Day 6: Admonishing vittles and poetic plumbing....

 

 

Stowed inside the frosty gut of the refrigerator stationed directly behind me are 12 pieces of fried chicken. There is half of a lasagna. There is a cracker-barrel plate of chicken pot pie  leftover from lunch my co-worker saved just for me. There is chrome vat filled with sausage gravy. There is a zip-lock bag cobbled full of homemade biscuits.  There are cartons of milk and condiments and (inexplicably) a coconut.  All are at my imminent disposal. All are waiting for me. When I open the fridge to fish out my jug of distilled water the sustenance beckons. It looks at me as if orphaned and, I swear, making little whimpering puppy sounds.

Last week I would have come into work and placed five pieces of chicken into the sterile tint of the microwave. I then would have heated up the sausage gravy on the stove.  I then would have doused the sausage gravy on top of the fried chicken.  I then would have sprinkled hot sauce on the entrée in the fashion in which a catholic priest sprinkles holy water during mass. I then would have blanketed the entire meal in a heap of parmesan cheese, feasting while watching  Sports Center or Investigation Discovery (addictive as shit).

But that was last week.

It has been exactly six days to the hour since I have last had any meat or dairy products. Six days since I have had any coffee. Six days since I have fired up anything that comes with a surgeon general warning.  

Six days since I have ingested any sugar.

Six days since I have cracked open the aluminum neck of a beer.

This is the longest I have gone without a beer since capitulating with my hands in the air and an alcoholic beverage in each paw on day 38.5 of the original Succulent Sobriety

This is the longest I have gone without a cup of coffee since 1992. Twenty-two years.Note: I’ve harbored wild-make-out sessions and dry-humped the hell out of angelic creatures who were born after I brewed my first addictive caffeinated swig.

Same goes with sugar since I always just drain copious amounts of sugar in my coffee and I calculated last week that, per keeping up with my weekly java-quota, I ingest about a liter and a half weekly of dissolved sugar into my body.

Ouch.

This is the longest I have gone without incessantly puffing one of my ubiquitous cheap cigarillos (or lately a pipe), which I almost always have lanced between the wedge of my lips when I write at my desk, in (shit) probably eight years.

This is the longest I have gone without ingesting meat into my anatomy since I started teething.

To be blunt, this is the longest I have gone without the assimilation of a given dairy product in the fleshy sieve of my digestive system since being dandled and breast fed back in the late 70’s.

It’s also been six days since last I clutched the exclamatory stem of gender delineating flesh and ( to be blunt again) choked the creative chicken, slapped the Hemingway Ham, spanked the Norman Mailer monkey and just plain released myself in a masturbatory puddle of libidinous jam.

 

The sight of a topless mannequin brandishing a box of handi-wipes could make me literally explode.

All I have done this past week is juice and drink green tea and went of an extremely-terse desultory decaf DUI (drinkin’ decaf while sporadically puffing off ersatz e-cigarettes, what a wuss, thought he, all of a year ago).

There are changes in my physiology. I haven’t lost much weight yet. The holidays are still hibernating in my beer gut. Somehow I avoided the obligatory night sweats and agitated tremors that I experienced during the initial sprint of Succulent Sobriety. I’ve some rashes, and some aches but I have managed to eschew involuntary shakes and facial tics. I do miss meat (and cheeseburgers, oh to have a cheese burger!!) but honestly, juicing is fun in a convoluted alchemical wizard who-somehow-enjoys-using-his-chemistry-set-in-weird sado-masochistic-dalliances sort of way.

 

The biggest changes in my physique is that I feel lighter. It’s like there is compressed helium in the potbelly of my gut, the caps of my knees feel like wicker baskets beneath the bulb of a hot-air balloon. There is a ruddiness (not a beet-flavored  anguine ruddiness, but a ruddiness nonetheless) glued to my forehead and the interior of my arms. When I sloughed my shirt off prior to showering last night I noted that the chalky-whiteness of my chest and lower thighs lacked the albino whiteness I have attuned myself to expecting over the years.   Also there is more of a gauntness attached to my countenance. The nocturnal skids forming a circle eight mathematical infinity sign that has been screeched around my eyes for the past decade is slowly beginning to fade.

There is also an almost tangible languor. A torpor. It sifts over the top of my head like a halo constructed out of cheap laundry wire hangars and clothesline pins. It’s hard to paddle up the inevitable streams of ennui when you are always chugging a cup of coffee and buzzed and looking at the world with unbidden wonder.

