Kickass and cognitive functioning

Kickass, the doorstop dog, tries to be tolerant of the keeper’s preoccupation with aging, but sometimes it is a heavy going.  Take his—the keeper’s recent discovery of Dr. Tara Swart’s “3 simple habits that can protect your brain from cognitive decline.”  There was a bit of a dip in the keeper’s enthusiasm as the three “habits” were defined as, “Get your heart rate up, change your eating patterns and prioritize sleep.”  The keeper’s heart rate tends to be slow and steady but maybe he can fix that by switching his TV watching from NSNBC to FOX. Obviously his eating habits will need to eliminate at least one-half of his morning doughnut in the interests of rodent studies showing that reducing refined sugar in the diet will “reduce oxidative damage to brain cells.”  As for “prioritizing sleep.” Dr. Swart says sleep helps clean the brains “glymphatic system which flushes out the build-up of age-related toxins in the brain.” Sleep is an area the keeper thought that he managed well, but then when other aging systems began to wake him up at night and he could not get back to sleep for thinking about narcissistic rodents occupying the White House, he more or less lost his sleep control. So here’s the keeper’s keep-cognitive plan: jump up (and down) to turn off Fox news while gobbling down only one-half of a doughnut, and make behavioral changes so the bladder ceases to be the command organ during the night.

(See billstokesauthor.com for more Kickass and news of the novel Margaret’s War.)