“..and
then with a hissed curse Gatley remembers the anti-big-hanging-gut situps he’s
sworn to himself to do every night before 0000, and it’s 2356, and he has time
to do only 20 with his huge discolored sneakers wedged under the frame of the
office’s black vinyl couch before it’s unavoidably time to supervise moving the
residents’ cars around.”
-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.
The sit-up.
The perfunctory abdominal ballet. The
ire of grade school calisthenics when the wrestling matts would be tugged into
the center of the gymnasium in a series of reverberated splats, the (it always
seemed to me) butch lesbian PE instructor who had a mullet and coached
volleyball would chirp staccatos into her whistle, mandating that her pubescent
minions partner up. One partner lying supine on the matts, knees forming
successive triangles casting undulating shades in the waistline valley below, crossing
her arms in the shape of the confederate flag against her chest while the
antipodal partner hammers her palms on top of the shoelaces of the wounded
victim. There is a whistle and the sight of aligned bodies transitioning into
pistons. The cantilevering of the northern hemisphere flapping in huffs,
forming lower case vowels, huffing into the precipitous caps of crooked knees.
The partner pressing down on the shoes intoning digits, counting, chronicling
the number of death repetitions until the shrill of the whistle and the gruff
voice mandating that we switch positions, inflicting the punishment on our
partner, listening as they count the number of times our faces plop up for
air.
In an endeavor to decimate the poached egg
cummerbund of flab hugging my waistline like an inner tube at a water park (and
in an effort to be more like Artie, who we all know is the strongest man in the
world) I’ve decided to spend day 12 chronicling my attempt to perform 500
grueling gut-tingling pushups, writing about the mongering quest in parsed
intervals.
So, without further delay:
Sit-ups 1-21: Pathetic. Made it to 21 before keeling over. Can’t even scale the rungs of my own age. In high school we wore standard patriotic district 150 PE garb and I could do over 80 timed sit-ups in one minute. There’s a burning sear in my lower abdomen. At five in my spine cracked (as in popped in a series meted snaps). It felt like a building blowing up only in reverse.
Sit-ups 21-43: Subtle drizzle of sweat visible like
translucent abacus beads on forehead.
Plowed over. Maybe a little workout 80’s music will help.
Sit-ups 1-21: Pathetic. Made it to 21 before keeling over. Can’t even scale the rungs of my own age. In high school we wore standard patriotic district 150 PE garb and I could do over 80 timed sit-ups in one minute. There’s a burning sear in my lower abdomen. At five in my spine cracked (as in popped in a series meted snaps). It felt like a building blowing up only in reverse.
Sit-ups 43-70: When I stepped onto the vile neon squint
of the bathroom scale at my mom's house last wed I weighed more than I have in
my entire life. Honestly I’m not obsessed with my body and sometimes years go
by where I don’t even lumber on top of the quantity registering-plate informing me
about the volume of my body mass in an imperial system of units.
After a week of juicing mingled with an intermittent
Vegan diet I weighed myself again today. Lost 7 ½ pounds. I’m still not at the
weight I was before I started the original Succulent Sobriety but I’m fighting,
biting into everyday as if with animated mutant claws.
Sit-ups 70-100:
Finished first 100…perhaps it the 80’s music talking
but my gut feels like a cabbage patch sized pac-man choking on a power pellet. Taking
twenty minutes succulent sabbatical. There’s some ratting in what I can only
perceive is pending middle age love handles. Wait, maybe I should continue.
Flash dance just came on. Oh, What a feeling indeed.
Sit-ups 100-121: Again, made it too 21 without stopping. Perhaps
there is something about the legal age of alcohol consumption coercing the bio-rhythms
of my body to pause and look for pint.
121-170: This skin is like a cast where, if you are
lucky, you find yourself wafting like steam inside of like a corporeal sarcophagus
for 70 years. If you are lucky. I’m looking down at my body in almost Whimanesque
SONG OF MYSELF astonishment. Here is the
elevator button of my navel tucked like a thumbprint embedded in dough or as
Joyce says in Ulysses, “Creation from nothing. The cords of all link back,
stradentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be gods?
Gaze in your omphalos. Hello! Kinch
here. Put me on to Edenville . Aleph, alpha: nought, nought one." (That's the protagonist Stephen Daedalus looking down into his belly-button and placing a collect call to book of Genesis Adam. Tell me Joyce wouldn't have gotten exiled not only from Ireland but also kicked out of every single MFA program located in the contiguous US and Guam today)..
