Friday, January 30, 2009

Narcissist, Take II

For the past couple of weeks, I've been starting and discarding blog entries. I start writing and then The Brain is, all, don't write that. Or, I mean, you can write that, but you can't put it on your blog.

Here is a selection of the stuff that I can write but that I can't put on my blog, heavily--it is understood--edited.

Bits

Dave and I trundled off to the gym last night to meet up with my niece.

Self Referential


Me and Groucho


My hamsa tattoo.

Nostalgia Kills

There are days when I feel like I'm always on the brink of addiction.

Addict

There are some things that I don't write about, or that I write about rarely--in this place anyway.

I rarely write about sex, for example, and sexual desire (although my recent Viggo Mortensen madness might just be an example of my trying to hide that subject under a magnifying glass).

I sometimes write about depression in what seems like a personal way but which is really very abstract, and I almost never talk about my day-to-day or year-to-year struggles with it.

I do write about exercise and the gym, but I rarely write about weight and weight-related matters. I consider weight to be a bit too personal, and I consider people who talk about weight to be a bit too...too much the type looking for approval. It's all a bit too much like anxiety-ridden twee for me. I do talk about addiction from time to time though, which I think very much relates to weight.

See, I found this quote the other day.

"An addict is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong." --Stella Adler (1901-1992)
(That quote opened a sociologically-minded article about drug addiction in America.I don't know, beyond that, where the quote comes from, and the only knowledge I have about Stella Adler is culled from Wikipedia, which informed me that she was an actress and acting teacher who may or may not have fudged her birth year to avoid some early Hollywood agism.)

I've never known an overweight person who wasn't a food addict and I would further say that I've never known an overweight person who wasn't trying to signal that something was wrong. Very wrong. Oh, I don't mean that they were dismayed that they lacked discipline or willpower.

Wait a minute. See, I'm already trying to weasel out of making this a personal thing by trying to talk about overweight people as though they were some abstract thing. Let me try again.

At my fattest, I thought I was invisible. The bigger I got, the more invisible I was.

Addictions

The Brain is one of those brains that doesn't let go of stuff easily. Consequently, I have become very, very hesitant about picking up things that The Brain might take a destructive liking to. That is, if I think developing an addiction to something might be destructive, then I shy away from it. Strange as it sounds, sugar is one of the destructive things I try to avoid. Drinking and smoking are less problematic. With drinking and smoking, my strategy is to take a soft approach. I would say now that I am a non-drinker and a non-smoker, though I have been both a drinker and a smoker in the past and I may return to both in the future. When I need a drink or a cigarette, I'll have one. Understand that it's been about two years since I've had a cigarette, and about six months since the last time I drank (two weak-ish gin and tonics one evening last summer).

Of course, none of that applies to addictions to non-destructive things. Can it still be called an addiction if the thing I'm addicted to is non-destructive? I think it can. I think the word addiction defines my relationship to the object I am addicted to, not the outcome of that relationship. For example, I am addicted to surfing the internet. I am addicted to

That Guy

So Dave and I have been battling with the storage unit recently and I hate to say it, but the storage unit may be winning. Of course it's winning. It has all the ammunition. The other day it disgorged a box of my old photographs and diaries and--ugh--talk about hitting below the belt.



Eremitic Boy

One of my treasured memories from that lonely, tumultuous time is of the long, drunken night I ended up in my apartment with an eremitic boy who's now at Harvard and a former stripper who's now in law school (and, no, I'm not going to go into any details beyond that). After those two left, I was still drunk and despondent and humiliated and I called Dave and said something like, "I can't do this. I want to come home." And he said, "You are home."

I hung up the phone and got into the bath and got out of the bath and took photos, this among them:

[Ah. I thought I could post this photo, but The Brain says no. No, I can't.]

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Rosa, I really enjoy reading all your posts, they are deep, REAL and a some of them speaks to me on so many levels- I can identify with them- we as humans are not that different from each other.

Rosa said...

Ta for that, G. Japan. If they get to be too depressing, kick me, okay? ;)