The Philosophy of Fasting

This morning I was sitting around the kitchen table with my roommates, debating the merits of exercise. I was pro-exercise and others were con or somewhere in the middle. And one of them made the point that Elle MacPherson doesn't look like she does because she hits the gym every day. That exercise doesn't ever really make the life altering change to our looks that we hope it will. And I told her that in the last year I've lost roughly 20 pounds and definitely look different. She asked if this was just from exercise and I said yes...but it's not quite true.

Just after Thanksgiving last year I embarked on a five day fast. For five days I drank salt water, lemon juice and tea. During those five days I lost maybe eight pounds, most of it water weight. Which means I should have instantly put it back on in the days following the fast, but I didn't. I kept getting thinner. I ate less generally. I started exercising. So now a year later those five days of not eating have left their mark on me and I wonder if it was kind of a cheat.

This summer I was in a used bookstore and I found a slim yellow volume entitled "The Philosophy of Fasting" by Edward E. Purinton. Published in 1906 it advocates what is essentially the Master Cleanse, what I did a year ago (a very truncated version). I flipped through it, intrigued.

When you're not eating there's not much else to do but think. All the time you usually spend planning a meal, buying ingredients, preparing your food (or in lieu of that, the time you spend arguing about where to get take-out) is now just dead air. Since I was avoiding the thought of eating I thought about lots of other stuff that I had been avoiding by eating all the time. My way of dealing with difficult emotions or thoughts has always been through food, eating as a kind of sedation. Part of the reason I went on the fast was because that compulsion had begun to take over my life in a scary way.

This is a weird thing to write about because this blog is about things I think are cool or funny or interesting or poignant or would recommend other people try. But fasting is none of those things. It's personal, as is everyone's relationship to food and their bodies. As much as we do it in groups, fetishize it, torment each other over it, teach and write and talk about it, eating is like a relationship. No one knows what goes on between you and your food except the two of you. Edward E. Purinton's book touched a lot on the spiritual side of fasting, how starving yourself leads to all kinds of revelatory experiences but he sounds pretty crazy and self-obsessed, much like this post is starting to sound...but I still get it.

Because I fasted, which led to thinking which led to philosophizing. My reasons for eating more than I needed to and then more than I even wanted to became clearer to me and I found that those reasons held less power when I was aware of them. Am I cured of these compulsions? No. They manifest in a hundred other ways and I'll never abstain from all bad behavior, god willing. Do I have control over myself? What an ugly word control is especially when related to the physical self. But now I know what's possible. Change is possible. I've changed. I don't think fasting is the only way to make that happen for myself or anyone but I'm still really glad it did happen. I wont ever look like Elle MacPherson, obvs, and while I look different, kinda, maybe its not as different as I'd hoped when I started loosing weight.

Could I fast again? Well, I have one or two days at a time. It's not the same because the first time you don't eat for many days in a row you're not sure what to expect and it's kind of exciting. Now when I do it I'm like, oh yeah...that bullshit. But with it having been a year and all I'm beginning to feel some of that desire, to just set aside time for myself. Time to think, to have a headache, to reflect, to pee a hundred times a day, time to work out my philosophy. Whatever it is.

Small Potatoes

Well, it's September 11th. I don't think about September 11th very much. I didn't think about it today until I checked Facebook and saw everyone's statuses reminding me and telling me that they were thinking about it and also pretty sad about it.

I woke up this morning planning to write a post about some potatoes I grew in a window box. They're Magic Mollies, purple potatoes that I hoarded for almost a year to plant in my garden. When we had to move out and couldn't take the garden with us I got the shovel and uprooted one of the potato plants. It was a wonderful color, dark green with purple coming up the stem and spreading into the leaves growing in every direction. I put it in a long narrow plastic container with some silty dirt and hoped for the best. Over the summer it continued to grow, taller and taller but there were never any flowers on it. Eventually the whole thing collapsed on itself and I made the executive decision to rip the thing up rather than cart around twenty pounds of dirt to yet another of my many homes.

All that came of it were a handful of tiny potatoes. They looked like something a woodland animal leaves behind. Appetizing, but I didn't get around to eating them, then forgot them in a friend's refrigerator. It was a disappointing yield but still the Mollies are magical to me. Anytime you have a hand in creating something, even something so small and turd-like, it's kind of a thrill.

The scale of the worthwhile and the meaningless is such a difficult one to balance. On the one hand I'm thinking about a day eight years ago when thousands of people died a short subway ride away from me. I have memories of the day and the days that followed. My mother got sick that same week and was in the hospital for ages, it seemed. I remember visiting her and walking through the ER hallways lined floor to ceiling with pictures of missing people. On the other hand I'm thinking about potatoes.

