KNEWSING 1: Fighting Food

I have decided that everyday I will respond to an article I read in the newspaper. Sometimes these articles will be front pagers; sometimes they will be paragraphs found right in the underbelly of the nytimes.com. I will read a different newspaper from a different city everyday, choosing something that stands out. It will be a combination of knowing the news and musing – I’ll call it knewsing. Why not? It’s also a way of opening up a discussion, so I welcome comments here, anytime, from anywhere.

Today’s article is from The New York Times. It’s called: Parenting and Food: Eat Your Peas. Or Don’t. Whatever. By Frank Bruni
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/weekinreview/30bruni.html

The article is about how to deal with your children and food – how to keep your sixteen year old from imitating the bulimic/anorexic model in the fashion magazines that sit at the check out aisle in the grocery store; how to keep your son from becoming the next case of childhood obesity.

Food strikes a personal chord for me. My father died of obesity, at 50 – a life cut short by too much eating. I myself went through a different disorder and almost cut my own life short by lack of eating. Food is something that I have hated for a very long time; fought with, Tyson-fisted. I have never been able to receive pleasure from food -- not the kind that soothes and eases, like the way the French eat, at Cafes, slowly. Or the Spanish and their Serrano, happily loving the fruits of the earth. I’m sorry for that, for that loss of happiness.

It's a happiness I channel by watching the food network and writing restaurant reviews -- talk about paradoxes and irony. I love doing both of those things. I love watching garlic sizzle on the pan on Iron Chef; the carots on the chopping block; I love writing about the way a succulent piece of broccoli tastes dipped in butter and coconut curry.

But it really is about so much more than food. My father’s appetite and eating was so much more than gluttony. Bruni’s article ends with a statement about the “mysteries of appetite.” And it’s telling, I think. This animalistic drive within us, like a pregnant woman who eats dirt, seeking minerals. The other day I saw a woman on the airplane, she took up two seats, and was so bloated I had the sudden violent urge to yell at her, while at the same time feeling like I should hug and ask her what she was really hungry for. What was it, in her, driving her to fill herself up to the extent that she got to the point where she had to buy two plane tickets just to take a vacation and fly back home to Tennessee. How is it that we have allowed food to stop nurturing us and start nullifying us? Why has food become something we fight instead of flavor?

Early Morning Elvis Blues

This morning on the plane back from Memphis to Miami. I realized my brain was working in starts and starts and particularly visually. Maybe because I had woken up at 3am to catch a red-eye. Maybe because I was looking out, above the sky above the clouds, onto a magnificent view of the universe.

I had this vision in my head, as I was god knows how many feet up in the sky, of a blue stove, crackling in rust, dripping, as if I were looking at it through a window sill during a rainstorm. Or, like its paint was melting off. Right on top of this blue, melting stove was an orange tea kettle. The orange and the blue were spectacular in the image, next to each other like that.

I think this has to do with Elvis.

Years ago, when I lived in a shit-hole apartment in Washington Heights, I had a gaudy image of fat Elvis in a blue suit on top of my fridge. I also had poetry books in the kitchen at the time, which is where I still think they belong. Blue-suited, bloated Elvis was in a gold frame. A couple of feet to the right, on top of my white, rusting, NYC-shit-hole-apartment-stove was an orange tea kettle I used to have (that I left behind when I moved).

Because I’ve been thinking of Elvis while visiting Memphis, I think these two fused in my head (the Elvis picture and the tea kettle), taking me back to Manhattan from Memphis on my way to Miami (which was merging with a Mozart soundtrack, because I was writing a book based on Mozart at the time I was living in Manhattan…a lot of M’s here, I know. I apologize). In other words, the blue from Elvis’s suit was merging with the orange tea kettle and the feeling of New York and of the kitchen poetry. It was making me remember what I used to think of as Elvis back then. I think differently now, but the image is still relevant.

Now, I’m falling in love with Elvis. Which is a good thing. It’s always a good thing to fall in love with people you are writing about.

Shrinking Pains

So, I’m seeing a shrink. It’s been about 8 months and it’s starting to get really hard. It was okay at first, then months rolled by and it started getting good, and now it’s just awful. I’m beginning to hate going and if my pleasure buttons had a say in it, this would all be over. I would sign out, say goodbye, I’d put my credit card away, happy to not have to pay for pain. Because the last time I went in for a session I left with an ache I couldn’t stand, it rattled around in me for days.

But, I guess this is what happens before you heal – these shrinking pains. The bones of all the past cracking and shaking before they disappear and turn to dust. Ouch. I know I can’t stop going. Not now. The skin is only starting to crack and I know there’s so much buried beneath it – canals and rivers. I want to be able to swim in them, bask in the sun, be happy in myself for the long haul. And so…on to the next session.

“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.”
- Lance Armstrong

Choosing Rain

The other day I had a strange thought. I wished, for a moment, that we were back in the days where we had arranged marriages. It seemed to me, at that moment of uncharacteristically conservative thought, that there was something beautiful about the idea of learning to love somebody that your parents had picked out for you -- believing that they, as your parents, knew you well and would know who could be a good match for you. In other words, giving Love a chance to grow and build; and not, not ever, giving up on it simply because one didn’t have the choice of giving up. Love seemed, in these thoughts, all the stronger. Of course, this is a fleeting thought that carries many different repercussions – I don’t think I’d be very happy if my parents imposed a groom upon me, in all truth. It’s just, it seems like people, having the choice of divorce, and of so many people in the world to play with and choose from – it just seems that people mess up by giving up too easily and relying to readily on the glamour of over-rated choice.

