For a while, all my clothes came from Old Navy because they made pants in fat-guy sizes that didn’t scrimp on “style” meaning they weren’t just that flat blue color Levi’s reserves for such large-sized jeans. Now, I’m relatively normal-sized, so I have options. I’m wearing 36 X 34 jeans and, somehow, wearing large shirts, which is something I think about way too much. Right now, I’m wearing a pair of 36-waisted jeans and it’s awesome. I have on an extra-large shirt right now, and it’s billowy on me, which is awesome. These are the feelings that inspire song. I should be singing with a whole troupe of dancers, trapeze artists and trained dolphins behind me hammering out a spectacle devoted to the awesomeness of my smaller clothes sizes. So, I guess it makes sense, emotionally, that I’ve been to Kohl’s three times in about a week, buying three pairs of Levi’s (off the motherfucking shelf, yo!) and about a half-dozen or so shirts.

I’m not sure why I’ve settled on Kohl’s to bestow my clothing spree. You’d think I’d spend more money and time at such fat-shunning places as the Gap or Banana Republic (which are nothing like Old Navy at all…nope, not one bit) or have a friend go into American Eagle to get me a shirt or something. Make clothes shopping a way of exercising demons of inadequacies past, like a Maury Povich show where the picked-on and abused are now suddenly good-looking and they confront their tormenters. But, I don’t have a lot of teasing demons and I already have two sweaters from the Gap, plus I’m not sure where else to shop vengefully besides the Gap, particularly since I’m 30 years old and I don’t think I’m allowed in any other stores with smaller clothes or I’d have to register with the state. I’m blessed to lack a history that I have to avenge now, but at the same time, how great would it be if I had one.

That’s the real problem here, and why I haven’t posted in a while. When I take to the keyboard in the mornings, I try to think of ways I’ve been nailed to a highly-reinforced cross due to my weight, but I never was. The pressure about my weight came from within, never without and even then it was more of a general self-loathing, a kind of depression aimed at my fatness. I never felt judged or wronged or shunned or anything that amounts to drama about my weight. And those moments of true self-loathing where I’d abuse myself were fleeting and I’d move on. Truth of the matter, I’m too good-humored and reasoned about my weight to make anything interesting with it. I never wanted to be like anyone else and never saw my weight as getting in the way of being popular, loved, or having any emotional needs met. I got along. At least that’s the way I feel right now.

I mean, smaller clothes? That’s it? That’s the source of all this joy? It’s weird, right? Clothes?  So what.  It’s fucking clothes and we all wear them.  It feels weird to me especially since I’m wearing pretty much exactly what I was wearing before, just in smaller sizes and they were never a huge part of my life. Why do I get so fixated on the clothing aspect of this whole weight loss? Are pants from the store fundamentally different than pants from Old Navy’s website? Not really. Blue jeans are blue jeans. Button-up shirts and button-up shirts. Polos are polos. Colors and design may alter a little, but it’s the same damn genus of clothing.

Maybe clothing played a bigger part in my life than what I realize, like I was somehow harboring jealous thoughts of all those boys in high school who wore Tommy Hilfiger shirts and whatever else was popular to wear then. It doesn’t change the fact that wearing smaller clothes makes me very happy, I just wish I knew why.

My parent’s helped perpetuate the idea that I would grow into my size. Like I would somehow stop getting fatter, only taller, like rolling out play-doh into a snake. Maybe I would have done that too if not for all the Pepsi and cookies and self-delusion that I wasn’t that bad.

I played baseball, making me a kind of athlete I suppose. Soccer for a few seasons even (the team was good, named Roviso Supply, and I have no idea what Roviso supplied). Never picked last in any gym events. Not picked first either, but solidly middle of the pack, type of kid. I couldn’t run for shit or achieved in any of the Presidential fitness things (fuck you, shuttle run!) but that was the asthma, I told myself and others told me, not any kind of weight issue that hindered me there. Such lies.

There’s a picture of me, I think I’m nine years old, or so, I’m not 100% sure of my age, of me sitting up from being on the floor. The camera’s positioned at my feet, looking up toward my face. In the picture, I’m dressed in just a t-shirt and underpants, sitting up, slowly, with one hand raised fin front of me, as if reaching for a handle to lift myself the rest of the way up. The t-shirt has slipped up and there it is, the original gut. I have that distressed fat guy face as well, the straining, frustrating look of a person trying to move a heavy mistake.

If I were able to see that photo objectively, then, and if I had the wherewithal to make personal changes, I would have labeled myself fat and worked out. There was a brief time when I did work out often as a kid. I don’t remember how long this flirtation with fitness lasted, but it was in my Aunt Sissy’s basement. Aunt Sissy is now my crazy aunt, chucking broken light bulbs into her neighbor’s swimming pool, but that’s another story. Aunt Sissy had a weight bench, an exercise bike, a few scattered dumbbells and a rowing machine in her low-celinged and partially finished basement. (Her son sleeps in that basement now, in the center of room, near their cat’s litter box. Presumably, that’s where he keeps his .44 magnum. This cousin, too, is another story). I would go over there with my mom and we’d work out for a time. This habit couldn’t have lasted long because I didn’t become a gym rat or fit as a result. Other attempts to create workout habits withered as well, the fossils of which are stacked in my parent’s basement. There’s the Body by Jake sit up contraption that you sat in, a bit like a cramped chair, then leaned forward with to simulate a situp, but with stress bands to make the sit ups harder, though with this thing they should probably be called “lean forwards” not “sit ups.” Then there’s the other Body by Jake sit up device with is just a padded plank with a hinge and handles. You lay on it, grab the handles and sit up. Viola, fitness! Clearly those efforts never stuck either. Why? They were hard, dammit and I wasn’t very good at them. And I felt remarkably embarrassed doing it, like someone out there was mocking me for trying, so I couldn’t muster the courage to keep it up. Thus is the mind of me as teenager.