Same with quality tobacco.

Same with a cold beer.

                                                                             ***
 
I work at what  might be classified as a group home. All the residents’ stationed here are in their teens and are wards of the state.  They live, sleep and eat on the campus. Part of my job is to eat with the residents and set a good example. Since I work third shift, the residents’ are asleep and all I intrinsically really have to do is a little bit of cleaning and monitor the hall. For almost a third of my like I worked at Bradley library. I was surrounded by a pagoda of books.  I could lead you to the periodical stacks upstairs and pull off the shelf the hardcover bound book featuring the 1946 edition of the New Yorker where Salinger’s Holden 'Morrissey' Caulfield makes an appearance in the third person in a story entitled, “Slight Rebellion off of Madison.” I could give you the call numbers of certain literary texts and philosophical manuscripts w/out blinking. I would usually come into work early and write for three hours in BU’s pathetic excuse for a computer lab before clocking into work.   It was a job I loved and then BU fucked me over (imagine that) and then I was unemployed for six weeks and then I got a better paying job. Where I work now is less stressful when it comes to petty drama. I get 10,000 a year more than BU and my bosses are friendly. Along with thirds I used to work just an insane amount of overtime but I don't anymore. It is the most fortunate gig for a writer who already has pissed out several manuscripts since it gives me ample time to write.

It's also the perefect gig for a seasoned bachelor like myself since there is always food in the building. It's not uncommon for me to go month's without going to the grocery store since I can always just feast on the government-riven vittles provided on the hall. As my coworkers will testify its not uncommon for new hires to gain 10 pounds the first few weeks of work.

 

 

 I was thinking about the food slumbering in the fridge doing my weekly word count (12,000, not bad) trying to ensure that I keep up with my linguistic quota when the plumbing under the kitchen sink where I work erupted, not in a spuming vertical thrush associated with that of a geyser, but something broke and water started sprawling forming a diminutive lagoon near my shoes.

I cracked open the drawers cupboard beneath the sink and with plumber’s crack and poetic plunger I put my maladroit pipe-fitting skills to use. The labyrinthine maze of plastic gaskets, weathered washers and bone marrow tubing had been clogged the last couple of days, flooding parts of the kitchen, making the chrome bin of the sink look like an elapsed baptismal fount.

While crouched down beneath the sink for over an hour endeavoring to fit cylindrical tubes together I hazily discerned that when I completed the task I would have nothing to congratulate my daily domestic victory with. No incentive. No smoke break. I couldn’t brew a pot of coffee to ameliorate my focus.  I had sworn off beer until late February. I was full of vitamins and juice and was hungry for something raw containing massive amounts of zinc. I grew frustrated.  The intestines beneath the sink began to swirl the longer I stayed crouched on all fours looking up. The lower case pipe refused to clasp, awkwardly French kissing each other when I tried to swivel them into one. The water was turned off but there was an incessant Chinese water torcher treacle.

It was somehow during that moment when I realized why I had returned to Succulent Sobriety and why I had undertaken the rudiments of this individual sojourn again.

I wanted to grow and I realize that I was in control of my (for a better phrase) destiny or telos. I realized that if I wanted to I could say ‘fuck’ it’ like I  have said on so many days and go home with a twelve pack and linguistically in front of laptop and fabricate a crazy story before passing out as if shot on home row I had the power to enact that decision. I realized that if I wanted to rise up from beneath the tenebrous innards of the sink, go to the fridge, concoct my fried chicken and country gravy hot sauce and grazed cheese extravaganza   and delete Succulent Sobriety II from the transient etch-a-sketch of the internet I could do just that. I realized that, if I wanted to, I could change my thinking. I could laugh at the hilarity of the situation.  I could look at the pipes and think about how the bulk of fellow Homo sapiens residing on the buzzcut of this planet don’t even have access to indoor plumbing. Or toilet. How the bulk of the earth would kill to have just one piece of chicken stuffed in the fridge.

It was in that moment that I realized I wanted this. That I wanted to juice and go off the sauce and see how I view the world without caffeine because I want to grow.  Just as my job as a writer is to chisel 2,000 words a day and not ask questions, just as my job at work is to stay alert and fix shit, my job for the limited time I am wearing this denim coat called the human flesh is not to abuse it. To take care of the attire, to give everything tucked inside to a greater goal and to (somehow) laugh along the way.