Friday, September 24, 2010

energy

I haven't written much because I feel like a one note guitar player with no amplifier. I'm putting all of my diminished energy into becoming normal--I hear the laughter and shouts of "not possible". In ten months I will weigh 190 lbs. I last weighed 190 in High School. My family has never seen me normal in any sense of the word. I have heard so many stories of desperate, courageous people at the meetings I attend. Last week this little bit of a lady stood up and told her story about weighing 300lbs. About having high blood pressure, sleep apnea, acid reflux and migraines. Now they are all gone leaving only the human being. I have heard variations on that story for the past 9 weeks. People filled with so much low self worth that they can hardly walk-- literally and figuratively climbing out of a dark pit. A word about that dark pit. It is very small and gets smaller with time. Then one day the sun shines through the new spaces of your moving frame-areas of your being become re-illuminated. For me that means poems and books to write--crazy projects like the radio show and the film we are making on suicide prevention. Classes to give and people to meet, places to go without fear of becoming a burden-and grandchildren to tell stories too--about enchanted hummingbirds and how when their Aunt Julia was a child she helped put the color blue back into a rainbow and on and on.

Friday, September 10, 2010

thinking out loud

My second weigh- in is coming up on Monday, Sept. 13 and I am thinking more about the future than ever before. At the rate I'm losing weight in seven months I will be a normal weight. Sounds incredible to write about the future when I had made my peace with moving on to the next world. Now, I have to readjust my thinking. At my beginning weight of 400lbs. my world was small and getting smaller. There is an inverse ratio of physical size and the size of the world a person lives in. There is so many things I couldn't do--such as going for long walks with my wife--even strolling down to beautiful Green Acre with my grandchild seemed like a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. Fears change. The world is suddenly quite large and more unknown than ever and the unknown generates fear. In this case the fears are welcome--embraced even. As life should be embraced. Life should be so vast that it becomes impossible to put your arms around and not the other way around. By that I mean life could not embrace me--could not get its arms around me. All this is not to say physical size is the only factor in creating a too small world. I have friends who suffer from severe depression that certainly shrinks the world they live in. I also work with individuals and interview individuals with disabilities and that can shrink your world. I have a memory of my friend Kathy coming to the radio station for an interview. Although we are on the first floor, the front entrance had about a two inch lip that was really difficult to get her electric wheel chair over. We strained to push the chair. I thought and still think about how at that moment the horizon of her world was two inches away--not somewhere faraway where the sky meets water or earth-- beautiful pristine line that separates two very different kinds of beauty. Kathy's horizon was a grimy strip of two inch high concrete--a formidable wall of a prison. So my prayer and hope for all my friends is that you walk your entire life around a beautiful mountain lake where the clouds come down for a swim on a warm summer afternoon and that this "sea of joy" be able to contain your reflection.

Monday, September 6, 2010

Google voice

In my new life of calling strangers getting up at six a.m. and going to meetings I need an economical phone-especially after a 624.00 cell phone call has made me an outcast. I am currently living in a van by the river and my family says I have joined the Peace Corp. Free Google voice to the rescue, I still wet my pants calling strangers and talking about being a food addict but now I can do it for free--wait a minute! That doesn't sound right. I should be charging to humiliate myself. Verizon charges 10cents a minute. I should at least charge 20cents for a simple humiliation--40 cents for a soul baring-I need to move and grow a mustache humiliation. But I digress. How about Google Buttons? No one sews buttons! No one! Even the Pope wears robes because no one sews buttons!! Now that I have lost weight I have to pay to get buttons replaced when I inhaled and shot buttons out across the living room causing the cat to go deaf. Now people are afraid of me and my buttons. I have to take them to complete strangers at a dry cleaner to sew them back on. How about Google buttons? Hold your garment close to the computer screen and mouse click on Google buttons. What good is a lousy computer if it can't even sew a button a shirt. I think the Pope said that first-I don't know. I'm just a fat man getting up at dawn eating low fat yogurt. Don't ask me these questions until I'm normal.