Guy’s Cavalier Approach to Life
Not least because I've
every right to do so, I have carefully weeded out of my pic stash almost
every photo taken of me during several of my life's porky periods. The one
remaining horror (as I had come to think of it) is the pic you see on the top
right of the first quartet of images. It was taken in 2011 in Amityville where
I was born & - is 'raised' the right word? I was standing next to my
lifelong buddy Don Thomson, in on one of his rare trips east from
Wisconsin. That swatch of floral print shirt shoulder is
all that remains of him in this cropped photo. On the day the photo was
taken, I probably would have clocked in (had I dared to stand on a scale,
which I hadn't for who knows how long) somewhere around 215. When later that
year, after my 60th birthday, I went for a full medical checkup, my
doctor pronounced me amazingly healthy although suggested it
wouldn't be the worst idea if I took off, say, 20 pounds. Somehow (I'm
guessing) the requisite complex synaptic shifts for 'hearing' this news
zapped into a configuration sufficient to get me on a low calorie diet for the
rest of that year and the rest, really, of every year since then. I now average
about 155. I don't know why I did it.
That is, I like having done
it. But any of the obvious reasons one might have expected me to give, had
one asked me, didn't obtain. They just weren't true. It wasn't
because I 'wanted to be healthy' or "wanted to look good.' I don't
know why I did it, other than to say that "it was time" (which
is up there with "it is what it is" as the most idiotically
unhelpful observation human beings make) or equally WTF: "I don't
know, I just did it." The benefits were tabulatable: mostly related to vanity,
by the way, not health -- & while after the fact I enjoyed that something in
or about me was evidently at work to keep this new regime going, I couldn't
saddle it with any of the self-help premises or strategies (however
Jungian or otherwise palatably non-cliché) it had once been my
job as literary agent, editor and writer to know the value of and wield in
appealing ways. (I used to write those kinds of books - books that purported to
be 'self-help' as that category is usually understood). I didn't feel I'd
finally learned 'discipline,' or began to value life in a more complete and
open way. I loved existing! But I pretty much always had, fat or not.
I don't feel I'd reached some
exalted state of awareness in any of this. I simply no longer was able to link
cause and effect in any of even the most obvious ways. True, the blunt force of
if you're hungry you'll want to eat or if you spend all your money you'll
be broke or if you jump off the top of the Empire State building you'll die by
splatting on the sidewalk still held credence. But what did that explain about
motive? Nothing, really. The more I 'looked' at motive, the more the only
interesting way to start seeing it was playfully. I'd been writing long dense
poems every day for a number of years. On April Fool's day 2009 I started added
drawings. And the poems quickly became less dense. They had drawings to
play with! They didn't have to be so all-out serious. But as to
"Why did you start drawing then?" as I was & am
sometimes still asked, I had no idea. It's gotten to a point now -
I'm not proud of this - where I'm annoyed not at myself anymore for being
unable to come up with even the simplest explanations for why things are what
they are, but at other people for thinking that such a thing is possible.
Again, this doesn't make me 'better' or more evolved. Just frustrated, like
a baby must be when she sees a purple dragon in the sky and everybody else sees
flotsam & jetsam.
Thankfully, the annoyance
doesn't last. Because what drawing, and its attendant consequences, as I'm
almost able to call them, offer -- sex, laughter, playing Mozart, walking out
of the Lafayette Avenue subway at Fort Greene up into the glories of 1870
Brooklyn brownstones and their regal canopies of Sycamore trees, etc. -- are
constant distraction & activity. Everything is distraction, by the way,
because it isn't something else.
There's more to say - oh there's an infinity to say! - but I
think that's enough now. Except perhaps to add that one of the prods for coming
up with my breezy & rather arch title - "Guy's Cavalier Approach to
Life" -- was (on the face it) its appalling contrast to the tone
& the accomplishment of an extraordinary thread on Facebook initiated
by one of my dearest friends with a plea for information about whatever
means of keeping themselves healthy her friends and acquaintances could
name - from diet to exercise to whatever else they'd learned from experience.
This unleashed responses from many other of my dearest friends (many from
childhood) - all of them gorgeously clear and articulate about what had worked
for them - across the board from the emotional to the medical to the
dietary - and in such great specificity! They were doing what I find myself
incapable of doing: giving advice. And it was good advice. And I know much of
it helped both my friend who'd begun the thread and who had
been battling long disheartening stretches of ill health - as well as
helped each of the advisors to give that advice, or maybe better put - the
results of their own experience. It was beautiful and human and completely true
for the participants.
But I could think of only one thing to add: Get your crayons
out.
There are three quartets of images here. I think they can sort
of tell you what they're about directly. I hope so. God knows I
can't.
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