My Inspirational Fucking Thursday Afternoon

I'm old and fat and it's winning.

Last weigh-in I was 381 pounds. Twelve pounds shy of the biggest number I've ever carried. 

My back hurts. I can't walk more than a few minutes without it hurting more. 

I have a therapist and a psychiatric nurse practitioner and Duloxetine and an eating disorder therapist and an eating disorder group therapy and a physical trainer and a physical therapist and I am old and fat and it's winning. 

There is fight left in me, but there is no inspiration. No hope. There is a will to keep going because there is simply nothing else to do, but there is no hope. 

My physical therapists kept telling me "if it hurts stop doing it" then one day they started saying "well if hurts that isn't necessarily bad" so now I'm convinced they just want to get rid of me, because they know they can teach me more stretches than a rubber band and it won't help because I'll just keep getting fatter. 

No more OA. Know what someone said at OA?

They said if you're a longtime OA member, you have a responsibility to be physically fit to serve as an example to newcomers. 

Translation: If you're fat, stay home.

Aye, aye, fucker.

I'll fight. I'll lose the weight, somehow. 

But I'm going to be miserable. I'm going to be motherfucking miserable. 

You know. For variety's sake.

Thanos doesn't care about my ice cream

This morning I weigh 363.2 pounds. I think. My digital scale is like a slot machine. I have to get on it three times at least -- sometimes four or five -- just to get a consensus, just to get it to give me the same number more than once. This morning's 363.2 seems right.

I own one pair of shorts that fits, two pair of jeans (one with a split in the groin), and I've been cycling through the same 5 or 6 t-shirts for months. 

It's been a long time since I could stop myself from bingeing. 

OA helped me for a long time, but I don't know if I'm willing to go back. Too often, especially after my mother died, at best I felt completely disconnected from the people in the program. At worst, I felt betrayed. I know myself enough to know there's a good chance my feelings of distrust toward OA has more to do with my own bullshit than anything that anyone in OA has done. But at the same time, I know that no one I've met in OA -- should I ask them what they think -- is capable of telling me anything other than "OA is the answer." Or, you know, one of their goddamned slogans. 

I know I can write. I know I can walk. Maybe I don't need anything else. 

The first of the 12 steps was never a problem for me. "We admitted that we were powerless over food -- that our lives had become unmanageable." Yeah, sure, DUH. 

But after that?

"Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity."

"Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him."

Eh.

Tell a 12-stepper your problems with that and they will laugh knowingly. There's a lot of knowingly laughing in the 12 steps. In fact, a lot of times I think a lot of 12-steppers stay there just so they can keep laughing knowingly and pretend they're fucking Yoda.

In fact, after what? At least 7 years of being at least peripherally attached to OA, and I still have not had one person -- in spite of multiple requests -- even try to explain to me what turning my will over to a higher power means in a practical sense. No one. Not one. I tell them I don't understand and I get smug fucking knowing laughter. They have nothing else to offer. Or if they do, then they would just rather act superior.  

Like, what do I do? When I need to make an important decision, do I wait for "signs" from supernatural forces? Do I literally do nothing until I get some burning-bush-esque manifestation? 

Early in my OA recovery I told a woman I had struggled so hard the day before to fight against the urges to binge. She said, "well that's just it -- you don't fight the urge, you just turn it over." And I just said "yeah," like an idiot because I was too afraid to admit I had no idea what she meant. After 7 years, I still fucking don't. 

Because I can say, "I turn my will over to a higher power," sure. But then I can still buy the motherfucking ice cream! Fucking Thanos isn't going to show up and snap his fingers and make the ice cream disappear to balance the universe's ice cream population. So what does that mean? What does it mean to "turn it over?"

And after years and years and questions and questions I never got anything better than smug fucking knowing laughter. 

Well.

So apparently I'm angry at OA.

I don't know. I don't know what the point of this post was and I don't know if OA is in my future. 

