and there was no way I was ever going to look at the thing.

Several hours later half a litre of fine merlot was coursing through my veins. I'm sure that there's no connection between that and me standing in Eddie's garage looking at a dead body bit.

Never let it be said alcohol influences my judgement.

He showed me the calcium deposits that make up hardening of the arteries. It looks just like bone, mostly because bone is pretty much made up of calcium. I had no idea that was what hardening of the arteries meant. Imagine growing bone-like stuff in your heart. We stared solemnly at the icky yellow deposits of fat that help clog things. This was the heart of someone who had croaked from heart disease.

I was so very icked out. Actually, we were both icked out. Eddie is as ambivalent about the thing as I am, which is why it wasn't in his house. He wanted it to make a point, but he's as intimidated by it as I am, I think.

Eddie is obsessed with heart disease mostly because a lot of it is preventable--a lot of it boils down to what we eat. He runs a web site about it, he attends nutrition-focussed medical conferences, he writes letters to learned medical and nutrition journals. Researchers at these conferences actually recognize him.

One of these researchers gave Eddie his very own broken human heart. He's going to take pictures so people can see what happens when you goop up your system with a crappy diet, kind of like those gunky lung pictures they use to try to terrorize smokers.

You know, if you had asked me yesterday what I'd be doing today, I can confidently state that I never, ever would have answered, "Well, I think I'll go look at a body bit a friend is keeping in his garage."

Yep, sometimes I even surprise myself.

--Marn

Mileage on the Marnometer: 254.74 miles (409.9 kilometers)
Goal for 2003: 500 miles - 804.5 kilometers