Day 3: The Joy of Jaded Juicing, afternoon tea with Yanni and Enya and loving the big-fat black girl inside of us all...

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second day of unalloyed juice fast. So far I have decimated the emerald phalluses of 10 full-sized cucumbers (damn do you get a lot of juice outta those), 2 bags of baby carrots, a translucent plastic bin of blueberries which was overpriced and yielded way less nectar than anticipated. One full pomegranate, eight apples the color of forgotten felt on a mini-golf course in spring, some Honey dew which my mom had in the fridge along with some leftover eggnog she told me to drink or just toss out since apparently I don’t eat anything that is solid anymore.

Every time I’ve wedged in fruity triangular slices of nourishment into the top hat of the juicer I always add a clove of garlic because, shit, why not.

Also some Kale (shit) which I hadn’t intended on buying but the lady at Haddad’s who apparently was some sort of Juiceologist told me I should always use Kale as a base.  She also informed me that she juices every day, regularly, sometimes twice.  There was something about the way she says the words once a day which sounded like she was talking about fiber and regularity during a commercial break while watching afternoon Soaps at a nursing home. When I tell her that I‘m a writer and that I am conducting this experiment to investigate how jettisoning  so-called vices from my anatomy will invariably lead me to discern certain tautologies pertaining to the emotional pangs of the human condition, she tilts her head and looks at me like a pre-school teacher lambasting her lost pupil for coloring outside the lines in a baby Jesus coloring book.

 

 

 

 

The Juicologist had bookworm glasses and legwarmers and cinnamon toast bangs occluding what I could only intuit is a Harry Potter lighting slash fissure shaped in the corporate logo of PETA on her forehead. When I saw that she was wearing salient blue nail polish, I tried to be witty and said something like, “ What did you do? It looks like you just juiced a smurf!!” which apparently pickled her the wrong way because she just sort of lumbered away leaving me alone, in aisle one, brandishing my Kale like a bridal bouquet sans groom.

For the most part I feel fine. There is a steady warble in my lower abdomen, a rock tumbling mumble, the muffled swish of concerned parents’ ushering vulgarities under their breath at the last school district meeting.

Still, I feel that with all the constant juicing and creative cleansing I’m long overdue to piss out a Skittle one of these days, since I’m literally, bursting with fruit flavor.

 

Wait, that's Starburst...

 

Been drying out at my mom's house for the last couple of days. My mom has never smoked and doesn't drink and hasn't had a cup of coffee if almost forty years. She has a very Little-Lamb-Who-Made-thee innocuous pastel russet brick abode just outside of Bartonville. Mom's a very gentle, Christian and has bible verses written on 3 x 5 notecards pasted and strewn throughout the benovlent bulk of her house (there's a bible verse usurped from the book of Nehemiah in the bathroom above the toilet paper. Nothing like juggling guilt while thinking about a minor prophet while you are seated on the throne). She also has treadmill in the basement only it is missing an arm so I kept toppling off it in skidded flails while endeavoring to work out yesterday.

 

Since mom doesn't drink coffee her cupboards are like wounded with boxes of tea, the bulk being decaf, though the teas still have weird ass marketed appleations. Names like Wild berry acai pomegranate, Blueberry chai,TAZO Noir, china pekoe, sugar spice plum celestial seasoning, Good earth good night heb tea. I went through about 10 bags of vanilla chai (decaf) (ie, 7 bags all at once) and still couldn't render a decent buzz. The excess vanilla tasted like I was going down on a Snoopy Snow cone maker which still harbored a syruppy late-70's aftertaste. It was just plain blah. As I ruffled through the tea bags (kinda of felt like I was sifting with awe through the fishbowl full of condoms in Nurse Nancy's office back in high school once again) I couldn't help but think about how funny it would be if I would start a series entitled AFTERNOON TEA with Yanni and Enya in which every episode (which would musically convene with the baroque overture from masterpiece theatre) would feature myself having a 'dignified cultural hoity-toity high-noon' cup of tea with Yanni and Enya at an inauspicious environment (say a bowling alley or a gun show or the local 4-H whittling competition in Floyd county) and then something happens by way of a midget or obese country boys in overalls to mar our 'cultural' expeirence.

Maybe it could resucitate ratings on PBS.

Maybe.

Since I work third shifts and have done so for the past decade I still harbor this predilection to sop up as much sunlight as is possible and I just don’t sleep much. On the days I work I’ll wake up 10 pm, brew a pot of coffee, arrive at work at 11, hit the hell out of the coffee pot during my shift, try to glean as much writing time I can noodle before clocking off at 7am when I head home to imminently straddle the oak kneecaps of my writing desk, crack open beer after beer, brew more coffee, chain-smoke, pelt out sentences, curse, try not to look at the slate of the screen for fear the reflection of the proverbial one who got away . Drink more beer. Alternate between Walgreens on Western avenue where, if you have a card you can get a 12 pack of PBR for under 7 bucks and Western Liquors where my beloved Sunshine works and where I can always count on a seasonal Sam Adam’s sampler. Usually I’ll pick up a frozen pizza or enchilada. If my roommate Kyle is home we’ll usually have an hour or two where we drink in tandem while bitching about the current state of american letters. I then retire to my den again, continue my thunderous allegro of trying to make the keyboard cum via the stokes of my fingertips, pass out, curl up in fetus posture on my coach, crash at 5pm. Wake up five hours later for work.

 

On my days off its not uncommon for me to nocturnally delve into marathon fifteen hour crash sessions where I don't even wake up to pee.  Last night (at my moms) I had a dream where I was in a town next to the ocean ( I think it was San Francisco) and I was with all these writers' who were  touted as the “next wave.” I sauntered into my dear friend Natashia Deon of Dirty Laundry Lit renown who was with her sister. Natashia was wearing these leather pants  and leopard shirt and looked every bit of the rockstar writer her prose encapsulates.   During the dream I continued to amble into friends’ from the past. I saw my dear friend Mark –Andrew featser whom I met in England years ago. I saw some of my other writer friends from college. I went into this building and gave my current boss a hug and then realized that the building was Bradley Hall, the university I gave my testicles to (both professionally and financially) for ten years and they reciprocated by terminating a job I loved (they still send me overdue loan statements, though).

 

 

The highlight of the dream was that I kept be followed around by this hug, obese fat black girl wearing glasses. She looked kinda of like the protagonist from the movie version of Sapphire’s PUSH only she was maybe three or four times as obese. She made the avg. patron of Lane Bryant look like they just auditioned for the role of Karen Carpenter in Anorexia Nervosa: The Musical. Just huge and sprawling and gargantuan and she waddled and huffed and sweated the way fat girls waddle and sweat when they walk. The crazy part was in the dream I kept holding her hands and squeezing her sausage-shaped fingers and kissing her forehead. She told me she was “the worlds biggest fan” of my work and she started quoting passages of novels I have written to me from memory. She then told me soemthing that every writer years to hear which is that  his/her craft, “Makes me feel less alone in the world and makes me feel loved.”

I kept kissing her forehead while holding her hands and I continued to walk, introducing all my high-brow literary friends to the fat girl, informing them after the requisite introduction that she is my muse.

When I awoke I few the vernal tips of Cucmbers into the ganwing whizz of the juicer. I then went downstairs and mounted my mother’s exercise bike. Above the spedometer on the stationary bike there was a post it note with a bible verse from Jude which read:

“To him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy..”

I thought about the fat black fat girl in my dream.

 I thought about how I still have a fuck’ve long way to go.

I looked at the bible verse again and continued to pedal as hard as I could sweating out everything that was inside of me, pedaling into the next day even though I really wasn’t moving much at all.