As I was having all of these thoughts, I recalled something I saw at a supermarket about two years ago. There was a man, looking like he had just come from Cuba yesterday (or the day before, or the day before that) and he was staring at row of canned foods. He seemed completely overwhelmed by the variety of companies and brands offering the same food. And so, bogged down by choice, he just stood there – unable to choose; motionless. “In Cuba, we’ve got corn. Corn is corn. Peas are peas. Jamon es Jamon.” I could see him thinking this in his head. And the expression on his face told me he wasn’t so sure whether all this choice was as great as he thought it was going to be. I know Cubans (as a Cuban-American it is part of my daily existence to know many generations of Cubans from different migration waves) that come to the States and want nothing more than to go back home. Just as I know Cubans that come to the States and think: this has to be some kind of capitalist heaven. And in these latter cases, choice becomes the end all be all…a way of life. How many things can I acquire? Why not buy one of each? Why not? If I can…If I’m free to do so…If the market allows me…well then, why not? Why in god’s (or is it Dios, or Chango, or Allah ….you get the idea) name not?

Choice is a funny thing. Like today, for instance…

Today, I decided to go for a run, despite the fact that I knew a storm was approaching. Perhaps there was a slight feeling of invincibility about me this morning. So I went out, and I ran for fifty minutes before the dark clouds that were looming above me opened up their wide mouths and gushed spear-like rain in my direction, hurling its arrows in the face of my seeming invincibility. And in that moment, I thought about how little choice I actually do have. How little autonomy in the world I truly practice. I cannot control the clouds and the way they spin in and out of my life; the ocean and its currents; the sun and the way it scorches or soothes. Of course, I do have a choice to go out in the rain, or stay home. But who is to say that at home a tree would not fall through my window, trashing every bit of machinery, literature, and whatever else I have so gathered and possibly horded? And who is to say it might not even give me a bit of a thrashing.

I tried to run home, fast as I could, making my long-distance running legs sore -- Soon, however, the rain lifted, but not before taking with it whatever certain thought I may have had about the nature of choice.

The Life of the Mind: A Sign of the Times

Thoughts for the day (or at least for the past couple of hours)

1. Thinking about how I just played my first hand in the stock market...this could be fun.

2. Thinking about a friend I met not very long ago who is in “the desert” – at war in an undisclosed location.

3. Thinking about how I am inching away from agnosticism and into a true belief in something greater than myself and how it’s a shame to feel to have to excuse a belief in a greater force at work in our lives and in the world.

4. Thinking about how I asking that greater force to be by the side of my friend in “the desert.” Also at the side of my good friend who is about to have a baby. Her third girl.

5. Thinking the person I love. How there were two times I lost my virginity, with two different people. How the first time, it was simply an act, the breaking of tissue. And how the second time it was more gradual, over days of sex and champagne and conversation. How the second time felt like it was the true loss of virginity along with the very real gain of something else. This second person is the person I still love.

6. Thinking about how my first love was a platonic one – not too very long ago, full of a unique kind of hunger – a literal physical hunger, a sexual hunger, a desperate hunger. Love should never be desperate. I’m glad we remained friends and didn’t, at that moment in my life, become lovers – it might have ended in disaster. It was a wise decision on his behalf.

7. Thinking about how the Chinese Gymnasts look so young and how Phelps has to consume 12,000 calories a day in order to keep up with those speedy laps. Every time I watch him swim I think to myself: is this man human? And then that leads me on a train of thoughts about humanity and where we come from and how our gymnastics are not so far from fantastic documentaries like Planet Earth…and how really we’re just mammals with minds. But then isn’t that combination a very powerful thing? And then I say, ok, ok…avoid the philosophizing and BS, move on, move on.

8. Thinking about another set of human acts: creation and commerce and how that comes together in the selling of a $26 dollar grape ($910 for the bunch) in Japan.

9. ...Obama, Mc Cain, Paris Hilton. Georgia and Russia. Putin. Hijo de Puta?

10. Back to Japan; how I love Japan. And how in Kyoto I had a spiritual experience that’s difficult to express in a bullet point. Thinking about the book I’m reading by Murakami about running. And how I’m training for a marathon and how all of these thoughts came to me while I was just outside running. And then thinking about how all these thoughts come full circle…and how tomorrow there might be another circle to ride.

11. Thinking about traveling, in circles in lines, across borders and boundaries, cities, states, and countries…Hawaii (I want to go back to Hawaii...). Thinking about love, the roundness of my life, about fruit (like the grapes), and the fruit of the earth and the fruit of my mind, and the fruit of my efforts, and my second love, and all whom I love, and my life; and then I think of death…as always, the day has not gone by without thinking about the death of my father. The anniversary of his death is next Friday, the 22nd…I think I want to add him, my father, to number four on this list…that the greater force be also with him, to guide him through what I don’t yet understand, in whatever transition of self and form he might be going through…

…There are always more thoughts…but, today, I’ll end here.