Let It Go, Let It Go...

“…so it's always a process of letting go, one way or the other.”
--Charles Bukowski

I know Buk was talking about women in the above quote, but I think it applies for me. I hope that I don’t cause offense by using the truncated quote out of context.

I need to let go of a lot of shit.

So, it being four weeks into the classes, I’m no longer as apprehensive as I first was. No surprises have been found. But like someone watching their best friend or sibling become a parent, you have no real idea what the life is like until you’re in it yourself.

Of course, in this case, I’m the one that’ll be doing the spit-up after a meal.

Food. Yes, everyone knows and immediately thinks of the surrender of beloved comfort foods and drinks. Goodbye pasta! Farewell fizzy drinks! Au Revoir alcohol! (For at least a year—your mileage may vary…) Ciao soups!

Sigh.

So, that’s it, right? I have one, maybe two, last tours of old battlefields, smoky steakhouses and quaint French bistros before I graciously trade my gourmand pleasures for smooth sailing into the sunset.

Yeah. Right.

No matter how much I’d like to believe that my biggest challenge will be going cold turkey from Dr. Pepper, I know that the biggest gorilla in the cage is my brain and its way of processing the world—and right now it’s eyeballing me like I’m an old piece of Samsonite luggage.

Over the years it has developed survival strategies for getting me through all kinds of times, good and bad. A lot of my coping strategies and socialization tools involve the use of food and drink as props. And anyone who knows me knows I love to be on stage delivering yet another tedious monologue—and what kind of performer would I be without my trusty props?

However, as I look deeper into my mottled soul I see, at least from my paranoid perspective, there are a number of hobgoblins lurking in the shadows sneering and gibing me.

I should clarify that statement.

Granted I’m a middle-aged man of relatively respectable physical stature and I carry my weight reasonably well, all things considered. Basically, people, in general, don’t fuck with me. At least not to my face. Anymore. But that’s another story… However, I don’t carry it well enough to escape being labeled as having ‘let myself go.’ Because, truth be told, I have. But, in my defense, it’s complicated.

In other words, there’s more than a few self-esteem issues here.

The particular drain I’m circling here has a name: shame. And the garbage disposal past the black rubber sphincter is yawning open, blades whirling and chattering at me.

It’s surprising how much shame is tied up in this whole situation. A metric fuckton of it, if you will. It’s everywhere! It’s like stepping in dog shit and then walking through most of your house before it finally hits you that something's terribly wrong… and you’ve no one to blame but yourself. So you end up cancelling whatever plans you may have had (and suddenly became very attached to) and you end up down on your knees trying to abate smears of canine soft-serve out of your carpeting, and clothing if you’ve really gone to town.

Shame smells about as good as dog shit—but I’m not going to find out if the taste is as horrible, although I suspect it is.

I have been around long enough to know that when you find yourself in a tough situation you really want to get out of, you have to change the conditions that got you there. For me, I cannot blame one thing in particular, because it is truly an aggregate of conditions and choices. Yes, I will proclaim that sometimes shit happens—but I cannot deny that I walked my happy ass down this path.

And here is where it gets tough. I have to let go of the shame. Shame of being (or at least looking) slothful. Of letting myself devolve to this state. Of having to use such an extreme measure as surgery to try and remediate my physical state. Of surrendering a normal life because I couldn’t hack it any other way. Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam...

I’ve got to let go. And I strongly suspect that I will make this as easy or as worse as I truly wish for it to be. To get a better context of what I mean by that, watch the old Tarkovsky film, “Stalker.”

I have to let go. And I know I can. And on my own terms—to a certain extent.

Because if I don’t, I will still have to let go.

Of everything.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

--William Ernest Henley

So it begins

Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light
--Milton, Paradise Lost

Every now and then, blogs change direction. Especially if they haven't been updated in awhile. So it is with the case here.

When I first started this blog, I was working my way through a tough period in my life and I dealt with the stress by resorting to poetry. (I don't really consider myself a poet but rather an eccentric and often vulgar storyteller.) However, since my grammar and spelling are often suspect, if not downright offensive, poetry allowed me to wallow in a broader range of mediocrity--or at least that's what I continue to tell myself.

Especially since very few people read my poetry.

But time passed and things changed, as they are wont to do. Now, I am at a very different kind of crossroads in my life and I find I must take drastic and, dare I say, radical action if I want to live much longer.

Melodramatic? Maybe so. But, I do have a team of medical professionals backing me up and if you're going to make a scene, I always say that it's better to do it with a chorus.

So why the drama? Well, my excess weight is quite literally killing me. And this insidious condition has been building for about 20 years now. That's a long time to build 150 lbs. (over 10.7 stone for my UK friends and 68 kg for everyone else in the world, generally speaking) of excess ballast.

Now, granted, I do have a big frame to haul around the extra meat. I stand at ~73" (1.8 meters) and as a younger man I was able to have a relatively active life in spite of the very impressive beer gut I was constructing. As it turned out, I hadn't been respecting the limitations of my skeleton nor the plumbing keeping my meat and other tissues alive. As time progressed, and I gained some stability regarding employment, my middle-aged spread got way the fuck out of control.

 And then things started going wrong.

