Perhaps we should abandon resolutions, if only to not make ourselves suffer more. One alternate pledge we might take up as we stare down 2025 might be to forgo the upright vows to spend hours on a treadmill or never eat sugar again, and attempt, instead, something like making peace with our own foibles and failures. This does not require us to stop seeing ourselves for the flawed beings that we are; merely to indulge those flawed beings every once in a while, or at the very least to keep their failures in proportion.
As I head into the new year, I have no shortage of opportunities to catalogue my own faults – and if I forget, there’s a chance some of my relatives will do so for me. But I hope to treat them as I might treat an old friend, one whom I can see clearly and still feel a certain warmth towards. There will be no moment in the coming year when any of us, I or you, are unburdened of our defects. Instead, we will keep on being what we have always been: irascible, messy, stubborn, selfish, lazy, impulsive and alive.
[…] By any reasonable standard, I have won life’s lottery. I grew up with two loving parents in a peaceful house. I’ve spent my whole career doing work that thrills me—writing for newspapers and magazines. I married the best woman I’ve ever known, Alix Felsing, and I love her more now than when my heart first tumbled for her. We’re blessed with strong families and a deep bench of friends. Our lives are full of music and laughter. I wouldn’t swap with anyone.
Except on those mornings when I wake up and take a long, naked look in the mirror. […]
I weigh 460 pounds.Those are the hardest words I’ve ever had to write. Nobody knows that number—not my wife, not my doctor, not my closest friends. It feels like confessing a crime. The average American male weighs about 195 pounds; I’m two of those guys, with a 10-year-old left over. I’m the biggest human being most people who know me have ever met, or ever will. […]
What the hell is wrong with me? […]
“Eat less and exercise.”That’s what some of you are saying right now. That’s what some of you have said the whole time you’ve been reading. That’s what some of you say—maybe not out loud, but you say it—every time you see a fat person downing fried eggs in a diner, or overstuffing a bathing suit on the beach, or staring out from one of those good-lord-what-happened-to-her? stories in the gossip magazines.“Eat less and exercise.” […]
Losing weight is a fucking rock fight. The enemies come from all sides: The deluge of marketing telling us to eat worse and eat more. The culture that has turned food into one of the last acceptable vices. Our families and friends, who want us to share in their pleasure. Our own body chemistry, dragging us back to the table out of fear that we’ll starve.
On top of all that, some of us fight holes in our souls that a boxcar of donuts couldn’t fill.
My compulsion to eat comes from all those places. I’m almost never hungry in the physical sense. But I’m always craving an emotional high, the kind that comes from making love, or being in the crowd for great live music, or watching the sun come up over the ocean. And I’m always wanting something to counter the low, when I’m anxious about work or arguing with family or depressed for reasons I can’t understand. […]
There’s a flight I want the man inside me to take. It doesn’t matter where it goes, as long as I’m in the middle seat. I want to sit there without flooding the banks of the armrests. I want the seat belt to click around my waist with an inch or two to spare. After that, I can bitch about the middle seat like everybody else. But I’d like to sit there and feel good about it. Just once.
4:05 a.m. I step up to find that my digital scale is still on the fritz. First a lost wifi-connection, which I fiddled with for 30 minutes yesterday. And now, it just flashes and stares at me. I step off and on again, but it will not read out my weight. Now if that’s not telling you Something...I stand on it, staring down at it, a few body movements away from heaving it out the 2nd floor window. I step off, stare at it again, and leave it alone (for now). I’m not done with you yet.
Here we go (again.) 799 (!) consecutive (almost) days on my daybreak walk to Cove Island Park. Like in a row.
Humid. Breezy. 72° F. Low tide. 25% cloud cover. Few humans. Magnifico.
I walk.
And, there she is. A Black-Crowned Night Heron. For some reason, I’ve being seeing these birds everywhere. Like they are plants by Someone or Something extraterrestrial trying to send me a message. Look at her dummy.Pause. Wait. Stand. Look. Watch. Contemplate. What’s the rush?
She’s certainly not my spirit bird, the cormorant. But the anti-me. So patient. So stoic. So calm. Standing there in water up to her ankles waiting for breakfast.
So, I do. I stare at her. But, there’s something else gnawing at me. It’s that super thin, long white plume growing from the back of her head.
And the question is why?
Who decided it needed to be white? And not blue, orange or black.
Why super-thin and not a feather?
Who decided there needed to be a plume at all?
And, of the billion things to look at this morning, why are you locked in on this plume?
Madness is the doubt of reason. Perhaps it ‘is’ reason. Who can prove it one way or the other?
Notes:
Photos from Daybreak walk at Cove Island Park this morning, @ 4:52 am. to 5:45 am. July 13, 2022, 72° F. More photos from this morning here.
Post title inspired by: “But for the man who watches the leaves trembling in the wind’s breath, the rivers meandering through the meadows, life twisting and turning and swirling through things, men living, doing good and evil, the sea rolling its waves and the sky with its expanse of lights, and who asks himself why these leaves are there, why the water flows, why life itself is such a terrible torrent plunging towards the boundless ocean of death in which it will lose itself, why men walk about, labor like ants, why the tempest, why the sky so pure and the earth so foul – these questions lead to a darkness from which there is no way out.” — Gustave Flaubert,Memoirs of a Madman and November (Hesperus Classics, 2003)
“By any reasonable standard, I have won life’s lottery. I grew up with two loving parents in a peaceful house. I’ve spent my whole career doing work that thrills me—writing for newspapers and magazines. I married the best woman I’ve ever known, Alix Felsing, and I love her more now than when my heart first tumbled for her. We’re blessed with strong families and a deep bench of friends. Our lives are full of music and laughter. I wouldn’t swap with anyone.
Except on those mornings when I wake up and take a long, naked look in the mirror…”
