You can forget all about it for a little while up in Saugerties, where I finally touched the sacred wall of Big Pink.
Hello and get in touch, loveliest Susan and Shondra . . . please. We'll not be forgetting YOU.
About Me
- Jim
- Hardly a ripple, in spite of the generally monumental frustration. Lucky in love, though. Saw Jimi at Oakland Colliseum in 1969. Local celebrity Jack Cassidy (bass guitar, Jefferson Airplane) joined him on "Voodoo Child, slight return."
4 comments:
hey, marge and jim. great conversation with you.
listened to "Another World." i'm especially taken with "This Land" and the instrumental of one of my favorite songs, "Plaisir d'Amour."
can't figure out how to get "The Rules" for Jim and "Being Fat" for Marge, or vice versa, to you. what's your email?
how's our old Cabin 11 holding up? was the rest of your week great?
keep me in touch with how your job goes, Marge.
much fondness,
susan
Rules
There have to be rules. The rules must be fair. Which means they must favor the deserving. That’s only fair. Whoever heard of a rule that favored everybody? Who gets into “good” universities, for instance: some people do, some people don’t. Isn’t it better if the people who matriculate are the people who deserve to? Not only kids whose parents have money, no, no, it’s not that crude; but kids who went to good enough schools so they score well on the tests, which means kids whose parents have the money and sometimes the nationality to live in good enough neighborhoods so the schools are good. Like that.
So who gets to be a citizen of this great nation? It’s got to be only the deserving. If citizenship were open to all, what would be the point of being An American?
I’m not talking practicality. I’m not referring to the obvious advantage of deporting foreign-born troublemakers who try to organize unions or stand up for safe working conditions. I don’t mean the whole business of paying people without papers less so that employers can also pay people born here less, since wages are set from the bottom up. Clearly these are great consequences of dividing people who are citizens from people who don’t deserve to be citizens. But no, I’m talking pride. If anybody could be an American, the right kind of American I mean, the USA kind, not South American or Central American, but real American -- it just wouldn’t mean anything.
The United States of America is not a closed society. Those who want to become a citizen of this great land simply have to follow the rules. The first rule is, be born in a country the US allows you to emigrate from. Which nice, relatively white-skinned countries this includes we’ll leave aside. It helps to have skills US employers need, technical skills, which gets back to the point above, having parents rich enough so you get into the right schools to learn the skills…etc.
But suppose you’re stupid enough to be born in another kind of country, another layer of society. Darker, for one thing. Poorer, of course. You want to leave your home, your family, your life to live in the greatest country on earth. That’s admirable, that shows good taste. But to make sure you understand how great the greatest country on earth is, you have to pass certain tests. You have to fill out innumerable forms, again and again. Each form must be accompanied by thousands of dollars. That’s only fair.
And of course you must learn English. English is the greatest language on earth, because it is spoken in the greatest country on earth. Any other language is an insult.
Those of us who have the supreme good sense to be born US citizens don’t have to pass tests to prove how deserving we are. Why should we? Some other generation in our family already followed the rules to become citizens. Or were dragged here in chains, also according to rule, the rule of property. (And then had to pass a few other tests involving lynching, fire hoses, vicious police dogs, jail cells.)
At the beginning of the twentieth century, when so many citizens’ grandparents immigrated to the United States, their labor was needed and welcome so it wasn’t very difficult to become a Citizen. Well, life changes and the class that rules has to change the rules to stay in charge. Still, a Rule is a Rule.
Quotas to enforce affirmative action are racist and sexist. That’s taken as read, as they say in Britain. Quotas for how many people, what kind of people, from which countries, can legally immigrate to the USA any given year are Rules. Sacrosanct, conveniently dividing the deserving from the criminal.
Obviously Americans are the most important people on earth. Read any newspaper report of a plane that went down: of the 135 passengers and crew, Six Were Americans! Thirteen Americans were caught in the tsunami! It’s an outrage when American soldiers are killed in Iraq. It’s not worth mentioning how many Iraqis die because American soldiers and mercenaries occupy their country.
There’s no doubt a scientific formula for how many foreign lives each American life is worth.
Everybody knows that an “American job,” an American citizen’s job, is the only job worth protecting. Not protecting from the owners of industry, the owners of banks, and the government that serves this tiny minority of owners. But worth protecting from the small dark Guatemalan woman hunched over a sewing machine. Worth protecting from the guy in a ridiculous turban in New Delhi who, yes, speaks English, but with that ridiculous accent as he answers the phone when your computer acts up.
Above all, worth protecting from the migrant worker who faced starvation, heat stroke, exposure, shooting by US border guards, torture by vigilantes -- all warranted-- because his overriding goal in breaking the Rules is to steal your job.