The first to bust out of the normal range of operation was my blood pressure. It suddenly sky-rocketed high enough to give me a stroke scare. Soon after, I was found to have dangerously obstructive sleep apnea. Then my heart developed an arrhythmia (PVCs). After that particular concern was stabilized, my weight continued to climb as I became less active. Then a DVT and resulting pulmonary emboli almost did me in. A year after that close call, I come to find out my asthma was worse and I'm no longer absorbing oxygen as well as I should (I'm hovering in the 90-80 O2 range--normal is around 100). All of these issues have combined to place me in a rather precarious position. Last Halloween, I was hospitalized for four days and then placed on medical leave from work for two months.

I have not improved. Much.

So, while I was in the hospital, I asked my attending doctor if I should consider gastric surgery. My wife had already undergone gastric bypass the year before and was doing very well in the program, so I had a pretty good handle on the life and The Tool--and what changes the new lifestyle imposed.

The doc immediately and enthusiastically agreed.

And she made it rather clear that my body was not going to take much more of the life I was leading. It was, in all ways considered, a very sobering conversation. Over the next couple of days, while I got used to my new and closest buddy, an oxygen line, I had plenty of time to sleep. And to think of what was now laid before me.

Sort of a lady or the tiger moment.

Behind one door, lay early death. As dreadful as that sounds, things are, as they usually are, complicated. Because behind the other door was a road that promised its own version of a road through perdition, but with it came the hope of a longer, healthier life; a chance to reclaim a life I foolishly abandoned decades ago.

Again, at first blush, it seems like an easy choice.

But, as usual, the devil is in the details. Neither journey, from my perspective, promise easy travelling. Recoiling from premature death is normally considered a natural and relatively healthy response. However, in the interests of honesty and full disclosure, it's bloody, damn hard to change direction--especially if you've been travelling a certain path for a long time. Hell, even Newton wrote some laws regarding inertia and in my metaphorical case, they seem to be all too viciously applicable.

Part of the difficulty is the specter of my father's death.

He had many health problems that intensified over time and at the relatively young age of 52, only two years older than I am now, he died from congestive heart failure. In the hospital. In the cardiac care wing. If your ticker is going to go wonky on you, there was literally no better place to be. But he didn't make it in spite of the half hour code. I was 17 at the time.

I grew up a lot in the following week.

I handled all of his final arrangements. I emptied, cleaned up and sold his mobile home--my second home following my parent's divorce. I handled the leg work for all of the estate issues until I turned 18, at which point my half-sister formally turned over executor responsibilities to me.

I stood with him one last time in an ancient funeral home, decorated in late-Victorian whorehouse, and marveled at how young and at peace he appeared to be. I saw, clearly, that he was finally free of pain, stress and whatever demons that had been chewing on his soul. Over time I grew to envy the illusion of peace that death gave him.

I truly hope he found peace. With what's left of my faith, I think he did. I think he's alright and that death isn't at all what we, the living, think it is.

Unfortunately, the experience had a cost for me in a way I didn't imagine: I have a very hard time seeing myself out living my father. Irrational? You bet. Yet, there it is.

Well, back to the now and to the two doors in front of me. And I move toward the surgery, and hopefully, longer life.

I have done most of the preliminary work to fulfill the requirements needed to receive gastric surgery. Yesterday was my first day of class outlining the new life awaiting me. It's what my brain, my intellect wants and demands: I don't want to die. At least I know that to be true.

But, I have my own demons gnawing away at my soul and I have distracted them through the visceral pleasures of process addiction. I can no longer hide or self medicate through my gourmand lifestyle. I'm about to go cold turkey from my maladaptive survival tools, and like many other addicts facing detox, I am afraid.

But as the wise man once said,

what matters most is how well you walk through the fire
― Charles Bukowski

a solution to an illness of youth

the next time
my nephew
whines

i'm bored

i'll say
to him

develop

a
heart condition
stage 4 cancer
blood disorder

or

catch

a
drug resistant bug
bullet
vehicle in motion

and then
you
sure as shit
won't be
bored
then

or
at least
not for long

why do?

why do i question
that
which has
no answer?

where was i
to choose
criticize
or even
witness
when all came into being?

when i was no one

nothing

until i was

but only for a brief moment

why do i resent
giving back
the gift
loaned
with no
promise
or
guarantee
or
requirement
other
than
giving it back
so
it can be given
to
another?

why do i see
and seek out
the very things
that rob color
and light
when I could see
and seek out
that which is beautiful
and gives delight?

why do i claw
at my soul
already
scabbed and raw?

do i need
for
all to see
and read
my trauma?

but what
if no one
understands?

then the tales
encoded in
the argot of scars
are
wasted
along with the longing
of understanding

why do i feel
lost
afraid
angry
even when
memory
has melted away
like ice in sunlight
the ledger of
wounding?

why do i waste
my time on these
ghosts?

why do any of us?

i guess it's because
we can

for to waste something
precious
is to mock
god

luckiest human ever

food
is thrity seconds
of effort
away
including walking

running
hot water
less than
ten seconds
away

a place
to privately
void
my
bladder and bowels
and

to top it off

whisk away
my excretions
in a rush of
formerly drinkable water

leaving behind
a stink
that is sucked away
by a fan
remotely switched on

like magic

like so many other things
i and
my fellow addicts
take for granted

the horror
of waking up
and finding out
that your so called
struggle to survive
is actually contributing
the largest mass murder
in our species' history
is a sickening jolt

but

it hasn't happened

yet

so, just in case

after the long drive home
let's watch the recorded
shows on the
huge television
while sucking down an
ice cold beer

impending extinction tastes great

fuck 'em all
i won the lottery