"Clean Living?"

[Context of the scene: Dave is an ex-con, imprisoned for tax evasion, who's begun to hang out with skateboarders down the road from his housesitting job. He sees them mostly as hard partying punks, rather than athletes. Steve is a competitive skater; Dave, Steve, Bobby and others have traveled to attend a skating competition in Houston.]

When he woke up again, it was light. The digital readout on the tv said 7:30. Steve’s bed was empty. Dave put on his jeans and went outside to look at the morning. He heard a car start on the street behind the motel and then saw Steve in the parking lot, warming up. He was in shorts, socks, and tennis shoes, touching his toes. Dave nodded to him, unsure of where they stood.

Steve nodded back. “Want to run some?”

“I haven’t got anything to wear.”

“Those sneakers you had on last night’ll work. I’ll loan you some shorts. Come on.”

They ran south along the 59 access road, past an orange-and-white Whataburger and a giant supermarket called the Fiesta Mart. Steve kept the pace down to where Dave could handle it. He was the closest to cheerful Dave had ever seen him. “This isn’t how I pictured you,” Dave said.

“I don’t recommend this for everybody,” Steve said. “Somebody like Bobby, he’s probably got to keep fucking himself up for a few more years. That’s cool. You need that too. I’m not sorry I did all that when I was a kid. It’s just, after a while the engine starts to miss. You get tired of feeling poisoned all the time.”

“Clean living?”

“A joint or a beer every now and then won’t hurt you. Even that doesn’t get me off like it used to.”

—Lewis Shiner, Slam (1990), pp. 139-140 [emphasis mine].

Freaky

First I’d like to apologize to any of my readers who may have been concerned about me based on my recent blog posts. I can get very negative when I’m writing online; and blogging (as well as tweeting, etc.) tends to open up the floodgates of my psyche, similar to having a beer or two at the bar. I think it’s all part of exorcising (exercising?) my demons. And being a queer kid raised by religious fundamentalists, I can assure you they are Legion. Nevertheless, like the Tao, my personality has ebbs and flows, and I never stay in bout of downer-ness for very long.

Thankfully, I’m able to get the appropriate kicks in the ass from various sources. Last night, it was watching the movie Chronicle (finally) and an episode of CSI called “Freaks and Geeks” that slapped some sense into me.

I’d forgotten my core values, especially valuing my own inherent weirdness. I’d taken getting older as a command to settle down and embrace blandness. I’d let being irritated by a few freaks over the years convince me I was inherently bourgeois, when the truth is that not only do a few freaks irritate me now and again: everybody irritates me sooner or later, so there’s no call for me to dismiss any set of people categorically, nor force myself to conform to one set based on the dismissal of another. Along the way I lost the sense of my own beautiful weirdness, my own call to be different, unique.

My calling is to solidify, then transcend my Self. My calling is to finally learn the compassion for others I did not learn as a child.

Five Years Free

Later this month I'll be celebrating— in my own quiet way (or so I hope)— 5 years of real freedom. My last relationship died just after Labor Day in 2006, but I remained living with my former LTR until mid-August of 2007, to give myself time to build a cash reserve (among other things). Some really great friends helped me move, buy furniture and set up my home in my current space. It was the beginning of real freedom.

I love my home. I love my space, my privacy and my stuff in it, especially my library. I love my animal companion, Manuel, whom I adopted less that a year after moving in. I love my home because I've turned it into a refuge, one that is rarely intruded upon. I love the fact, also, that it is conveniently located near adequate shopping, socializing and entertainment resources. I have a good place to live, and I hope I get to keep it for a long, long time.

Nothing short of a miracle or a disaster would induce me to move at this point. I'm not counting on the former, and I'm hoping and praying to avoid the latter.

Losing Weight, Gaining Gracefulness

Today on the lifehacker site there is an article titled How I Lost 100 Pounds by James Golick. The article is very on point, and stresses some of the same dietary basics that paleo does, namely: avoid starches, sugars and processed foods, and stick mostly to meats, seafood, fruit and vegetables. He tried various diets, including forms of vegetarianism, but this method has worked the best for him.

I especially appreciated this paragraph from the article:

Losing weight requires an enormous amount of motivation. You're going to have to change your lifestyle and make real sacrifices. It's going to be hard. Motivation will help you continue to justify the changes you've made, and prevent you from slipping back in to old habits.

I’m examining motivations in my life as well. So far, again, the strongest motivation for me is to be different, to be unlike the average denizen of the United States, with his daily bucket of fried chicken and Cinnabon visits. Not that I can never have those things; but such indulgences should be very rare, and therefore all the more enjoyable. I want to visibly appear different from these people. Not just in physique, but in carriage.

I work near Union Station, and sometimes go there during the day. I can generally tell red staters from locals, and both from Europeans. Red staters plod and waddle; locals stride briskly; Europeans glide. The Euro-glide is something to see. I guess it helps not to have grown up in a culture originated by Christian Puritans.

