Krunkie McKrunkface
Kava Connoisseur
I am grateful that kava did not come looking for me until I was ready for it, otherwise I might have missed out on it.
For me it was odd, and fortunate, and a fluke.
Since the recession I've been shopping at "salvage grocery" places, of which there seem to be fewer these days as the recession gradually disappears in our rear-view mirror. The best thing for me was all these gourmet stores in strip malls in California built next to planned developments that sold but never even got built back in CA liquidated all their stock when they went under at pennies on the dollar and bizarre amazing stuff started showing up in my midwest for almost nothing, in part because people had no idea what they were selling.
Anyway, just after Christmas at one of the few salvage grocery stores still going, where I regularly buy perfectly good Italian, German, Swiss, etc coffees at $3 or $4 a pound or so, I saw in their coffee section three packages of Wakacon Lawena they were selling for $15/lb, but it was a day they were having a storewide sale, 20% off everything. They often have Amazon returns for sale there (that's what Amazon does when you return a product, they liquidate it by selling for pennies to wholesalers and salvage merchants, obviously someone had read an article, bought four pounds, tried it once and threw up and returned the other three). I assumed they must have thought because of the similarity in names kava was some sort of coffee, but because it was selling for 4 or 5 times what people normally pay it sat there unsold, waiting for me. Specifically for me, knowing I was coming.
My wife has suffered, and I mean suffered, for some years from mild anxiety and insomnia, and she has faced trying to deal with it in ways that didn't work or were hard core roads down which she did not want to go, for many good reasons. Anyway, success eluded her and we were getting kind of desperate. I remembered hearing about kava in the past, especially in the gold rush days of the 90's but had dismissed it for a number of now comical but all-too classic reasons, but for $12 a pound, when we were desperate, I decided to give it a try.
So I took it home and we both tried a small amount. The only thing I noticed was a slight apparent ability to focus my thoughts a tiny bit better, and the interesting mouth numbing effects, and also noticed it didn't seem so bad, but then we started reading up on it very fast. I realized by price research that $12 a pound for Fijian noble was a pretty darn good deal, so she rushed out (the store was a half hour drive away) to get the other two pounds before the store shut and the sale would be over, also before anyone else who knew what it was might snatch up what is an incredible deal. Yes, folks, I got my first three pounds of good Fijian Noble kava for a total of $36.
But then, of course, we were stuck with three pounds and were either committed to really giving this a good try (which our desperation ensured) or throwing it out (and our cheapness and unwillingness to throw away $36 without giving it a good try, a damn good try, kind of ruled that one out).
And so we plugged away at it for a month on small doses, one or two TBS a day, feeling almost nothing and fairly convinced everything we read was accountable by a very powerful placebo effect, perhaps made more convincing by the foul taste and the numbing.
Except I started getting amazing dreams, which then inspired me to try to get krunk. I upped the dose.... nothing. I upped the dose again even more.... nothing. I got determined, I was just going to keep upping the dose until I got krunk, before I gave up. Well, guess what? Oh, you already have. I got krunk.
And then I got krunk some more. Then some more. And I kept getting krunk for a couple of months, not noticing anything happening beyond the blissful krunk. But gradually a large number of beneficial effects started to accumulate, things I'd never even imagined could be possible, most notably, the chronic inflammatory condition I've suffered from for the past 50 years, Unspecified Spondyloarthropathy which in my case is tied to the HLA-B27 genetic marker, so it is essentially a birth defect, , with a bizarre cornucopia of annoying and often painful and debilitating symptoms, cleared up. For me it was like a miracle. This stuff gets you krunk and fixes everything that's wrong with you. OK, I'm in.
And that's my story, except that it is still continuing, still getting better and better.
For me it was odd, and fortunate, and a fluke.
Since the recession I've been shopping at "salvage grocery" places, of which there seem to be fewer these days as the recession gradually disappears in our rear-view mirror. The best thing for me was all these gourmet stores in strip malls in California built next to planned developments that sold but never even got built back in CA liquidated all their stock when they went under at pennies on the dollar and bizarre amazing stuff started showing up in my midwest for almost nothing, in part because people had no idea what they were selling.
Anyway, just after Christmas at one of the few salvage grocery stores still going, where I regularly buy perfectly good Italian, German, Swiss, etc coffees at $3 or $4 a pound or so, I saw in their coffee section three packages of Wakacon Lawena they were selling for $15/lb, but it was a day they were having a storewide sale, 20% off everything. They often have Amazon returns for sale there (that's what Amazon does when you return a product, they liquidate it by selling for pennies to wholesalers and salvage merchants, obviously someone had read an article, bought four pounds, tried it once and threw up and returned the other three). I assumed they must have thought because of the similarity in names kava was some sort of coffee, but because it was selling for 4 or 5 times what people normally pay it sat there unsold, waiting for me. Specifically for me, knowing I was coming.
My wife has suffered, and I mean suffered, for some years from mild anxiety and insomnia, and she has faced trying to deal with it in ways that didn't work or were hard core roads down which she did not want to go, for many good reasons. Anyway, success eluded her and we were getting kind of desperate. I remembered hearing about kava in the past, especially in the gold rush days of the 90's but had dismissed it for a number of now comical but all-too classic reasons, but for $12 a pound, when we were desperate, I decided to give it a try.
So I took it home and we both tried a small amount. The only thing I noticed was a slight apparent ability to focus my thoughts a tiny bit better, and the interesting mouth numbing effects, and also noticed it didn't seem so bad, but then we started reading up on it very fast. I realized by price research that $12 a pound for Fijian noble was a pretty darn good deal, so she rushed out (the store was a half hour drive away) to get the other two pounds before the store shut and the sale would be over, also before anyone else who knew what it was might snatch up what is an incredible deal. Yes, folks, I got my first three pounds of good Fijian Noble kava for a total of $36.
But then, of course, we were stuck with three pounds and were either committed to really giving this a good try (which our desperation ensured) or throwing it out (and our cheapness and unwillingness to throw away $36 without giving it a good try, a damn good try, kind of ruled that one out).
And so we plugged away at it for a month on small doses, one or two TBS a day, feeling almost nothing and fairly convinced everything we read was accountable by a very powerful placebo effect, perhaps made more convincing by the foul taste and the numbing.
Except I started getting amazing dreams, which then inspired me to try to get krunk. I upped the dose.... nothing. I upped the dose again even more.... nothing. I got determined, I was just going to keep upping the dose until I got krunk, before I gave up. Well, guess what? Oh, you already have. I got krunk.
And then I got krunk some more. Then some more. And I kept getting krunk for a couple of months, not noticing anything happening beyond the blissful krunk. But gradually a large number of beneficial effects started to accumulate, things I'd never even imagined could be possible, most notably, the chronic inflammatory condition I've suffered from for the past 50 years, Unspecified Spondyloarthropathy which in my case is tied to the HLA-B27 genetic marker, so it is essentially a birth defect, , with a bizarre cornucopia of annoying and often painful and debilitating symptoms, cleared up. For me it was like a miracle. This stuff gets you krunk and fixes everything that's wrong with you. OK, I'm in.
And that's my story, except that it is still continuing, still getting better and better.