I just know what I weigh and how I feel and that things have to change. 

So I'll do my best to not hurt myself with food today. Tomorrow I'll let you know how it went.

This Is Here

I went for a walk today and I don't know if it was an act of courage, but it is something I feared. I don't know if it was because of Covid or social anxiety or the voice that always reminds me of the jiggling fat I have on display, but as desperate as I was to get outside my apartment and move, I wanted to do anything but. 

I took a half hour walk on the Mohawk Hudson Hike-Bike Trail. The few times I've taken walks during the pandemic, it's always been disappointing. Watervliet is safe, relatively inexpensive, and as scenic as the back of a strip mall. So I thought the trail would be a nice change. Nature. Fresh air. All that silly hippy shit.

The trail is far from idyllic, at least not where I entered in Watervliet. The traffic of 787 screams by on one side. And whatever sounds the Hudson makes on the other, you can't hear it. There are overpasses and helicopters and asphalt. 

I committed myself to a half hour walk. The plan was to walk 15 minutes down the trail, and then turn around to head back to the car. 

I'm not sure when I started crying. 

Really, it started as soon as I got to the parking lot. The trees block any clear view of the river while you're on the trail--at least the small part of the trail I walked. But you can see the Hudson from the parking lot and it was gorgeous in the sunlight. I was overcome with this stupid sense of wonder, as if I hadn't known this living wet thing hugged every corner of my hometown since I was a child. It was as if a voice was telling me, "this is here, this has always been here. You just haven't shown up."

On the trail I said hello to people who walked or biked from the opposite direction. I didn't feel anger toward any of them. Under the extra weight I lose and regain and lose and regain, my ankles hurt and my back hurt and my knee hurt. 

And at some point I started crying into the sweaty back of one hand, still walking, wiping my eyes and looking down when any new hikers or bikers showed up. Everything hurt, but I didn't cry from pain. It was pleasantly warm and the air was hot and sweet. 

I thought of the dark rooms that have been my home for the past year, and how at some point I truly believed I would never be able to feel the sun like I did on the trail or breathe the air like I did on the trail. I thought about that early August day in 2016, five days or so after they carved the cancer out of me. When my girlfriend at the time drove us out of the hospital parking garage, we passed under the bridge from the garage to the main hospital, and I said "I never thought I would see any of this again."

I thought about walking. Just walking. How many times I felt better just walking. How many times in high school, friendless and with nothing else to do, I walked for 6 hours at a time in Albany, my pockets fat with tapes for my walkman (because yes, that's how long ago it was). I thought about how far the Hobbits walked, and the books that made me want to be a writer. I thought about my mom in her hospital room saying that on the picture on the wall in front of her--of a road leading off into the distance through a forest--she had seen a man at the end of the road and that she knew he was waiting for her. 

I thought "This is here." This sun, the water, the sweet grass and the birdsong. It's here, all here, and it has been here. I have been hiding in my apartment and this has been here. As the walking kept making every part of me hurt, it occurred to me I could keep coming back to this place and that someday soon, I might finally feel like myself again. And every now and then on the trail I cried a little more. 

I saw things that were things I had seen before. I saw a boy feeding grateful ducklings, bobbing in the little waves like Titanic survivors waiting for rescue. I saw a bird as red as new candy. On the way back, through the trees, I saw a still finger of water reaching inland from the river flanked by handsome, almost flat rocks. It was nothing I hadn't seen before, but this time I cared. 

Fifteen minutes was up when I reached the Menands Bridge. There were trolls beneath it, or Mad-Max-ish raiders in spiked football gear like in the post-apocalyptic video games I've spent so much time with this year. I turned around and headed back. Lighter.

Letter to Mom, from an Emergency Room, with a giant fucking spider nearby

 Hey Mom. I'm ready to talk. 