170-201: For fucks it feels like a U-Haul is making circle eights, tattooing tire skids in the mathematical emblem cosigning infinity on my lower tummy. Also, I'm seeing yellow splotches. They look like hand prints.
201-223: Now I'm fucking
hurting. If you peruse the work of Joseph Campbell over and over again
you come to the sentence with respect to male and female archetype,
"The girl becomes a woman with her first menstruation. Life overtakes her.
The boy has to act to become a man." I can see feminists
who throw tampons at my poetry readings hurling tampons now. The male rituals
inherent in every culture express this as a sociological tapestry. A rite of
passage hood. A tenebrous plume at Les Tres Frere where the initiate male
enters in a slither of darkness only to be reborn in a frieze of
paintings, christened with the virile ethos of a new identity.
223-229: Fuck. More yellow
splotches. And squiggles. The wind outside is shrieking. It's one degree.
Anyone up for a game of MAGIC the gathering ICE AGE.
229-250 (halfway mark): This is the
first time since June where I haven't dawdled to the liquor store first
thing after receiving my bi-weekly pay statement. Bad thing: The toilet just
broke, which mean that I have to remove the fucking linoleum top and flush it
primitively by lifting up the tank ball.
Trust me, it's not conducive to have a juice fast if you lack a functioning toilet.
It's just not.
This is the second time in a week I've
had problems plumbing (ie, see Day 6) which makes
me think that maybe I'm due to fulfill my lifelong dream as being a digitalized video game
caricature in the next installment of Super Mario Bros. I could wear overalls and a tilted Derby cap and be 'Wankio the Writer' whomping winged tortoises with the sway of my ponytail.
Plus Wank the writer drinks like a fish!!
Hey! Why is Wankio the Writer sodomizing that Goomba!?!
250-259: Yeah. The endeavor to transition my abdomen from a Quonset hut to a washboard has completely pummeled me. Time to go to my classical overpriced collegiate education for motivational manna to complete this quest. So, all Kantian modalities aside, in the timeless phenomenological vernacular of our good friend Edmund Husserl, " What is thematically posited is only what is given, by pure reflection with all its immanent essential moments absolutely as it is given to pure reflection."
Say that quote over and over again like a mantra and it is guaranteed to get you through arduous and daunting times.
259-269: When I was about the size of a fire hydrant, that is to say in second grade I would go running with my father around what would later be our home cross-country terra ferma at Madison golf course. My father ran everyday after teaching fourth graders and I remember that he would always wear socks on his hands instead of gloves. Always. So much so that I thought everyone wore sox on their hands instead of gloves when they went running around Madison golf course.
269-274: I don't come from a big outdoors family. Dad was never into hunting or fishing or camping. One Christmas my Uncle Albert gave me a tackle box. Since we never went fishing I naturally had no tackle to place in the box, so I used the tackle box as a depository to stow my GI Joes, or, as mom referred to them as, "Little people."
For years I kept Flint and Duke and Storm Shadow and Lady J and Serpentor (member him, along with the theospophical monocle of Dr. Mindbender) in the tackle box. One Sunday our church had a picnic out at a lake where everyone was fishing replete with rod and tackle box and I remember turning to my mom and saying, "Geez mom, I guess all these fishermen brought their Little People to play with."
274-275: Fack. I can't even curse right. Help me out Hugh Grant.
269-274: I don't come from a big outdoors family. Dad was never into hunting or fishing or camping. One Christmas my Uncle Albert gave me a tackle box. Since we never went fishing I naturally had no tackle to place in the box, so I used the tackle box as a depository to stow my GI Joes, or, as mom referred to them as, "Little people."
For years I kept Flint and Duke and Storm Shadow and Lady J and Serpentor (member him, along with the theospophical monocle of Dr. Mindbender) in the tackle box. One Sunday our church had a picnic out at a lake where everyone was fishing replete with rod and tackle box and I remember turning to my mom and saying, "Geez mom, I guess all these fishermen brought their Little People to play with."
274-275: Fack. I can't even curse right. Help me out Hugh Grant.
275-279: Also when I was in second
grade I used to wake up every morning ay 5:30 and do an exercise program called
MORNING STRETCH with Joanie Greggains. Again WHAT SECOND GRADER GETS
UP AT 5:30AM on school days and does aerobics??? We each got two dollars every
weeks for allowance and one Friday, when the allowances were being doled out,
dad gave me an extra fifty cents because he impressed that I would get up, on
my own volition and work out. The following week my younger sibling
Beth, in an effort to augment her allowance got up and started doing aerobics with me which infuriated me to no
end because it was my private time with Joanie Greggains.
