There seems to be no upper limit to how much my sleep habits can improve with the assistance of blessed medicinals. I'm not exaggerating. I went to bed last night around 8pm, though not with the explicit intention of sleeping right away. I watched a few things online, girls dancing in their underwear, and then started to feel dopey around 9pm, finally succumbing to sweet slumber. I awoke briefly around 11pm to make water and eat an ice cream cone without washing my hands. My next sensation arrived at 6am in the form of sunlight illuminating the backside of my blinds.
Even if we disregard the first two hours as not being genuine sleep, there is still the seven solid hours to consider, if considering my sleep is your cup of tea, or its steward: sympathy.
Do not worry about me eating ice cream in the dark of the night. It is official now. I have lost ten pounds. This puts me back at the weight that I was about three months ago when I was as heavy as I've ever been before. 225 pounds.
It was a combination of a few things: I bought two new pair of jeans and I saw a picture of myself in Venice Beach in which the need to lose weight was all that I could see. It was as if I was peering right into the eye of the great white whale. I came home and told myself all manner of nonsense, Ahab I, but when I didn't stick to the nonsense that I had presented myself then I committed to being much less nonsensical about things.
The problem with having lost ten pounds is that it is all gone from the lower part of just one leg. It is uncanny, and unpleasant. I have been very good about exercising both halves of my body equally, and have been sleeping much better, and watching my diet, but my other extremities almost seem to be getting larger, softer, more complete, buoyant and perhaps capable of flight.
The lower left leg just keeps shrinking and has lost any color that it previously had other than the patchy dark hairs that protrude from it at unexpected angles. I'm afraid to pull it out at the beach to get any sun. It's hideous. I walk mostly in circles. I get so tired of that, sometimes I'll turn and walk the other direction, producing a series of circles in the sand that do not look dissimilar from many famous crop formations, which does beg the question as to why aliens are only interested in our grains.
No matter how many shaky squat thrusts I do all the weight keeps dropping off of that one vulnerable leg. It's getting dangerous, or will be soon. It's simply gruesome at the beach, like something dead washed up onto the shore and attached itself to a lopsided fat man in one last desperate moment of shame. I tell everyone that it's my cock and offer to let them put sunscreen on it, but the presence of an unkempt foot at the end of it ruins my ruse. I offer that I'm not circumcised, my parents didn't wish to mutilate me, etc.
If it were a cock then it would be the ugliest member ever to have attached itself to a femur, rather than being where it belongs south of the waistline and just north of the testes. Most cocks do not have bald kneecaps at their base, also. Any hardened lump like that found in the scrotum sack should be looked at right away by a professional. If Lance Armstrong taught us anything, then it is that.
There is also the problem of occasional erections. My lower left leg hasn't had one in weeks. I used to wake up and it was rising under the sheets like a terrible tower of desire and probable fetish. I could sense its spooky ascendance near the foot of the bed, almost uncomfortably distant from my tender groping hands trying to get at the thing to physically appease it in the hopes that it would return back to the dream world from where it came.
---------------------------------------------------------
I see outside of myself, standing in the waters of a vast dream, the waves arriving softly and receding around me. The image of the leg beneath the clear shore break, where the water reflects and refracts the light from above, sending the image of the scrawny appendage out at a obtuse angle, one that would be impossible to sustain my full weight. Somehow, it magically does.
In this shared delirium where ocean and sky meets mind, my leg juts out from the water line towards the shifting sands underneath, monstrous in its impossibility, the ugliness of persistence, that of nature. The skin of the leg is the color of the surface of a bleached moon, riddled with the detritus of hair drifting like seaweed. The waves arrive and depart, bringing their cascading foam along with them even as they escape me, a malformed reef. The error of the sleep universe becoming momentarily suspended and clear as the water tugs its way back towards the seeming infiniteness of the sea, the arrival of yet another obscuring wave, bubbles in a hurry, pulling to and from.
And I, standing above it with trident drawn, prepared to harpoon its wretchedness, to watch it twitch and squirm under the waves as it goes, a paroxysm of silent splashing gasps, caught through the body by one of the prongs, flailing slowly and wildly amidst the surf, trying to escape the obscurity of ocean, of the endless dark of the many water witches.
.