Only Americans, real Americans, deserve jobs.
Didn’t they used to say that about men? That women by working outside the home were stealing the bread from the real breadwinners?
We must keep in mind that the number and kinds of jobs available depend on what creates the most profits for the ruling class. This does not include constructing housing, schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, levees, childcare centers. It does not include increasing hours of libraries and art museums.
Isn’t it better to fight over the crumbs of a shrinking pie than to join together to explode the pie? That would be breaking the most important Rule of all.
Being Fat
Fat people are like alcoholics. You never become not a fat person. You might torture yourself into losing weight. A very few never re-gain that weight plus more. Yet even they must be perennially vigilant.
For the rest of us, the yo-yo’s, the struggle never stops. Here is a case history.
First, where I’m at now. On the way to Weight Watchers last Wednesday, I bought a piece of dulce de leche cheesecake. I insisted on the fattest piece, third from the window. If I’m going to consume calories for calories’ sake, I’m going to make the most of it. I stuffed giant bites into my mouth as I walked, but didn’t have time to really taste or finish it. So I put the remainder into my backpack. I was afraid to be provocative, like a guy walking into Narcotics Anonymous with a needle stuck under the tourniquet around his arm.
I did not weigh in. I was hoping that being at the meeting by osmosis alone would put a brake to the wagon I’ve tumbled from, the wagon that rolls over me then reverses to roll over me again.
It didn’t.
I’m eating defiantly and bloatingly. Without the structure of “write what you bite” and keep to “healthy guidelines,” I’m lost.
Since I know I’ll go back on the wagon all too soon, my question is: what can I eat now, that I’d have to limit when I’m back on program? I also refuse to consider anything I do eat on program, such as grapes or popcorn, even when I sort of want to.
I learned in the last three minutes of therapy last night that my role model is Tony Soprano.
I’ve been proclaiming for years, “I want to be a powerful man. I want gourmet meals, pressed clothes, a pleasant house to magically appear every day. I want everyone to defer to me.” My Platonic ideal is the 1950’s white collar white male married to the smiling wife who doesn’t work outside the home and resents nothing, who lives to vacuum, dust, shop, cook, scrub pots, rear perfect children and defer to me at all times.
But I am too aware of the rages and sadness of those ‘50‘s wives to believe in the Platonic ideal. Also, none of the details have anything in common with my own family. (Except for the part where my mother put my father ahead of the children.) My mother went back to work as a school nurse, first learning to drive without my father’s support, getting her bachelor’s and master’s at night at West Chester State College, My father was a postal worker and he enjoyed washing dishes -- he claimed it was the only way to clean his nails -- and my parents food-shopped together. When they got home they ticked items off the receipt as they put them away because sometimes a loaf of white bread or a can of peas was overcharged and every penny mattered, really practically mattered. When there were mistakes -- last week I asked my mother if there ever were and she said yes -- they got it corrected the next time they went shopping. My point is that in real life, the stereotype was useless.
But seven seasons of watching the Sopranos on Netflix, first episode to last, makes Tony absolutely real to me. He was fat, some of the men kissing his ring characterized him as “that fat fuck” behind his back, but so what? They still feared him. Women flocked to him. Carmela and the kids loved him. He was powerful and immensely attractive. That’s what I want to be, an alpha male. Okay, Tony was a sociopath. That’s only what I secretly want to be. Anyway, he was a sensitive sociopath. Who loved animals.
I’m hoping this nugget of insight will halt the forced feeding in which I’m involved. More than casually involved. It’s my major relationship.
Yesterday I found I was only eating weight-watcher friendly foods. Wow! I thought. That’s my reward for the Tony Soprano insight. But on the way to Whole Foods, before I even got into the car, I thought, wouldn’t a nice buttered Portuguese roll taste good? But in the little bakery across the street, instead of the roll I got a chocolate pretzely looking thing. It didn’t have much chocolate, it didn’t taste all that sweet -- really, Portuguese deserts don’t turn me on -- but it woke up my cravings. So at Whole Foods I ate: apple slices dipped into “sweet cream,” nuggets of figgy cake, crisp bbq potato chips, a WONDERFUL little paper cupful of chocolate cheese cake, a dry cranberry scone, flounder in some kind of sauce, awful swordfish. All samples. Good old Whole Foods.
And to underline the fact that I’m off the wagon, I bought well-aged cheddar cheese, “seeduction” bread, Icelandic butter, Dr. Praeger’s sweet potato pancakes and spinach pancakes. Everything else was my normal haul: unflavored soy milk (it’s gone up to $1.69 a quart), fat free plain yogurt, extra dark French coffee beans melita grind, Asian-style veggie burgers.