When today passes I'll be thinking about the potato side of life far more prominently. Or there will be another unspeakable tragedy and I'll think about that. Or another crop, something even more sustaining and delicious and I'll think about that. I guess on the anniversary of important events, both good and bad, we're not just thinking of one day but all the days in between, all the events that have changed and shaped us, who we were and what we've evolved into. And we hope this time next year things will be better.

April is the Cruelest Month...and May Through August

Statistically speaking I dropped off this whole blogging thing at about the right time. Half a year and I checked out. I can go on about the reasons why I did but what's more interesting are the reasons why I'm writing again, which will hopefully not be just another whim. But hey, who knows? Life is long and full of impediments.

Let us take a journey back to April then, that far flung month of Fools and sudden flurries. It was wet, it was cold but Spring had reached out to tap our shoulders and say, "Hey, wait up I'm coming! Don't go without me!" I looked out at the sagging broken bits of my garden and thought, Let's do this thing. Earth was turned, leaves composted, cement swept and the great Craigslist search began. First to build a garden box you need wood and free wood is the best kind.

My roommate Claire and I met up on a desolate street a hair's breadth from Red Hook then followed a strange woman into her warehouse, using a flash light to pick through her debris and find chunks of wood of an approximate size to one another. They were all different finishes, some actual lumber, some just the hacked up drawers of an old bureau, some were lined mysteriously with cloth that no force on earth (barring industrial solvents) could remove. We bungeed what we could to the back of Claire's bike and the rest on a tiny black hand cart and walked the forty or so blocks to our house, with the weight of the wood tipping their conveyances over every ten feet or so. Tenacious C, as I like to call her, urged me on as my shoulders separated and we finally made it, April wind whipping our faces and the clouds rolling over.

Aw, look at this photo. I'm so glad my Nalgene is pictured here. I lost it a few weeks ago at a yoga studio. Never forget!!


When we finally got to hammering all this garbage together we noticed our boxes were perfectly coffin sized, if you were being buried 150 years ago in the Old West.


There was one for me as well but I like the power to the workers tone of Claire's pose here with the hammer and all.

Hmm, now we have boxes. Where to find dirt? Until you need large amounts of it at once you assume dirt is the most readily available commodity out there. I mean everywhere I look I see dirt, right? But no. Craigslist again! This time it lead us to a bar on Fifth Ave. where the proprietor had been digging out his basement, hoping to make the ceiling a habitable distance from the floor. One day it will be a music venue but that particular day it looked like where we were going to be murdered. It didn't help that in the corner sat two hundred partially filled black garbage bags under a caged bare bulb. These turned out to be full of dirt, not body parts, and we started hauling them up the perilously steep basement staircase. Another surprise about dirt-it's pretty fucking heavy! It took the both of us to manage certain bags and when we peaked in one we saw why. This wasn't loamy compost full of rich organic matter. This was red silt, the clay earth of old Brooklyn sitting under the pressure of a building for a hundred years. Not entirely sure anything would even grow in it we loaded down a friend's car until it sagged and drove the bags home to go through another back breaking session of moving them down the long alleyway to our apartment.

Now the fun part! Slashing the bags with a razor blade filled me with glee. Because I'm deranged. Claire upended our compost bin over the red clay, ignoring un-composted bits like corn husks and what we'd just eaten for lunch, assuming it would all work itself out in the end. We mixed the two together hoping to create a hospitable environment for our seeds.

And such seeds. I had it all worked out. I was gonna grow a whole season's worth of food and have enough to can and jar, freeze and dry, and subsist on all winter. I dreamed big, baby. Tomatoes, snap peas, kale, carrots, green onions, potatoes (Including the purple Magic Mollies I'd hoarded in a paper bag all year. When I reached my hand in to get them I shrieked. Their eyes had sprouted and the stems caressed me like antennae), strawberries, five kinds of basil, rosemary, thyme, beets. All of these I planted in peat lined trays and covered carefully with clear plastic. I worried over them like a mother. A negligent, inconsistent mother but somehow they sprouted. I built a trellis over the boxes out of old silkscreen frames for the climbing peas and sat back waiting to reap what I'd sown.

Then the blow! My landlord wanted my house, Tenacious C was moving out and I had to find a new place to live all of which is a saga for another day. I suffered in a few ways, throwing out most of my personal belongings, losing money etc. But the hardest thing was saying goodbye to my garden that I had planted and tended in good faith and which now was reduced to a charge from my landlord. Removal. He trashed it all. All our work in a dumpster just like that.

That's assuming he didn't just charge me and keep the beds in his new yard anyway, which I'd really be glad to hear.

So here I am, in upstate New York again, a part of the world that first inspired me to begin writing about food and the outdoors and growing things. And I said this was going to be a post about why I've started writing again not why I stopped but it seems they're the same story, really. I stopped because my garden was taken away before it could be anything and I'm starting again because writing about food and life and plants brings it back to life, allows it to stretch its tendrils out and climb that trellis where it can unfurl and bear fruit.