Mom you're dead and I am who I am. Unlike my best friend, I commune with nothing in nature. I don't believe in God or ghosts or, really, you. I believe you are gone, Mom. Your final lesson to me. Maybe your worst, maybe your most important. Your body, your corpse, your meat, the thing that used to house you and was now like an impostor, like a doppleganger from an alternate universe containing everything that was you except the most basic unknowable stuff, it taught me that once you died there was no you. No spirit. No ghost. No soul drifting off to reward or punishment. 

I am talking to you like a poet. I'm sorry. 

No. No, fuck that. You're dead and I am who I am. I'll talk to you, finally, in whichever voice I choose. 

My girlfriend is snoring, Mom. She's in a bed in the emergency room of Samaritan Hospital. She needs her appendix removed and I'm here to offer whatever my presence can offer. She loves me, Mom. I love her. I'm going to marry her. 

I am split on whether or not you would like her. I'm not sure I care. Maybe I obviously care but I just don't want to. I don't know. You left me a fucking mess, Mom. 

Should I call you Grace now instead of Mom? Would that help with something? Would the practice help me to see you eye to eye rather than the looming presence you have always been?

You left me a fucking mess, Mom. Your death changed everything. Your death is a great, invisible spike in a graph measuring the certainty that no matter how much growth or success I achieve, I will always fuck it up. As Trent Reznor sings, no matter how many chances I get, no matter how many blessed rebirths, I will "keep myself. I will find a way."

My art teacher warned me. 

I don't remember her name.

Every other writer is better than me. Every other writer remembers intimate, almost sensual details of every person in their dumb life. Or they simply learn the skill of lying about it. I prefer to believe the latter, but that may only be because of my shortcomings. 

I had an art teacher in grade school. I pissed her off all the time. I don't remember her name. I recall long, stringy gray hair and glasses. I remember her being tall and thin, but everyone was tall and thin to me when I was in grade school.

I pissed her off because I ended every assignment the same way. No matter what we were supposed to draw or color in, my creations would always end up being visited by a giant, poorly drawn spider that would cover everything in the drawing with what I called "webs." Rather than webs, it was just me scribbling madly over everything I created, regardless of whether or not I'd managed to make houses and dogs and trees better than I ever had before. Everything would end up buried under a massive, chaotic cloud of scribbles without rhyme or reason. And whenever the art teacher asked me what happened, I just told her a giant spider showed up and shot webs over everything. That pissed her off. Or maybe it didn't.

But that was me. That was perhaps the closest I got to being a fortune teller. I could build a kingdom and it will eventually collapse not from invaders, economic calamity, or natural disaster. It will fall by my hand, and for no other conscious reason other than something inside me cannot allow things that should be to exist. Not in my life. 

I'm getting ahead of myself maybe. I don't know. 

I'm just here to say I'm ready.

Every day is another day closer to financial ruin. Every day is another day closer to physical collapse because of the weight I have regained. Every day is another day closer to the kind of regrettable but otherwise manageable medical emergency my girlfriend is experiencing, that for me will be like a tornado hitting a sitting pond of liquid shit because I don't have insurance. 

Every day is another day closer to not sitting on the fence anymore, to the day when I stop living in the mental health purgatory of not being suicidal coupled with the reality of being unable to cope with being alive. Every day is another day closer to finally killing myself. 

I don't want any of that, and I'm finally ready to act. 

I did not intend to say all of this to you, Mom. I'm not sorry I did, but I didn't intend for it. Not this soon, and not so chaotically. That giant fucking spider is always nearby. 

All I meant to say is that we need to talk. And I don't know how to commune. I don't walk between worlds in which I don't believe. 

This is the closest I can do, Mom. The thing for which you and Dad have placed no value. My writing. This is the best I can do. And I need to do it because I really need to speak with you, and there's no other way. 

I have shit to do. We'll talk later.

Ghosts are not a thing

I know bullies.

