Cheer me up cheer me up, I’m a miserable fuck.
Chasing the dream, I need better cardio
I’ve spent the past 5 months in a grey blanket. But maybe I’m not giving proper credit to these new people who have found there way into my world. Nostalgia and felicity are dangerous when dwelled on.
What I mean to say is I’m getting fat. At first I thought the bulge forming was a badge of honor. It has long been a sign that a wealthy man is often plump. Look at medieval kings, all fat and greasy and loud and rich. Even if they aren’t adored they are at least respected and revered. No one would dare call the king fat to his face for fear of the guillotine or the gallows or that thing with the spikes in it that looks like a casket. (Spanish king Al-Mansur would put criminals in iron boots, bound their hands and dangle them above fire, the flames would heat up the metal boots and scorch and singe the victims feet. I assume Al-Mansur would jerk off as he heard the screams. He would have had me killed if he read that. Hope I don’t run into him in hell.)
Back to my fatness, I thought it was charming and to the right eyes it is. But in the way a stinky bum with a funny joke is charming, tolerable but far away for desirable. When I sit down at my desk and scot my chair forward my stomach perches on the edge of the desk like a fat owl on an annoyed tree. My stomach is about 2 centimeters away from completely eclipsing the sight if my feet as I stand up. Its visible in my face too, although my mom denies it. My chin is doubling over so much that when I crane my neck back it folds and resembles that gross stretchy segment of dangling skin under a roster’s beak. Now if you haven’t seen me in a few months you’re probably thinking that I’ve blown up in size comparable to Jaba the hut or that slug thing form the first blade movie. I promise I’m not a blob or a balloon, but yesterday I noticed a crease over my dropping stomach and my pelvic bone could comfortably hold a pencil in between it. I’m actually embarrassed to admit but my arrogance formed a wall around that fact that I was wildly out of shape. The pre-existing zealous devotion I had formed around my face and its perfectly arched eyebrows and my zorro-eque mustache kept me from really being to embarrassed about my weight. I figured what an extra ten pounds when you look like Prince’s cousin?
It wasn’t until last week that I saw my gut as hindrance. As if my appetite wasn’t a sign of power but a tool of self-destruction. I saw it as if I had been eating my own life, devouring my soul. And my stomach acid was melting away burritos and whiskey, but instead it was putting out my fire. I realized that as I was picking a film of dirt out of my belly button and talking to a girl with spite in my voice. I’ve been in the practice of deprecation for a while now, but let me honestly tell you nothing makes you feel more like a piece of shit then looking down at your maternally inflated stomach as you try your hardest to break a heart that doesn’t deserve to be broken. I got off the phone feeling low and angry and dark and I looked at the wreck my room was in. The piles of clothes wrinkling on the floor, the stains on the carpet and the sheets, the curtain I hadn’t put up, the way the bed sheet rolled up on one side exposing the plastic wrapped mattress. The general disarray of my life reflected in my room. My dog shit soul had made a dog shit room, and all the way up on the 23rd with a room with a view too die for their lived a fat little brown boy who was eating away his own talent.
When alcohol and me first started going out back in 2008 it was always fresh and new. She was vibrant, wild, and spontaneously sexy. When we would meet at night, our lips would touch we felt infinite. Everyone around us was a painting on a wall, admirable but little more than decoration. She made bathroom floors feel like plush beds with satin sheets. The stars I had in my eyes for her have sense faded out and our love is now the relationship I have with booze is one purely based on sex. (Bad analogy, ever put your dick in gin? I have and it hurts.) But food gave me that feeling again, there is a subtle romance in a 3am trip to the refrigerator to heat up the double cheddar cheese bacon burger on pretzel bread you had from Bennigans. Food grants me that instant satisfaction that alcohol once did, and it was maddeningly beautiful reunion with a sensation I’d been chasing. It was medication. Medication for the anxiety I felt around these new people, and new ways, and slipping away from old ways, and turning 22, and bombing on stage, and feeling unsteadied and lonely and annoyed and foreign in my own body.
Sorry, that last bit was melodramatic, I’m forever emo. (Forever emu, always a bird.)
I’m a man child. I need the spiritual equivalent to a bib and a diaper. I’m a miserable fuck and I like it that way. All I need is a girl to cheer me up and a noteworthy amount of people who adore me for my art. I’m trying to chase my dream but I’m fat and my cardio sucks.
Norman Raine wrote; ‘An artist should remain true. Otherwise his talent, like his stomach, grows fat and stuffy.’ I haven’t necessary been myself this year and a huge part of that if because I haven’t been writing as much ass I should. I’ve been doing stand up, and while the connection between writing and stand up is clearly visible, I’m a way worse comedian than I am a decent writer. I love words, and while extracting laughs out of crowds is intoxicating, it’s not quite as rewarding as the scientific manipulation of words. The book I’m working on is in its infancy, my stand up is barely funny, and my brain is being dulled. I’ve been caught up in a bunch of spiritual bullshit. I’ve been over eating and under thinking. Writing is my mediation, except way cooler. (Mediation is kinda stupid. I tried it for awhile but all I did was spend an hour in the park every Thursday making fun of people.)
So this is me slicing a vein and finger painting in the blood. Here is me with no guard up, here is me fully and honestly, no more eating my life out of fear. Here are my words medicating me. Her is my art helping me, wiping my boogers, cleaning my finger nails. This is my art as my wheel chair and my girlfriend and my joint and my bottle and my……socks.
Don’t no body like cold feet.
