Pretty doesn't get hungry
I'm
not feeling morbid, but i still think
about some pretty strange things. Things like "If I were to blow
my brains out with a shotgun, it's such a pity that instead of a
whole other world coming into existence all people would get is a
mess of blood and bone and grey matter to clean up and put in plastic
biohazard bags." I think a lot of these kinds of thoughts are a
byproduct of insomnia- I only get an hour or two of sleep and my
brain seems like it's constantly on overdrive, but generally can't
come up with anything useful or productive.
I
finally started writing a book. I haven't told anybody I'm writing a
book. I remember living in Los Angeles and every asshole at the
Coffee Bean or Starbucks with a Macbook was busily "researching
aspects of the characters in their new screenplay," while
never actually producing anything. A whole lot of “research” gets
done in L.A, that's for sure. Looking up neurological disorders with the online DSM and tacking them on to John Q. Everyman isn't writing,
just the same as an acoustic guitar and three chords at the beach
isn't music. If you want to pick up women, i guess you're doing it
right, but I still hate you.
That being said, I am sitting
in a Starbucks right now, typing on my Macbook. Without purchasing a
beverage, because this is Fort Collins, Colorado and you can still
loiter here (provided you aren't drunk or look homeless). I'm not
doing it for attention. There isn't an internet connection at the
sober living house i'm staying at, and even if there were, there are
48 other people living there and I share a shoebox of a room with
another guy who's always home. So while I may look like a poser and a
schmuck, sitting at starbucks typing on my expensive machine, believe
me when I say that I'd rather be entirely by myself doing this.
There's
a picture I took of my arm when I was eighteen, nineteen, I cant
remember exactly how old I was. My ex girlfriend, Nichol, had broken
up with me a few months before I took the picture. I remember that.
She was my first real love; the girl I lost my virginity to and the
first girl I had ever experienced any depth of emotion with. In the
relationship I felt excitement, both physically and psychologically,
desire, elation, anticipation, comfort, and confusion. There was also
fear, anxiety, crushing despair, possessiveness, rage, spite, and
finally, loss.
The
year before we started dating, I began a physical transformation. I
was 270 lbs and sick of girls referring to me as a teddy bear. I was
sick of my dad making casually cruel comments about my burrito
consumption at Taco Bell. Once, my stepmother mistook an earthquake
for me running up the stairs, and bitched at me until I was standing
in front of her while the house shook.
I
was sick of my friends making fat jokes when we were drinking around
the campfire in the Swedish cemetary or whenever when we went out to
eat (even though I ate less than any of them). I hated the fact that
I was too slow and fat to catch the bastards who made fun of me
because of my weight and beat seven shades of shit out of them, and
once I had hit my limit of shame and self-hate, I quit eating.
I
had chemical assistance with this; my body, regardless of how
healthily I ate, always seemed to go back to at least 250 lbs on its
own. I didn't eat much as it was, and I was a vegetarian, but somehow
I still stayed fat. This was back when ephedrine was still legal, and
was sold at Rite-Aid in the supplement aisles. My boss at Papa
Murphy's pizza turned me on to these pills that looked like vitamins
(I can't remember the name of the supplement), full of ephedrine and
god knows what else, that made my appetite disappear and still gave
me enough energy to walk everywhere and live my life. There were some
adverse effects: poor circulation, heart palpitations, panic
attacks, tremors and the like. I remember one day in college (I was
sixteen and enrolled in an alternative program) I had taken like four
of these things and drank a big gulp's worth of black coffee. I was
sitting outside my English classroom, waiting for my professor, when
I really
started to shake. This raver kid was crouched against the wall a few
feet away from me, high as a kite. When the shaking started, all I
could think was “Oh shit, I overdid it this time,” and from the
look the raver kid gave me im pretty sure he was thinking the same
thing. I popped my headphones off just as a large lady in a blue
dress ran by screaming, “Oh my GAWD,
it's an earthquake!” and I broke out laughing, relieved that I
wasn't in the middle of an overdose.
