Growing up my family prayed over meals. We were the weird family seated in the
non-smoking section corner booth at the old Avanti’s on Main Street and when
the pizza arrived everyone would
clasp their hands into a cocoon of knit
fingers, hush the lids of our eyes closed like drapes, lower the cusp of
our chins into the direction of the
table as if at a séance and (usually) dad, would say grace, thanking our overtly
Westernized variation of a bearded Deity for blessing us with this taxable sustenance
we were about ready to consume. Usually one of us kids were embarrassed and
would slant our head sideways instead of
closing our eyes and find something trivial on the floor to momentarily focus
on until the prayer ended— much in the same way males pretend that they are not looking down at the
draining pipes of their own anatomy as they stand scissored legged in front of
the communal urinal (troughs are the worst) at a baseball game.
Truth is my family kind of over did it on prayer. We said grace over damn near everything. In
the morning I remember my mother hunched in her lime housecoat reading her
thoroughly highlighted bible huddled in front of the heating duct in the dining
room. There was her bible in one hand and there was a shoebox from the 70’s she
kept budgeting coupons in stationed at her feet. We prayed before we left for school in the morning,
my mom standing next to my sister (holding her cello up on the banks of snow)
at the bus stop. We tucked our heads and
prayed for safety every time we left the port of Peoria, heading into the
cement-ribbon of I-74, curling into the loop of I-55 and blasting into Chicago
to see my mom’s side of the family commencing our voyage with a moment of
prayer.
Growing up I remember my mother would come in and
kneel down by the side of my bed every night. We would talk for five minutes.
Sometimes we would pray but, almost always I would ask for my father to come
into my bedroom. He would get down on one knee as if proposing to Jesus and
we would pray, together, volleying back the stanza’s of ‘Now the light has gone
away’ his peppermint breath and hirsute follicles of his beard tickling me
childhood face into a pond of nocturnal embrace.
Even today I
still find it beautiful when I see
people praying over meals, especially in public. I was with a buddy of mine who
is a big atheist and we were at a party where the host asked if he could prayer
before was ate. Later my friend said he was offended that the host had the
audacity to serve him food that was
publically consecrated. I lovingly told my atheist friend to shut the
fuck up, reminding him that for thousands of years hunters, upon slaughtering
their capture, would offer a wisp of inscrutable gratitude, thanking the
creature for sacrificing his animalistic existence to cultivate the
nourishment, ensuring the continuity of the executioners' psalm.
***
It is day 27 and not much has changed. I have gone 27 days w.out a beer (note: I still really want a fucking beer) and 27 days without the use of a tobacco product (note: a nice cigar dangling from my lips while I peruse the Modern Love testimonial column in the Sunday New York Times would really be nice right about now). In the last 27 days I have not consumed anything that has been previously plucked, pecked or mooed. I have not consumed any products that can be cracked open and scrambled or transitioned into an omelette or squeezed from an udder and seasonably curdled.
I have really grown to love my friend Valena’s
cooking, especially her peanut butter rice noodle mixed with tofu splattered
with crimson spurts of Sriracha. With the exception of three table spoons
intermingled into the grainy heap, I have drank nothing but decaf, which (as I
have previously posited) just plain blows.
On an ewe, gross tee-eem-eye scatological caliber I can’t understand why I’m rockin’ the porcelain throne defecating all the time. I drink nothin’ but juiced vegetables and green tea.
Still
nothing has changed. Still I feel empty inside. I feel that I am wasting time
from other literary endeavors. I haven’t
lost the weight I’ve wanted to. My beer belly still poaches above my torso like
a tilted late-70’s egg-chair. I don' feel healthy or (hey, let's hurtle an ACT word in the narrative context) salubrious. I'm restless. I'm not sleeping.
I'm seminally depressed.
And I'm hungry as shit.