Of course, the question then becomes: as I begin to appear different from the average estadosunidense, as I begin to look thinner and to carry myself with greater grace, whom do I want to see me? Where do I go to show the world who I am? Because isn’t that too part of the motivation?

Unstarched

After sticking diligently to the paleo diet for one day, I already feel better. I woke up not feeling quite so ‘poisoned’. I’d noticed a few days back, while still eating whatever I wanted, that I felt awful in the mornings, regardless of whether I’d had any alcohol the day before. I realized it was the starches that were making me feel bad. And again, after trying the paleo for just one day, I feel better. How did I ever let myself forget that?

Starches are like drugs: I feel better right after eating them, but I feel much worse in the long run. After I get back into the paleo groove for a while, of course I’ll allow myself an ‘off’ meal from time to time (otherwise, I’d have difficulty ever eating away from home); but I hope I never fall off the wagon so completely again.

As I mentioned yesterday, the issue really revolves around motivation. I want to feel better, and be able to be more active. But the ideas of ‘feeling better’ and ‘being more active’ lack the deep emotional resonance and power that will keep me on the paleo path. ‘Feeling good’ sounds great on paper, but the actual quality of feeling good is subtle, not some constant, overwhelming mood of ecstasy. Therefore while feeling good is definitely one of the best reasons for sticking to this diet, it lacks the emotional ‘oomph’ to keep me at it day in and day out.

What would provide that ‘oomph’? Feeling sexy would be great, if I could somehow manifest that feeling of sexiness without actually having to deal with sex itself.* If I could feel sexy within myself without having to pursue outward expressions to bolster that feeling, I’d be fine with that.

Another motivation, one that may sound a little heartless, is enjoying not being like the average US citizen. When Mr. and Mrs. Redstate Fatass go waddling through the tourist areas of DC, I tell myself I really, really do not want to be like them. I really, really want to stand out from them, and be physically and spiritually different from them. I know this carries the odor of superiority and elitism, but I find it also has a lot of emotional resonance with me. So long as I don’t follow those thoughts down the path to heartlessness, perhaps I will be okay.

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*This will require a long explanation, which I’ll postpone for later.

I Need Better Motivation

I opened a new calendar today. I used to get “August-to-August” calendars all the time, but stopped a few years back. Recently I decided to start using them again. They recall to me the school year, and its implied sense of a time period in which to get things done. I make plans for what to do during the colder months (although I don’t often follow through with them), and I try to end up better in the spring and summer.

Last fall I started losing weight, and I did very well for a while there. I lost a lot of weight. But the weight has been creeping back up, largely due to the fact I haven’t been sticking to the diet. There were several factors for this, but the main one simply is this: I lost my motivation. I had several motives for losing weight, but the strongest (albeit largely unacknowledged) motivation was that losing weight would help me look good so I could attract a mate.

When that didn’t pan out the way I had wanted, I lost the motivation to keep on track. I had not realized how much of my drive to lose weight had been motivated by the desire to find a partner. Not knowing my real motivation—and more importantly, not knowing the inherent insubstantiality of the real motivation—led me to go off track, and to start putting weight back on.

So I need to have real motivation to lose weight. Something that comes from within me, is not dependent on others for the expression of results, and carries an emotional component (in order to involve my whole self in it, and not just my intellect).

Fortunately, I’ve caught myself before I put all the weight back on, and I’m still significantly smaller than I was a year ago.

Five Years In

Next month will mark the fifth anniversary of my move to my current home. I cannot overstate the significance of this move for my life. I was finally escaping a bad homelife, and moving away from a place of degradation and impoverishment. I am extremely grateful, to this day, to the friends who helped me make the move, and helped me set up my new home.

I don't really recall what my plans were for myself once I moved in. I think I had planned to eventually get a cat (which I did), and to start dating again (which I've done, but in a limited fashion—more below). I'd planned to do more in-home entertaining, which I did for about a year-and-a-half, but that's gone by the wayside, and now my apartment is organized almost completely around the needs of myself and Manuel.

I've thoroughly settled in, and despite a massive clean-out last winter, I'm still overburdened with stuff that would be a challenge for me to move. In fact, it would take a miracle or a disaster to get me out of that place now. Even though my rent has increased a little each year, it's still much more reasonable than the alternatives.

As for going out on dates and such, I haven't done nearly as much in the last five years as I had thought I would do. Last year I did see one man very casually, and frankly I enjoy that friendship very much because it is so casual. With him, it seems, my affection for him is tempered by my love for him, in that the affection would have me cling tightly, whereas my love has me cheering, from the sidelines, for his freedom, development and independence. And that's all I'm going to say about this at this time. He's a sweetheart, and deserves everything he can grasp from the world, and then some.

As for the future, well, I'm not getting any younger. But I'm happy in my home with my cat. We'll have to see what miracles/disasters wait around the corner.