Maybe my parents weren’t mean enough to me to force me to lose weight with those devices, and they probably would have bought me any weight loss thingamabob available if I had shown the slightest interest in curing the fat problem I had. This whole time, I probably let them down with my weight because I realize now that they wanted me to be better with it, but they would have never confronted me directly about it because that would have just pissed me off. I owe them an apology I believe. Maybe my friends were too forgiving of my weight because, as I said, I was not a hindrance in PE, like the real fat people. And I was funny and my friends were all goofballs and not exactly the type to give you encouraging words or provide you anything heartfelt, though I probably would have made fun of them if they had, or gotten pissed because that’s just how I roll sometimes.

As an undergraduate, that’s when I began to identify myself as fat. Even had some misplaced fat pride, spouting Garfieldisms like, “I’m in shape. Round is a shape.” Har-har! And equally hilarious, in reference to ab muscles, “Why settle for a six pack when a keg is more fun?” Oh, you tubby prince of humor, will your recall of t-shirt slogans stop slaying our funny bone! Right around undergraduate is when I owned up to fatness and rolled with it. Kept on eating, kept on cracking wise. Found a friend and we together formed this kind of a fatty union where we’d head out to Denny’s after dinner and eat chicken strips and drink soda, or gorge and gorge on food on the weekend while playing wrestling video games, and together we’d joke about our fatness, or glibly say, “Yeah, I know I’m fat” then we’d make a Jack in the Box run (“One upsized Ultimate Cheeseburger combo, please….with a Sprite” because Sprite is somehow healthy and make the 10,000 calorie cheeseburger and fries better). which was maybe rebellion or something, I don’t know. Maybe we just liked chicken strips and really big shirts.

I can’t pinpoint that moment of change though where I moved from a sort of closet fat man to an openly, nearly defiantly, fat man. Was it the fat kindred spirit? A sense of hopelessness that I’d never defeat fatness even though I never actually tried doing it? I held onto this “I’m fat, fuck you” kind of mentality until I got to Mankato. It wasn’t necessarily pride that kept me drinking Pepsi and eating chicken strips because I would feint from time to time toward healthiness, like choosing pretzels instead of chips and mustard instead of mayonnaise. And I surely didn’t give myself any breaks when left alone to my thoughts, being as vicious to myself then as I can be now. So, what the hell was going on?

Massive American character flaw I suppose, hoping that through my minimal and half-assed efforts, the mountain would, if I waited long enough, come to me. There’s gotta be something else going on. I just have to write more to figure it out.

2) I finished reading Methland by Nick Reding. I’ve tried a couple times to write a proper review for the book, but it keeps sounding false. All I want to say about it is, “It’s awesome, go read it!” but, you know, with more words than that. The book wasn’t all awesome since it interjects some unnecessary first-person stuff, including a fair piece of one of the early chapters which reads like he’s just being bratty about no one wanting to publish a book about meth (ahem, are you not aware of No Speed Limit, Mr. Reding?) but if you really think about it, you can put the whiny parts in the greater context that he feels the meth problem is alive, dangerous, voracious, and largely ignored by the people who can make a difference. Personally, there are big pieces of this book that take what I was trying to say with my MFA thesis and deliver it with the mallet of book-length journalism (just parts, but still). It’s a fantastic book, definitely a fascinating and effective read, even if you’re just a gorehound like Oprah and like to read stories about people’s hands and faces melting off.

3) Ugly dogs must make bad seeing-eye dogs. I’ve never seen an ugly seeing-eye dog. There this one guy who gets on the bus who must be a little blind because he sure acts it and he has this adorable black lab as his guide dog. Whenever I see that dog, I just want to rub him behind the ears and throw something for him to chase because he’s just a cute dog.

4) I think that if I have to start a new career in some far flung town, I’ll investigate opening a used bookstore if they don’t have one, or I see a need for another one. The debt I would incur would be crushing, however, I think I would be an effective purchaser of books to sell.

5) Considering that I’m not an alcoholic, in the classic sense of the term, I find it incredibly difficult not to drink. By drink I don’t mean intending to get drunk, just a beer here, there, and a few extra on the weekends. Not getting drunk, just enough to loosen the kinks at most. It’s completely unproductive for me in terms of weight loss to have this much beer in the house, or to drink a beer with dinner while we are going out, but this habit is like biting my nails…something that should be very, very easy to stop, yet I keep on doing it. There’s just so much beer to try and old ones to reminisce with, dammit. For one, all these microbreweries have all these varietals out there I see and get interested in, though most of them probably taste exactly the damn same and I just don‘t recognize it. Plus, I just found out where I can get Schell’s here in Madison, and I discovered a bar/restaurant that sells Grainbelt Premium, which is a very fine beer, particularly for the price (that same bar, which is upscale by the way, has Blatz on tap and Hamm’s for a dollar a can). I know better, and the empty calories hamstring the weight loss efforts. Like this month, I know I didn’t lose the five pounds I wanted to. Shit, I’ll be lucky if I didn’t gain weight this month because I did not eat responsibly or work out enough. I was down to 3 or 4 days when it should be 6 or 7 days.

That’s all that has been going on, sadly. Hopefully, as my schedule normalizes in the coming weeks, I’ll be able to post more than what I have been doing.