Just infuriated me. How come
everytime I have a good thing going with a hot eighties girl somebody
feels compelled to intervene?
On going narrative of my life.
279-291:Still thinking about Joannie
Greggins. I want to have no-holds-barred sex with an 80's girl with leotard and
legwarmers. You bring the Bartles and Jaymes and the diaphrgam. I'll put on a
little Stevie Winwood. Oh don't you know what the night can do.
291-315:
That was, simply put, the best 80's sex I've ever had in my life. I saw Alf,
Pee-wee Herman and Max Headroom all rolled into one Cindi
Lauper fruit roll-up. Your vagina was like a rubbix cube with all the
colors peeled off and epoxied on the hard-to get to squares. Rather
your vagina was like a sony walkman and my cock was the mixed-tape
anonymously slipped in your locker after home ec class. Rather, I rode you like
a pogo-ball baby.
..and Pogo balls are what they're
called (bitch).
315-329: Damn do I hurt. Sore.
Pathetic.
329-341: Last Saturday I
had to face the fact that there are some literary projects I have to
put on hold until SS2 is over. Each entry of SS2 takes between 4-6 hours
and drives me batty since I'm aye-dee-d'ing out of control thank to no
caffeine. One project I had to place on hiatus is a project called PINTA
PARADE. It's a 500 page travelography (that's
travel-biography) novel about a trip I won back in '93 that literally changed
my life. It made me the individual I am today. I don't think I would be a
writer had I not won this trip. The trip was called Young Columbus and
was sponsored by PARADE magazine. Basically they took 150
brimming adolescents between the ages of 12-18, combed from all over the
country and created a two week international summer camp. They flew us to New
york for a day and then ferried us overseas for two weeks. We were chaperoned by
college kids and everything was all inclusive.
The experience was eternal.
341-349:I've been working on the
novel since 2007 (although germinal drafts exist from spring 2003).
It's dedicated to Mark-Andrew Feaster, Greta Enzer and the Harmony
Anne Dusek, all with love.
349-372: Passed out after 349. Parts
of my lower stomach are rattling like ceiling groves in an aftershock.
372-390: The thing about the PARADE
YOUNG COLUMBUS contest is that, intrinsically, I failed. I tried to win it why
it when I was in 7th grade competing against High schoolers with sandpaper
moustaches and teh trip was to Paris (Paris!!) and it was the winter that
the first Home Alone came out so of course I wanted to go to Paris
(paris!!) only I failed, losing to a high school Junior with an
unpronounceable polish last name whose younger brother is now head of the IT
department where I work only I found out later that trip in its entirety
was canceled due to the threat of terrorism and the first gulf war. The
next year the trip was also to Paris (repeat Paris!!!) and I worked my ass off
390-401: on the speech I was to
give at the Cater Inn only I lost to (blisteringly gorgeous)
Karen Taggensworth who went to the fellow Lutheran church up the hill
and the high school on the north side of town where everyone had blond
hair and dental insurance. I failed again. I was downtrodden. I thought it was
my year. When my district manager nominated me for a third year I lethargically
agreed. The trip was to England. Somehow
401-424: I decided that I was going
to work even harder. that I wasn't going to let anyone beat me.
424: And somehow (in January, 21
years ago) I was awarded a trip I would take 10 weeks later that would change
my life.
424-425: Can't wait to post the
novel this April (13th-22nd) and share it just with you.
425-440: While passed out I had a
dream about my dear friend in Europe and Barbara Antoniazzi. About a
month ago I had a dream where Barbara and myself were both in Neuschwanstein
and she wouldn't look at me and I was kissing the back of her neck. While
passed out I had a dream where Barbara had come to America to visit
me only she was "on the Lam" and she started hi-jacking gas
stations. I was driving this convertible and I picked her up and she looked
and me and said, "Stay here," grabbed a wicker basket from the
backseat and ran to the house of my best friend growing up, placed the
wicker basket on the front porch rang the doorbell and then leapt back
into my car. When I asked he what she did she said, "I left my child at
the door."
441-442: make of that what you
will.
442: One project I'm still adhering
to is GIVE ME A WORD AND I WILL GIVE YOU A POEM.
In where, every week of 2014, I'll
be posting a poem based on a word or (hopefully) whimsical and crazy phase
The first poem was written for
Barbara based on a graphic novel she sent me FUN HOME. The second one was
dedicated to Megan Cannlla and was called CUMBO based off her (well) dildo. The
third was scribed for Russ Disbro and makes references to Sonic the Hedgehog,
disgruntled largesse and lapsed Lutheranism. This weeks will be for a young
man named Richard Leisse and gave me the phrase, "Premature ejaculation."