I hate the word. You know that? Hate it. Can't stand it. Bullies. Sounds childlike. It sounds inconsequential. It sounds like a thing a real person should be able to effortlessly brush aside with no help, other than perhaps the aid of an '80s workout montage. Bully. I didn't have bullies. They didn't steal my fucking milk money. They made every day, every hallway, every stairway, every room a living fucking hell. Bullies. They weren't bullies. They were the terrorists of my life. The terrorists of my youth. They are still with me. They send me friend requests and even if they don't, they would still be with me. My mother is gone. My mother is over two years gone and my mother does not speak to me, does not impart wisdom, but my bullies are still here. Mick, you are nothing. Mick, you are fat. Mick, who wouldn't be better without the burden of you?

My mother does not speak to me but the bullies do, and it's probably just as well because I don't know how different her words would be. My mom might say my full name. You know. For effect. 

My mother is gone and my mother does not speak to me. Where is she? Where did she go? What is she now? What would she say to me, if she could? All you ghost hunters and psychics, why do you not channel my mother's words to me? Why doesn't my mother move shit in the kitchen in the middle of the night and whisper shit to me while I'm asleep? "Mick, the lottery number is 2342." Or "Mick, buy MudGum stock, it's going to go fucking crazy." Or "Mick, I know you think I didn't love you, but I did. I still do. I hate that you don't think I loved you. I endured a lot, Mick and it changed me. It made me not always say the best things, but I need you to know now that I loved you. I always loved you. I never thought you were a mistake. I never thought you were a monster. I never thought you were something I wished I'd flushed even though I spoke to you like everything you did and said and thought was nothing but a curse against me." 

But you motherfuckers can record ghosts whispering shit in 50 year old prisons. Sure. Sell that shit with a bridge.

I am drunk. And this should be accounted for. 

Do you know when this goddamned pandemic is over nothing will change for me? Nothing. I was a shut-in when it started and I will be a shut-in when it's over. I am the guy in Seven, or Se7en, or however the fuck they spell it. I am the first victim. I am fat. It is alright to hate me. I am fat. Brad Pitt will talk shit over my slaughtered corpse. Morgan Freeman will show a modicum of tact. And the M.E. will be, like, "see how big this stomach is?" And everyone will be thinking, "Well, no shit."

I am getting more drunk now. 

This blog, when I envisioned it, would be my triumphant return from the land of self destruction. I don't know if that's possible. I don't know if I'll ever be able to stop killing myself. I keep trying. I climb steps and read books and I just don't know, man. I think I'm doomed. I mean, we're all doomed, aren't we? We can jog and go to 12 step meetings and do yoga and mediate and shop local and eat organic and one day some motherfucker checks his facebook notifications at the wrong intersection and then you are nothing. You are vapor. You are memories. We're all fucking doomed. We're all heading to the same place and that's no place at all. 

It's POSSIBLE I have had too much to drink. BUT YOU SHOULD BE IMPRESSED BY MY LACK OF TYPOS GODDAMMIT.

What can I tell you that you don't know? What can I tell you that I will regret telling you tomorrow?

Before pandemics and riots, before covid and calamity, there were more days than I want to admit that I would drive to my job on 787 and, occasionally? I would close my eyes. And just drift. But not long enough apparently.

I'm still here. Don't reach out to me. It is futile. I am hopeless. I'll still be around decades from now, more miserable and equally eloquent. 

This is a blog. 

Most of the time I won't be drunk. But this time I am. Because I can't stand life, man. I just can't. Someone teach me how to not hate myself. Someone force me to not hate myself. 

Fuck you Kurt. You got to quit at 27.

I have cats. They can't survive without me. 

Ghosts are bullshit. Please tell me ghosts are bullshit. Either ghosts are bullshit or the universe hates me. What did Ebenezer Scrooge ever do to deserve ghosts? If I'm stingy about coal or whatever, will I get ghosts? NO MORE COAL TINY TIM YOU TINY FUCK. I want to talk to my mom. 

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