ELEVATED LFTs by E.R. Tabios

Ugh. All I'm eating for three months are oatmeal, nuts, salad, fish, whole wheat toast and veggies.  Sounds healthy.  It is healthy (I feel better and without intention lost 7 pounds in the first week).  But said diet precludes wine wine wine, anything sweet, fruit, my normal meats, pastries ... and have I mentioned wine wine wine?  And the reason is my last blood tests showed slightly elevated LFTs and so moi doctor said go on this healthy diet for three months.  Then they'll test me again and, hopefully, ease up on some of the dietetic constraints.  On, say, wine wine wine ...

 

Naturally, I thought to create a mini-book on this matter (but of course!).  And this 3" x 2" book revolves around an item I didn't expect my doctor to recommend: dark chocolate.  I love chocolate but usually milk chocolate.  But I'm not now allowed on milk chocolate (too much sugar) but am allowed dark chocolate for its anti-oxidants.  Okey-dokey.  So, a mini-book! The title, of course, is ELEVATED LFTs.

 

And it began with trying to recycle yet another Holiday card -- these cards have such great cover stock quality.  I chose this one of three chickadees working together to decorate a Xmas tree because the decoration at hand is a gold star.  And I thought to reward moiself with a gold star for sticking with my new diet:

 

 

 

 

 

By the way, this book -- like others I'm creating -- are tinkering with ways to collage found material.  In the case of ELEVATED LFTs, I wanted to not incorporate any text "by" me.  This point-of-view relates to the larger poetics POV of language (thus content) not being the property of any individual author -- even when Shakespeare invented words/phrases (moithinks over 2,000 such inventions?), he couldn't retain ownership of them as retaining ownership would eliminate their raison d'etre as ... uh, language!  Am I digressing?  Okay ....

 

Here, then, is the front cover:

 

 

 

 

Open the book to its title page:

 

 

 

 

Turn the page to see the core of the content--the page being the packaging of emptied individual bars of dark chocolate:

 

 

 

 

The chocolates are Ghirardelli Intense Dark Twilight Delight with 72% Cacao:

 

 

 

 

Keep turning the pages to see the same thing: pages of recycled dark chocolate packaging:

 

 

 

 

Also recycled for the book's interior is a cut-out of one of the chickadees that I couldn't use on the cover.  I used this image because said chickadee looks sorta grumpy (doesn't she?), which mirrors moi mood on this diet:

 

 

 

 

So where shall healthier but grumpier Moi "shelve" moiself?  Well, this heart-ful twig chair has been looking lonely of late, so twig chair it is!