The
nine months leading up to my seventeenth birthday weren't very
exciting, although I remember taking so much ephedrine and adderall
that I felt cold all the time even if it was 90 degrees out. I
functioned well enough; I re-enrolled in regular high school and got
good grades in all my classes. I had various jobs I would go to for a
while and quit unexpectedly (apparently even large quantities of
adderall can't make me enjoy work). My parents had put me on
something called an “At-Risk Youth petition” when I was fifteen,
which basically meant that they had the final say on anything I
wanted to do, under penalty of incarceration. The petition got me to
stop smoking pot and taking handfuls of various unidentified pills
(for the most part) and kept me in at night. The stimulants I began
taking after it went into effect, along with the lack of energy from
not eating, kept me docile and focused enough to stay out of trouble.
I
made a point of not being home as much as possible. I made a few
friends in high school, and spent most of my free time with them. We
did stupid, harmless things like spend whole afternoons or evenings
at Denny's, smoking cigarettes, (I refuse to set foot in a Denny's
since they banned smoking) drinking coffee, and trying to make some
sense of the people we were growing into. My friend Danny was on a
bowling team back in Astoria or someplace, and he had a job, so a few
days a week we would go to the bowling alley and spend an hour or two
throwing balls at pins. My improvement was definitely not in
proportion to the amount of time I played the game.
When
you lose an enormous amount of weight over a very short period of
time, your brain doesn't automatically adjust. When I was 160 lbs, I
still thought I was fat. When I was 150 lbs, I still thought I was
fat. Throughout the process, I received praise from just about
everybody in my life; they must have thought that I was working out
and eating healthier or something. At 145 lbs, my dad (who just a
year before would poke my belly and giggle) would tell me when full
grown women were checking me out in the grocery store, which as it
turned out happened a lot. All this, and I still thought I was fat.
It was like walking around under the impression that I was, in fact,
horrifically deformed and everybody was too polite to mention it.
Fatass
By
the time I was seventeen and a half, I had gotten down to 140 lbs. At
some point during this rapid weight loss, I started dating all sorts
of different girls. I never slept with any of them, it was just nice
to have some sort of intimacy with someone who thought I was worth
their time. I'd never had that before. I still had a horrible self
image, and it affected the way I handled just about every situation I
found myself in, including relationships. I would date girls for a
very brief period of time and break up with them, seemingly at
random. Even now I couldn't tell you what made me quit seeing most of
them, but I remember thinking that when I broke it off, I was doing
them a favor. I was a fucking mess and I knew it, and then I met
Nichol.
A
close friend of mine named Selena was Nichol's cousin. They lived
about a mile away from each other in Kenmore, and had kind of a
catty, passive/aggressive thing going on. Selena liked to talk a
little shit about Nichol, about her sexual promiscuity and so on. I
was seventeen and a half, and while all my friends were out getting
laid, I had been losing weight. I thought about sex enough, but
despite myself and how I wanted to think about it, I had it in my
head that I had to wait for the “right one.” Some antiquated,
puritanical notion coupled with my own dysmorphia, I think.
Selena
and I used to talk on the phone for hours at night, because we were
teenagers and of course we did. Over the course of one of our
nighttime phone sessions, the subject of Nichol came up, and I asked
if she was single, almost as a joke. I had seen Nichol a year before,
while I was sitting at my friend Gavin's computer with a nose-bleed
from snorting ritalin all day, and she was hands down the most
beautiful girl I had ever laid eyes on. Even if she was single, she
was so far out of my league I'd have a better chance of winning the
lottery than sleeping with her. Selena missed the joking tone in my
voice, and got really quiet for a few moments. I could tell that she
was thinking, and I pushed ahead with it. I asked her for Nichol's
number, and if she could put in a good word for me, as it were. I
didn't even think about it then, but setting me up with her cousin
was probably the most heartbreaking, selfless thing she had ever
done: Selena was in love with me. I didn't know it, and if I had I
don't know how much I would have cared. That was the kind of guy I
was, I guess. And I'm not proud of it.
I
can't remember how many nights Nichol and I talked on the phone
before we actually met up, but it was enough to pique her curiosity.
Her dad was (justifiably) protective of his little girl; she was
gorgeous and even though Nichol thought her parents were clueless
about her sex life I'm pretty sure they knew more than they were
letting on. She had to get permission from them to meet up with me,
and there were rules for the meeting. She had to have her friends
with her, and we had to meet some place in Kenmore.