Metaphorically, I mean. Because it's actually in a landfill now.

The Old Ennui

The last couple weeks I've been moping around and immersing myself in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon and generally falling off the Living Right Wagon. Until pretty recently I didn't have a very firm idea of what living right means exactly. More like a vague outline- no students loitering after school, no horrible murders with hearts being removed. And also no smoking. Buffy Huzzah! But as a day to day guide those aren't issues I really wrastle with. Smoking, bleh.

So if I had to make a new living right code it would look something like this-exercise, eat healthy food that is good for the environment that you can share with family and friends, slay demons. Easy! Well, I haven't been managing any of my to-do list and am in a shame spiral. This happens to me pretty much every year in late summer. It's probably common for most peeps to look back on the long languorous days of possibility that make up June July and August and think, "WTF was I doing??". It's odd because many of us look forward to the season as being a time to sit on our lazy asses, watch stupid movies and fall asleep on the beach. I've done those things in spades this year and now that the shortening of days is visible I feel like I've accomplished nothing! Though I've accomplished everything summer's meant for! A Paradox.

When I'm feeling depressed all my actions compound and beget. So I haven't written a blog post in awhile? Might as well not bother then! Haven't gone for a run in a week? Might as well not for another month. Or ever (fuck running). When you feel like you haven't done anything right in a long time the effort to change becomes monumental. I think this is why we don't do things we know we should, because it seems like all the times we were doing the wrong thing can never be balanced out...or we'll get on the Living Right Wagon just to get knocked into the dust further down the road. That's pretty much why I've never flossed. Though I really should. Oh god, I'm going to hell! Or some alternate dimension composed entirely of shrimp (Buffy Huzzah!)!

Which brings me to my low point today. I went to Chipotle.

I wont say going to Chipotle is the low point for my entire life because that would certainly be an exaggeration. But definitely for today. Fast food restaurants have become bad to think for me, by which I mean they're now mentally in the category of the inedible. I was a Chipotle believer for quite awhile, particularly working in Midtown where choices were slim and disturbingly gritty. A burrito from Chipotle seemed like a pretty clean tasty alternative. I knew they were owned by McDonald's and had a kind of 'boo corporate' thought when I found out, but rice and beans are my fav.

Then I read Fast Food Nation and threw up in my mouth. I couldn't walk into Chipotle and not see the evil wrapped in every burrito. It didn't help that the last one I ate (before today) was draped by an employee's dirty dish cloth before my very horrified eyes. Anyway, it's been awhile since I've been inside a fast food restaurant except to use the bathroom and I was surprised by the list of numbers paralleling the prices on the menu hanging above the counter. What could they be trying to tell me? Okay, so they were labeled 'calories' but a salad was listed as being 118-813 calories. Huh? That's quite a range there. So is that the leaves and then the cheese with sour cream? Mm. Sour cream. All the items were like that, with a calorie low several hundred integers from its high.

I'd heard this whole calorie listing thing was going to become mandatory but hadn't witnessed it though now dimly recall the gals at the office screeching about having consumed 1800 calorie lunches all year. Personally, I don't count calories. I know what I'm eating and what will be likely to make me fat and what it feels like to be stuffed to the gills. When I make bad choices and eat a family sized bag of potato chips for dinner instead of a balanced meal I don't look at the bag and flip out because I've eaten my caloric intake for the week in one sitting. I flip out because I'm an idiot...hmm there goes the Living Right Wagon again!

I'm kind of on the fence about this whole calorie listing thing. Yes, nutritional information should be available, but is counting calories the same thing as knowing about good nutrition ? Is it good to ask corporations to take responsibility for their customers health or are we passing the buck and ignoring the question of health education in schools? Are these listings so vague that their informational value is just a kind of scarecrow to the wary i.e. 'look out you may possibly be eating 813 calories or maybe just 118, no knowing'? And if you do risk, then it's your own fault you obese diabetes-courting fuck up!?

Anyway, I ate one. A burrito bowl this time since the calorie content ranges about a 200 less than the burrito. But I got chips so that probably added the overall. Jesus. I might as well just eat a bag of potato chips and go die under a rock. I'm feeling terrible remorse and have sworn off the fast food again. Because of the evil thing not the calorie thing. It really is all about choices, the choice to eat something you cooked for yourself from healthy whole ingredients, the choice to change out of your footie pajamas and go out to enjoy a warm summer day, the choice to floss. Tomorrow I'm going to make a better choice and if the day after that I fall back on old habits it's okay. I can catch the Living As Best As I Can Carriage.

This is a website from that helpful NY gov trying to tell us how to be, which I found reading about this whole law thing and it tickled me. Very sensible advice overall though they recommend reducing television viewing hours. You know what I say to that?

Buffy Huzzah!