***
When I started Succulent Sobriety
last May I wanted to see if I could go forty days w. out a beer. When I started
SS 2 almost a month ago I wanted to see if I could grow. I wanted to
document the neurological ramifications of how my body would react if it was
voluntarily deprived of certain synaptic inspiring creativity –inducing
chemicals which society nine times out of ten deems as vices. I wanted to see
what this corporeal cloth of epidermal I find myself momentarily cloaked in is
capable of enduring. I wanted to jettison emotional manacles and jilted fear from
the past (I still have more baggage in my chest than a luggage carousel at an
international airport that I just can’t seem to discard.) I wanted to see if I
could accumulate the courage (without the aegis of alcohol, the
flickering sedative lull of freshly inhaled tobacco, the frenzied brusque
of cup after cup of caffeinated ambrosia or the reassuring fortitude of a
cheese burger) to slough the threaded silhouette of the past stuffing it
into a vacant bottle of Tanqueray and christening it on the prow ship destined
to sail into the promising port of a propitious t’morrow—a port that has eluded
me all my life and which , (drunk) I was able to accept because when you are
drunk and everything is right in the world you accept shit and you smile,
or least, in additional to feeling horny as shit, that’s how I get when I
drink-- accepting and horny. Accepting that everything sucks and I'm stuck in
the area-code of this domestic iceberg, horny b/cause I lust after
having a better life, because I jerk-off to the possibility of the
individual I have the potential to become in a way that is not vain or
solipsistic in the slightest.
In a way that is salubrious
and life-affirming and giving.
Esp. in the frigidity of this arctic vacuum
that is the frigid cold.
With the hopes of catapulting my creative growth
while gauzing over the scabs of sorrow that continually hold me back I have
decided that, over the next seven days, I will be participating in what I call
Paryushana—a seven day water fast of metaphysical insight and evolutionary self-realization.
In Jainism, perhaps the oldest religion on the planet, Paryushana is a Jainist holiday involving spiritual intensity, self-reflection and fasting. Over the next seven days I’ll be instituting my own inflection of Paryushana where I’ll be drinking (eating) nothing but a gallon of water a day. Before consuming the fluid I will meditate over the gallon of water for an hour, each day with an emphasis on a different chakra.
There are seven common chakras, so, seven day water fast where, hopefully, both my toxins and the emotional silt of the past shall be readily egressed and flushed out of the bin of my system.
Yes, it’s probably dangerous and yes (for all you
fucking yuppies out there who can’t wipe your ass without a checkup) I should
probably consult with a medical physician first, but my philosophy is that I’m
willing to die for my writing and if more writers are willing to die for
their craft I’d have less literary friends and fellow authorial
cohorts successfully committing suicide every year, choosing to execute
their demons by punctuate the narrative sip of their own existence, rather than
decimate their demons on the blood of the page.
I’m not New Agey. I’m not into crystals or saving
the whales and honestly have only a cursory interest in chakras at best. I would much prefer to meditate over a bucket of beer with my limbs
configured in an interrogatory human
question mark over the lip inside the local neighborhood tap than meditate over
wafts of incense with my limbs gridlocked and pretzeled into various hard to pronounce
tantric positions. I sporadically go to church with my mom and have a tendency
to break into Lutheran hymns when I’m drunk (especially Now thank we all our
god), but I wouldn’t classify myself as having any sort of religious affiliation.
As for “channeling chakra energy into the
water,” I find that no different from my
family-bloodlines fetish towards prayer. So much of life happens in
environment. While re-reading the story of the LindWurm I found myself commiserating
with the noisome blob, the shapeless mass, disgusting, overweight, exiled from
the castle he so longs for at a young age, unable to metaphorically ‘marry’
himself to a career, to a romantic partner, to a life where he isn’t worn out all the
time, slogging from paycheck to paycheck, to sewing himself to the thread of his dreams with gossamer needle and
linguistic font.
It is interesting to note that the LindWurm 'chums' his tail seven times--once for each of the central chakras...it is like he is endeavoring to unzip himself in yelps in order to heal.
Sometimes you have to unzip your own body in screams and yelp to find out what is inside of you.
It is interesting to note that the LindWurm 'chums' his tail seven times--once for each of the central chakras...it is like he is endeavoring to unzip himself in yelps in order to heal.
Sometimes you have to unzip your own body in screams and yelp to find out what is inside of you.
Sometimes you have to give up something you love to
find yourself and to grow.
And in order to grow you need to be hungry, first.
How hungry are you?
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