The Fat & Final Truth

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Friday, March 17, 2006

At most of the social gatherings I attend these days (which are not many) the discussion seems to inevitably touch upon age. Makes sense since these are urban North Americans, the events include only one age range almost without exception - it was not like that in Brasil, and people tell me that it is not like that out around the bay either. Good, there is hope on that front as well.

This little clip made me laugh - the guy is 70, she is 59, there must have been Viagra involved I suppose but nevermind that. Having it off in a moving car at that age! Wonderful! Good on them! There IS hope - as long as there are such indomitable spirits as these!

Reuters: Rome police uncover amorous joy riders: The zigzagging car gave them away. When police pulled over the vehicle, they found a naked 70-year-old woman who had been trying to have sex with the semi-nude driver, 11 years her junior. He was three times over the legal blood-alcohol limit, police commander Angelo D'Anardo said.

Saturday, February 4, 2006

Down to 235 just by simple starvation ....

Friday, January 20, 2006
One bigotry serves as well as another. The demonized are not ultimately demeaned by it, rather they are, in the end, enlivened and empowered. Then too, there is the spiritual fat to consider as well as the regular ol' kind.

"Both hands can be full of grease." (Man of Peace 1983)

Tuesday, January 17, 2006
I spent a few months in Houston, which some people there told me is called 'fat city', and sure enough, there are quite a few fatties in Houston. Now I am in St. John's and I notice a lot of 'em here too. Global epidemic of diabetes? I dunno, but on this even the newspapers concur - North Americans are fat.

In case you think I am being self-righteous - I am pushing 250, pounds that is, not sure what it is in metric ... 120 kilos? ... , a good 70 pounds overweight for my frame - I should probably be 170 or 180.

And sex, even if you pay for it, is not that great when you are fat. Someone might argue this, I see fat porn on the internet, maybe there are fat people who are having sex, but my experience is that it is better when you are not fat, I have tried it both ways, and I have cobbled this up into a concocted generality, pardon the pun. It is not a truth that I would die for. I am not sure that there is any such truth. Christ might be such a truth - but I have not been asked to prove it, not yet anyway.

Bob said a few things which I will use to introduce this post:

"When that steamboat whistle blows,
I'm gonna give you all I got to give," (Dear Landlord 1967-68)

"The naked truth is still taboo whenever it can be seen." (Dirge 1973-74)

"But nothing really matters much, it's doom alone that counts
And the one-eyed undertaker, he blows a futile horn." (Shelter from the Storm 1974-75)

I was about this weight when I first got to Rio, and God provided a small miracle to me. The light hit my murky eyes like lightning and I was amazed and delighted. The smell hit me and I was captivated. Then the heat hit me, and three months of the squitters, and I lost 60 pounds. Got down to 95 kilos. I was almost afraid to be shedding weight so quickly, but nothing I tried would stop it and every moment was so full of light and odour. I learned a few words to try to contain the feeling: 'alegria' 'joia' 'felicidade'. I fell in love with streets made of Português stones and Brasilieras who touch you when they are talking to you.

There is the odd fat person in Rio too, but nothing like what you see in Houston and St. John's.

My mother told me once that she thought people got fat to keep other people at a distance, as a sort of compensation for some kind of incomprehensible grief. I thought a lot about what she said - there is some truth there. She also told me to beware of short people, not generally, but particularly because I am tall. She said they are jealous - there is some truth there too as I have found to my cost, not as much maybe, but some. While I am on the subject of things my parents told me; my father said that black people are inferior, he grew up in Washington DC and he thought he knew - there is not very much truth in that one, none at all in my experience though I have never lived in Washington DC. He also told me that prostitutes are women who just like to have a lot of men around them - the jury is still out on that one. To cap it off; my mother told me that Jews killed Christ and wear little hats because they are ashamed - what can I say about that except that it makes me slightly ashamed to be a Christian, but I still am one, I think, well, who can say?

But ok, fat people (and me).

There are wonderful and tremendous joys in life. Every dawn I see makes my heart thankful - if I had all of the money and riches on the earth, all of the energy and power, I could not make a single dawn, not one. There is a joke I like in which God and a scientist are arguing. The scientist says, "I can create life"; and God says, "I bet you can't, show me." So the scientist gets some experiment on the go and God says, "oh no, none of that stuff, you have to do it from scratch."

But that is a bit ethereal maybe - there are other huge joys I have known: the birth of a child, especially if you are up-close to see it and hold the warm wet and slimy little thing in your hands; the creation of something entirely new from within yourself, in my case one of those was stumbling onto the basic 6-strut tensegrity structure (just about) from scratch. There are experiences which are so wonderful that they melt your heart: a child taking your hand or climbing into your bed in the night; all of this and more. I have seen these things, I have had these experiences. All this to show that I am not some shallow jock, because after all of that I still say there is nothing like fucking.

And my guess is that these fat people are not fucking, not very much. This makes sense for me of much that has changed for the worse in my world. I observe that the rich and powerful are generally fat. Ergo they are not fucking, and that is why they are making such a mess.