Yesterday (these are different yesterdays) at Weight Watchers Diane, the leader, began the meeting asking, “What does the phrase ‘all or nothing’ mean to you?” So I decided to plunge in with my current problem. Of course several people offered the type of correct, empty advice I’ve known for years. Plan so that you can eat some of what you want at the Garlic Festival. I forget what else, it was so rote and so beside the point of my break-out. One woman said something really helpful, though. She said, you know how when you eat healthily you feel better physically. So even if you do it for one day, you’ll feel better that day.
This cuts across my mind-set of, why torture myself this week if I’m just going to blow it next week?
Another woman recommended Geneen Roth’s books on conquering emotional eating. I’m suspicious of quick-fix self-help books. I’m in analysis, after all, which could never be accused of quick fixes. But when we talked afterwards, Samantha revealed so many attitudes that are similar to mine, for instance, “I’m beautiful on the inside, that should be enough, it’s unfeminist to care so much about appearance” that maybe I’ll check out Geneen Roth. Plus Sam is really cute, which always carries irrational weight with me.
The good thing about Diane is she lets the discussion flow.
Okay, why am I fat? One crucial aspect is that there is a severe disconnect between eating fattening food and getting fat. The cream filled chocolate iced donut you can’t resist doesn‘t produce a corresponding roll of belly fat five seconds later. This disconnect reminds me of sex and pregnancy. How long in human history did it take to realize that coitus created the bulge that becomes another human being nine months later?
Here is another connection between eating/fat and sex/pregnancy. The need for immediate gratification can overpower the intellectual knowledge of later effect. And there’s always the hope that the effect won’t really happen. Because sometimes it doesn’t. You don’t ALWAYS get pregnant from sex without contraception. You don’t ALWAYS get AIDS from sex without protection, even with an HIV-positive partner. And you don’t ALWAYS get fatter from inhaling all the chocolate butter cream icing off the entire cake. Sometimes the body is forgiving.
Just not all the time.
The big difference between people who are thin and people who are fat is moderation. Not michael phelps, obviously, who needs to consume, is it 50,000 calories? just to stay alive and win gold medals. Ah, what I would eat if I HAD to consume 50,000 calories a day. My old daydream standing in front of the bakery window is, I must eat as much as possible to beat my consuming disease. Doctor‘s orders. So I pick out every luscious oreo bar, peanut butter bar, mississippi mud bar, and throw in a few fruit tarts for Vitamin C.
I met a guy who had a healthier version of the daydream. Suddenly his metabolism would rev up so that he could eat anything and be dream-lean. I should get in touch with that guy when I reach number 4 (get a relationship) on my to-do list.
I guess I pride myself on not having moderation. The word connotes middle-of-the-road, lack of passion, colorless, fade into the woodwork. Lack of depth.
“We’ll pick it up” as my therapist says at the end of a session. I’m assuming patient-analyst confidentiality goes only one way, my way. Anyway, before we continue the moderation theme, here’s what happened yesterday. I read a Geneen Roth article in the Good Housekeeping September issue I studied at the hairdresser’s while waiting for the blonde dye to sink in. Good Housekeeping was an easy pick. Not only did it have a photo of Jennifer Aniston astride a bicycle on the cover, it was the only magazine not in Portuguese.
Roth began with how her friend Ed went to a guru to stop smoking. The guru said, first you must love the cigarette. Wrap it in a beautiful cloth. When you smoke, go to a quiet spot, lovingly unwrap the cloth, and concentrate on every puff.
You must fully experience the cigarette to fully give up the cigarette.
Roth’s analogy is we overeat when we cease enjoying the food. Food becomes shameful, something to inhale as much and as quickly as possible. So, so true!!!
Here’s my resolution: I’m going to enjoy every bite. I’m going to revel in it and make it count sensually. AND when it stops being enjoyable -- that big basket of fresh potatoes deep fried dark the way I like it with plenty of salt -- I will THROW THE REST AWAY. Unless I’m lucky enough to have someone with me who’s willing to share.
This is actually not a revelation. I remember writing to Charlene many years ago that I was trying to eat only what I truly liked and that it wasn’t as easy as it sounds.
I still intend to go back on the wagon. Maybe it’s more inviting to say, back on the horse that I slipped off of. The horse didn’t throw me. But it’s still a long way to the ground and a hard bump. This means follow the Weight Watchers program, including exercise.
After the garlic festival next weekend. After the day after the garlic festival, spending that Monday with Irene. After the day after that, easing into it.
I’ll have two months before the celebrations and depressions that surround my birthday, requiring celebratory and comforting Food.
Thanks for getting back to us! Email addresses are:
baileywing1@carolina.rr.com
for me,
slbrownccc@carolina.rr.com
or
baileywing2@carolina.rr.com
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