It was suppose to be posted today but
442-446: damn do I hurt. speaking of
failure
447-450: (and note, here's me plagiarizing myself from an essay I wrote seven years ago, plagiarizing b/cause its easier to copy and past then it is to write a this moment)
The first half of my life I was an
athlete. I ran seventy miles a week, my coltish limbs kicking a blurred cycle
of motion beneath my torso as both my arms formed tight right angles gliding
into a steady sprint, coursing the curtain call of my puberty and early-adolescence
in a weighted series of quickly snapped footsteps and exhaled pants as I jetted
across the topography of my youth in a steady gallop of limbs and arms skiing
past the grandiose thick eye-lash windexed houses of Moss Avenue, residue from
a bootleg era, sprinting around the coiffed perimeter of Madison golf course
careful to avoid the lumbering silhouettes of late-middle aged golfers lugging
their stalks of clubs like a fresh kill. I ran circles around the affluent
timed sprinkler lawns of West Peoria, each street guarded with a sentinel of
mini-vans and the chiropractic spines of basketball hoops. I ran through the
gangsta-graffiti'd flotsam and jetsam of the south side, unaware that the
thirty seconds it took to dip down the hilly gravel slope of either Western or
Ligonier served as a sociological fissure, an arbiter of class and status
discerning if you would make it in this world or if not. I ran through the
leafy foliage of Bradley park, the golden timeless leaves in autumn breezing
behind the back heel of my stride in a flurry of wisped crunches, across the
Chinese bridge, the cratered amphitheater barren of its summer stock tent come
the genesis of fall, when high-school students don jerseys and flimsy shorts
and cleats after class and take to the hard soil of the earth, a herd of
athletes all running cross-country, all roving their feet over the scalp of the
planet, accumulating the velocity to push harder, to run faster to quash the
blinking hyphenated digits of the clock at the finish line: to pour out simply
what is inside of you and find out what is left.
450-451: (self-plagiarism now punctuated): Basically from ages 7-17 all I wanted to do with my life was be a world class distance runner and I was just, modestly put it, bitchingly good, and then I failed. The summer of 92 I was fiftenn and would run five mile run through the leftover autumnal haze of Bradley park three times a day certain that I going to be (rather jingoistically) representing my country in the '96 Olympics. I was certain
451-455: yes certain that I would marry gymnast and fellow Olympian Kim Zmeskal (man fuck Shannon Miller) whom I harbored a drooling giddy cursive Valentine Day heart-shaped candy crush on. I had pictures of Kim in my locker and as I was running through Bradley park when the metaphysical menarche of dawn broke into shards of periwinkle glass shattered overhead in crimson smudges like bad 80's mascara before transitioning into shingles of light...life tastes just like yer lips baby, fresh and just a lil' wet and ready to blossom into the covenant of spring...
456-461: The hymen of my lower abdominal has officially been broken.
462: I failed at running because I didn't believe in myself.
463: When the '96 Olympics came around I was chain smoking like a motherfucker. I could still break 5:20 in the mile with ease.
463-470: Also (shameless Marty Wombachersque self-promotion alert pending) still posting a chapter a day of my life's work (you think we're gonna party and eat red meat after SS2 is completed wait til the final chapter of Yellow Monkey bars and Unbidden Erections is posted in early June.
470-481: Tryin' to remind myself in vain that the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong nor riches to men without understanding.
481-490: It's like my torso just got ran over by a monorail . I swear there is a horizontal slash ribboned like an equator between naval and nipples.
491-492: In the immortal words of Wittgenstein:
493: Going to be cutting my hair for a literary project in April".
494: "UGH!!!"
495: "If eternity is understood not by endless temporal duration but by timelessness..."
496: Going to be posting ALL my old poems from high school on line in a two year project called SHITTY HIGHSCHOOL poems so fledgling writers' can see that writing does get better over time...
497: "Then he who lives in the moment..."
498: If I had it all again I wouldn't just change it all. I would fuck every part of you.
499: As Joyce said '3 holes all women." As Foster Wallace said, "Judge me you chilly cunt. You bitch. Cooze. Slut. Dyke. Happy now? All born out? Be happy. I do not care. I knew I could. I knew she loved. End of story."
499 1/2: "..................................................!!!!!!!"
...
All in a futile attempt to be more like Artie...The strongest man in the world.
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