I am not talking about mechanical sex by the way. I use the eff-word, but what I mean is the best that you can imagine; an engagement of the eyes, the soul, the brain, the whole body; and a hurling, a being hurled, into the timeless void, and yet, not alone. A very metaphor for the forgiveness which only Christ can give (or so they say).

I stood in Hyde park one time in the 70s listening to some hippie talk about "passing the hairy gates to eternity", and he had three or four lovely young nubiles around him. He did not convince me. It sounded like he was talking power games and physics. More than two or three at once, more than any bragging; not to say these things do not happen when there are more than two or three, nor that they should not be bragged about.

There is a bit in the movie Zabriskie Point, where they get together in the desert, and suddenly the desert is full of senses. This is more like it, something out of control and unstoppable. For instance, I think the shepherds might have felt something like it when, as Luke's description has it:

Suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. (Luke 2-13 ff)

The key is in the word 'suddenly'. I don't wanna put this out of reach at all. It is nothing in the end that you can do entirely for yourself, it is just suddenly there. Like the "Wonderful! Counsellor!" in Handel's Messiah, you know it is coming, and you know just what it sounds like, and then they sing it and the hair on your head stands up!

And that is sorta what I know about fucking. Surprising to tell that the so called 'sex trade workers' don't know much about it, not the ones I met anyway, (when I thought that I just can't go on). It was quite a surprise to discover that. They know about the mechanics all right, although even there they do so tend to be conservative where possible. "Oh, I don't like those guys with big cocks, makes me sore." "She's so silly, she takes it up the ass. She'll soon see, things wear out, haha." And the like.

I knew a girl who hardly ever smiled. She was skinny and popular, a good dancer, the American basketball team liked her. She came into my place late one night and took off her shoes and rubbed her feet and groaned. I said, "gimme that", and took her foot. I gave it a caress and she leaned back on the sofa with a smile, so I got the oil and rubbed some more. Calluses and sore spots all over, from wearing high heeled shoes all the time she said. She closed her eyes and the smile just grew softer and softer as I stroked until she fell asleep and I thought my heart would burst.

I know more than I want to tell, it makes me sad sometimes.

...

So, what do I know about being fat? It makes you cautious. You plan ahead not to have to bend over and pick things up. You dread situations in which you may have to exert yourself to any degree and for any reason, and you avoid them.

I think insurance companies are run by fat people. They want to be safe. They make rules for themselves which essentially turn their own incapacities into principles, and then enforce them on everyone: "Oh you mustn't do that, think of the liability." I think laws are written by fat people. Oh yeah, the lawyers are thin enough; "a lean and hungry look", but they are interpreting and enforcing and profiting greatly from laws; later when they get fat and somebody makes 'em into judges, then they start writing them.

Who remembers the first time they leapt into the air on skis? No safety in that. The first time on a bicycle, out of control (in my case) and down over the (providentially grassy) hill to crash over the handlebars face first onto the sod. The first time asking a girl to dance, the first risky friend, the first really close call in traffic. The first near-death experience: thinking you will drown, thinking you will freeze ... and likely all subsequent passes anywhere near it, and so on and on ...

Anarchy has become a dirty word. I was taught that part of what Christians are striving for is a growth in individual conscience to the point where laws will not be necessary. Later I figgured out that this is anarchy, of a positive sort, but anarchy. And out of this pattern has come very much more: don't try to think for people, teach them how to read and they will think for themselves; don't try to feed people, show them how to fish and hunt and dig-and-delve and they will feed themselves; etc.

And later still, a receptiveness to the notion that the village is a model of the world, and the family is a model of the village, and the self is a model of the family, so if you want to fix the world, fix yourself. As a thought (by the way) this is not bad - as an ideology it sucks since it does not take into account fundamental differences of scale. Becomes just another excuse for self-righteous judgements (made by insurance men who go, check to see that nobody is escaping to Desolation Row).

Same with feminism come to that. I saw that Michelle Bachelet, the nova presidenta of Chile, says she will have a cabinet in which half are women. Nonsense of course. None of these prescriptive preconceptions work. I hope it doesn't sink her. Being a single parent of daughters, and with a mother still alive, might be enough to make her imagine that she is onto something. Her own success should give the lie to such nonsense but apparently hasn't.

Toilet training, now there is something that used to be women's work. If some woman would just figgure out how to toilet train large corporations and governments, that would be a good thing. But it will be another generation who have gotten over fixating on obvious sexual dimorphism, skin colour, and religion, who will have to solve that one - if the toilet has not backed up and drowned us all before then.

In my family you see, most of the toilet training fell to me, and whatever other faults they may have I don't think any of my children suffered for it.

...

So there you go. I got thinner and fitter and had some life for a few years, and then I had some bad luck and got fat again, protecting myself from the grief of having to leave, and now I am back where I started. God's grace that it all happened so quickly that this morning I can still remember enough to see both sides.

Death is comin'. The sky is fallin'. Fatness won't save yuh. Fitness won't save yuh neither but you will have more fun, and I mean 'fun' in the biblical sense, hahahaha.

I have had very good luck in the matter of death. I saw my aunt just the day before she died, and she gestured weakly to all of the equipment she was plugged into and the pacemaker they had stuck into her and whispered to me "silly", then she held my hand and said to me, "I want to go home now."

And quite soon after, off she went.