Day 14: Bacon tastes good...

 

Status: It is Sunday morning and I am at work and there is a huge trough of bacon next to a heaping vat of scrambled eggs, both stationed in chrome accouterments placed directly in front of me, which, along with another chrome box of toast is enough food to feed 15 healthy adult males. Part of my job is to get the residents’ where I work ready for the day and, on weekends, when the cafeteria is closed, the food is delivered onto the hall. Staff is required to eat the food and be a good example for the residents’. Since I work thirds I mainly sop up the leftovers. It’s the perfect gig for a bachelor since sometimes, as I alluded to before, months will eclipse when I don’t even go to the grocery store. There is simply no need and boy, does not buying food save money to monopolize on the ever draining beer fund.  

If this were two weeks ago I would take the eggs and the bacon and make a sandwich with two slices of toast. I would then make a second sandwich. I would then sprinkle a grainy mixture of red-pepper and parmesan cheese and a squirt of hot sauce while gratuitously gnawing away.

Two weeks ago I would have been leaving work and have just brewed a third pot of coffee for the night. I then would come home and write for an hours before vacating the throne of my writer’s desk and  d ambling over to Walgreens picking up a Sunday New York Times (another vice, worth more that half-hours in hourly wages) and a twelve pack and a couple of cigars.  I would then retreat back to my literary den brew more coffee, crack open a succession of beers, splay the Sunday Times out like an atlas on the far corner of my desk intermittently pecking away at the page waiting for a metaphor to hatch. Two weeks ago I would have gone out around 10 and picked up more beer before continuing to chain-smoke, continuing to talk literary theory with my roommate, continuing to  slam beer after beer until passing out, usually around five, waking up five hours later, going to work and starting the process again, ad infinitum, the pissing narrative of my day-to-day existence.

Two weeks ago I would have (easily) eaten 2 frozen pizzas during the day while  draining all that beer into my anatomy.

But today, it had been thirteen days since I last ingested meat. Thirteen days since I have had any beer or tobacco products. Thirteen days since I have brewed a pot of coffee, losing myself in the invisible stream of aromatic wafts percolating from the linoleum of my kitchen.

But this morning I still wanted meat. Be it pork, beef or poultry. Be it a fucking can of watered down tuna. I wanted a meal with some substance. Something I could rip into with a carnivorous frenzy .

                                      

I wanted meat. I wanted to break into the slaughterhouse and go hardcore Neanderthal in the frozen gallows of stowed animal parts.

 

Only I refrained. 

 

In the last week I have also had  a basket of sizzling chicken fries, a slab turkey and quadrants of a meatloaf available for consumption at my imminent disposal.  Occasionally the thought creeps through the fire door of my will thinking that I could take a chomp.

No one would know.

 

No one would know at all.

 

Physiology: Lack of caffeine is (still) instigating mayhem migraines. Oddly (shit) capitulating to a Vegan lifestyle is more arduous than giving up beer.  In the past when I would go three or four days without a beer I would almost always have dreams where I was carousing in the bars, usually Duffys in the Southside of Peoria. Sometimes Champs West. Almost always the dream bars would be geometrically configured slanted in the nocturnal-architecture of sleep, sometimes it would be larger, sometimes the bar would be placed in the opposite corner, but it was always the same bar. 

 My friend who on her own volition decided to join me in this quest stated that she has dreams every night about cigarettes. I don't have dreams about bending Gloria Jean over bean clattered counter of an espresso bar and making little hissing café mocha constructing noises but I do wake up, my brain befogged in fractals, like the bitter winter ice on so many car windshields this morning.

Giving up dairy has completely cleared my skin of any what-they-used to call 'blemishes' in the old stridex ads (or maybe its slapping the persona non grata on my masturbatory palm).  I'm continuing to juice, mainly carrots and radishes and seedless cucumbers.  I haven't weighed myself since wed but I'm estimating that I've lost probably 10 pounds since SS2 began.  During the original Succulent Sobriety I lost 18 pounds in 40 days and that was just giving up beer. NO change in diet.

 Also my brain is hovering like a cerebral cumulus in shocked  poofs, bulbous exhaust emitted from a WWII zeppelin. I can synapses that for years have triggered as if engaged in a game of laser tag beginning to fire different roots. I can feel my neural nets modulate under vacant trapeze swings ushering new poetic paradigms.

 

The most conspicuous physiological alteration is that my heart-rate, which for years felt like an accelerated panting bleep of a defibrillator ready to implode has completely (completely) due to zippo caffeine intake, stabilized. It's hard to describe. It's not even a placidity bong-hit stoned sedative groove. It's not exactly peace. Being plugged into the coffee pot 24-7 punts the blood through the interstate of the body in a chaotic haste.  I remember hearing a lecture (which I had on tape until I listened to it so many times it broke) where the great Joseph Campbell found a mystical number in Hindi, Norse and biblical traditions and was able to deduce that same number to the number of yearly beats in a healthy human heart extrapolating with vigor that 'The rhythm of the universe is the rhythm of our own unique life. Our own unique calling. Stressing again that we are in ACCORD with nature.   

 

Also more I'm depressed.

 

Also I'm not laughing as much as I used to. 

 

Music doesn't sound as melodious w/out the grip of a beer.