I
didn't have a problem with this, even though I thought Kenmore was
trash. I wanted my friends with me too though, because in my
experience nothing good could come from trying to bear up to the
scrutiny of a potential mate's best friends without some backup. The
bowling alley was too trashy in my opinion, which left Denny's (I
apparently had no concept of irony at seventeen) and the docks. So
that's what we did; it turned into what we always did. Denny's and
the docks.
I
showed up early, with Dan and Danny. We spent a lot of time at that
Denny's in any case, and I'm pretty sure that in Danny's mind, he was
doing me a particular favor by being there for this thing. Danny
never had a lot of patience for things he considered stupid or a
waste of time (which was also ironic, considering the things he made
a priority. One time we were sitting at his apartment, he had Selena
in his bedroom, literally begging him to fuck her, and his response
was “I'm eating macaroni and cheese! Shut up!”).
Danny and me in Selena's front yard
Nichol
walks in about fifteen minutes late with her friends Jenny and Andrea
(both of whom I would come to hate for
their constant henpecking and Andrea's eventual seduction and
subsequent subjugation of Dan). Nichol told me later that she was
expecting me to resemble what I had looked like a year before when we
had met briefly at Gavin's house, and didn't recognize me in the
restaurant. I found this particularly funny; the last time she saw me
I was sitting in a computer chair, wearing a ripped up dress shirt
with the words “ I Fucking Hate The Beatles” in big block
lettering on the back, cursing at the monitor while stuffing kleenex
up my bloody nose. I recognized her, though. I'll never forget that
moment; I got out of the booth and walked straight up to her with the
most honest grin on my face and said “Hi!”
Nichol
had a number of personality traits I found very appealing. A number
of physical ones, too. She wasn't very quick on the uptake though,
and when she looked at me it was funny to watch her expression change
from complete confusion to vague recollection to relief that I was
indeed Ian. We hugged, introductions were made all around,
and we sat at Denny's talking for a while.
Nichol
told me on the phone that night that when she walked in to the
restaurant, she didn't see me. She saw a lean young man with dark
clothes and hair smiling and laughing with his friends, and since I
didn't show up, she was going to try her luck with him. This confused
me, but I took it as a compliment.
Anyways,
that's how Nichol and I started dating. I fell in love, and I fell
hard, with absolutely no idea what I was getting into.
The
breakup was so hard for me... The cost was too high. When I say I had
no respite from the despair and emptiness for months, I'm not
over-exaggerating. I couldn't take it; the sleepless nights, driving
around aimlessly for hours on end thinking that maybe I would run
into her somewhere. The complete loss... I didn't know what happens
after you die, and I really didn't care. All I wanted was to not
feel, because every feeling was loss. Not sleeping, not eating,
taking whatever drug I could get ahold of, I was going crazy.
I
took this picture two weeks after they let me out of the hospital and
I could unwrap the bandages. The other arm looked pretty much the
same. It's the only picture I kept from the whole incident, and now is the only picture I have from my and Nichol's relationship, which is a shame because regardless of how it ended and how i lost it afterwards, there were actually a lot of good things we did together.
After
the suicide attempt, my friends tried being there for me. None of
them knew I had seriously tried to kill myself, and i didn't tell them for a while. I was so broken, and
they were all still friends with Nichol. The only friend I had who
actually succeeded in making me feel better was Arwain, who
introduced me to Josh, who introduced me to heroin, which killed the despair long enough for me to recover from the heartbreak enough to keep breathing.
I never wrote about this before. I wrote songs and poetry and alluded to it frequently, but I've never taken the time to just lay it all out there until now, over a decade later.
, Schnarchen und sabbern
Ich schwöre, ich habe noch nie diese Dinge zu tun
es sei denn, du mich erwischt.
in der Nacht die Gesichter und Schönheit rufen Sie mich an
am Morgen , es ist eine verdammte Zug
und zwischendurch gibt es eine Spur der Lücke
es scheint nie zu ändern
in diesem ersten Moment an in den Morgen
in den Spiegel , ich kann nicht scheinen arrainge
was noch so weit weg , und was ich denke ,
hat die gleiche geworden
bevor ich zu werden , was ich will
werden an diesem Tag
Ich denke, der Sprung aus und lächeln
