(Carlos Amoedo)
Up long before the sun again. We are heading towards daylight savings time, or away from it. I can never remember which is the one that is "wrong" in relation to UT. Selavy will be disappointed in my lack of complete and total knowledge pertaining to orbital chronology. My zodiacal predictions will no longer be safe from his celestial scrutiny. Oh well...
My whole life has been a fluctuation back and forth between various things: time, money, love, fitness, other things that I can not now recall.
I will title my personal essay this morning, "5 warning signs that you might have already forgotten that you have Alzheimer's..." It might help increase traffic to the site, though sadly they would not remember having been here. I want to shoot a Christopher Nolan Memento-style film about a guy who wanders around the hallway of his apartment building, pooping his pants, not really knowing why. I'll call it "Remento"...
There's something wrong with me.
I joined a gym yesterday, a real gym. You know it right when you walk in. It smells like sweat and there are very few women working out in there, if any. It is a place to work-out, not exercise. It is not a health or fitness center, it's a gym. But it was relatively cheap, $35 a month with no contract. I plan on getting my money's worth. So far I've been every day since I joined. Two days, I mean. But I've pumped out a couple 10 minute miles and struggled with a few modern torture and humiliation devices.
I am completely covered in sweat within 5 minutes of walking into the place. There is no air conditioning. It is that type of a place. The front door is always open and there is a big floor fan there, a guy sitting on a stool, nodding to everybody that walks by. I didn't get a card with my picture and a bar code on it when I joined, I got a handshake from the owner, Juan. He told me not to worry about the rest of the month, my first month will start in September. I like him already.
Something had to be done though, and nobody else was prepared to do it. Nobody else had the cojones. Most of my friends had stopped calling me "fat." Commercials would often make me cry for no reason. I dreamed each night of ice cream. When I would awake I just wanted to go back to sleep and be alone in the dream.
But once you're fat everything works against you. It's like a monster that has to be fed. It takes more beer to enjoy a slight buzz, compounding the problem. It is difficult to fight it all off. None of my clothes fit and I won't buy new ones. I have been telling myself that "I'm on the way back down" for about a year now.
I've ballooned up to 226 lbs, dwarfing everything around me. Kids will step off of the sidewalk and watch me pass, their little eyes filled with wonder and fascination, clutching their skateboards in fear. I've started stepping from side to side instead of having a steady gait forward. Each step is a claimed and earned victory. I look like I'm wearing a children's pool safety float around my waist. Sometimes I'll wear brightly colored shirts just to accent the visual simile. When having sex it seems that Rachel needs to be rescued when it's over. Sometimes I can sense her fear. I'll get distracted and wonder what it looks like from above, picturing her skinny arms and legs coming out from the sides, scrambling for air as I collapse, both of us right on the verge of calling for help.
The last time we went skiing they pulled me aside, out of everybody in our group, and asked me to stay "near the base of the mountain," for "everybody's safety." They handed me a stack of drink tickets and slid me over towards the bar and left me.
The only thing worse than being fat is being fatter, or older, or both.
But I know how these things work. Yes, metabolism plays a big part in it. But you must burn more calories than you ingest. Sounds easy, right? The difficult part to contend with is that you can never go back to being young again. Ever. I've tried. All that you can do is exercise so that the chemicals that make you happy get released in greater abundance.
"Nothing tastes as good as being thin feels." (dubiously attributed to Kate Moss)
Here I am playing "fetch" with the dog, Barkley. Up until yesterday it was the most exercise I had done in months.
(Carlos Amoedo)
I am the rather large object on the left of the image. For comparative purposes there is a normal-sized human, Olivia, near the center foreground of the image. You can see my dilemma, it is all there, wrapped around me, cutting off my blood supply, demanding to be fed sausage. Now, I intentionally chose a picture that reveals the extent of the damage done. Were it not for my exceptionally developed calf muscles then my legs might have broke attempting this maneuver. It is truly hideous.
Ok, I am just kidding here. I don't know where else to go with this and if I take it too far people will assume I'm being serious. Here is a sentence that I had to cut out from above, knowing that it would get me in some kind of trouble: "I don't eat McDonalds because I like the food. There's this girl that works the morning shift there that I'm trying to bang."
See? Nothing but real trouble from imaginary sources.
I am comfortably rotund, but currently hoping to shed a few pounds, that's all. To get below 200 is my permanently stated goal.
That, and to forever remain 26 years old, or less.
.
