My first roommate at UGA, in the Russell Hall dorm, was a junior named Matt. He had regular epic fights with his girlfriend followed by volcanic makeup sex. The legend went that he hadn’t changed his bedsheets his entire time in college. You could see the oily outline of his body on the fitted sheet. We called it the Shroud of Matt.
This is only about the fifty-third weirdest story from my four years in Athens, Georgia.
My tribe at UGA formed the first day on campus. I ran into a guy named Jon Bauer—we’d gotten to know each other at a summer academic program the year before. That first day in Athens, Jon was hanging out with some of his friends from his hometown of Albany, Georgia. I was with some of my friends from Brunswick. We added three or four others we met along the way and ended up with a pack of about a dozen. We ate together and drank together and went to movies together, and we often ended the night crammed together in a dorm room, flirting and bullshitting and passing around a cardboard box of popcorn. Sometimes our buddy Zane Vanhook would pull out his guitar and we’d all sing Journey’s “Stone in Love.”
The whole town was jacked up with energy—intellectual, sexual, musical, and pharmaceutical. The one great thing (the Shroud of) Matt did for me was hand me a record called Chronic Town, the newly released first album by a local band called R.E.M. The record sounded dark and murky and confused, which was perfect, because back then I felt dark and murky and confused. We caught R.E.M. before the world knew who they were, when they hung out at the Gyro Wrap or played secret shows under the name Hornets Attack Victor Mature. I’ve never met them—except for nodding to Pete Buck, the guitar player, while we peed side by side in the men’s room at the 40 Watt Club—but they were ours, like cousins who went off and got famous.
My friends and I ate most of our meals at Bolton Hall, known to students as Revoltin’ Bolton. These days a lot of universities have dining halls that are like food courts at an upscale mall. Bolton was more like a Soviet cafeteria. We mocked the battered slabs of cod and iffy institutional burgers. Our buddy Todd Waters declared that the au jus in roast beef au jus was French for “without taste.” But the food was all-you-can-eat and we were all young and hungry. We topped off the meals with the one sure bet in the dining hall—fresh ice cream from the on-campus dairy.
But that wasn’t enough for me.
Across the street from our dorm was the Classic Subshop, named after Athens, the Classic City. The subs were the opposite of classic—just a half-step above roast beef without taste—but the beer was cheap and the owner was a sweet guy who always said “Thank you now” as he handed over my microwaved ham and cheese. I went over there three or four times a week. This was before ATM cards—God, I’m old—so if I was broke, I’d cash a check at the gas station next door. The smallest check they’d let you cash was $10.50—they kept the fifty cents as a fee. My quarterly bank statement would have three or four checks for books and tuition, and twenty checks for $10.50. Pretty soon, $10.50 at a time, I drained the money I’d saved that summer and the little bit left over from my Pell Grant. I’d call home on Saturdays, catching up on news from home and making sure I told Mama and Daddy I loved them before I eased into the plea for cash. A few days later, I’d get an envelope with a stack of Mama’s tip money. I walked around with a billfold full of one-dollar bills, like some dude getting ready to hit the strip clubs. I converted those bills into a couple thousand extra calories every day.
A lot of that was alcohol. These days I don’t drink much—a glass of good bourbon with a little ice, or a cold beer after cutting the grass. But Athens is a twenty-four-hour rolling party if that’s what you want, and back then that’s what I wanted. We chugged Natural Light from red Solo cups at frat parties, slammed Beam-and-Cokes before football games, downed trays of screwdrivers on Drink ’n’ Drown night at a bar called the Mad Hatter. On weekends we’d buy a six or twelve of decent beer—Bud or Miller—and back that up with Drewrys, which went for five bucks a case and had a unique flavor profile: gym socks soaked in untreated sewage. We’d get buzzed on the good stuff and then switch to Drewrys when our tongues went numb. This was also the time Coors went on sale east of the Mississippi. It seems weird now, because nobody actually drinks Coors except in TV commercials, but at the time it was a big deal. (The whole plot of Smokey and the Bandit, that cinema classic from 1977, revolves around Burt Reynolds escorting a truckload of bootleg Coors from Texas to Georgia in his black Trans Am.) When Coors arrived in Athens, you couldn’t buy cans or bottles—just kegs. A couple of smart liquor stores started selling it by the gallon. I’d see guys walking back to the dorms with Coors in milk jugs. This might have been the invention of the growler.
Drinking felt like bonding. It also gave me courage. If I had enough to drink, I might be brave enough to slip my hand onto a girl’s bare thigh at a party. If she had enough to drink, she might let me leave it there. After two or three Long Island iced teas, I felt charming and suave. That was a big improvement over most of the time, when I felt enormous and unattractive.
Of course, once the morning came, all that booze made me even more enormous and unattractive.
Besides drinking, my other hobby was basketball. Our group played for hours on the Russell Hall outdoor slab most every afternoon and night. (My dear friend David Duclos is hoping I don’t mention the time Joe Ward, a UGA star slumming on our court after getting kicked out of practice, spiked one of David’s jumpers all the way across Baxter Street into the Krystal parking lot. Sorry, bud.) Sometimes we’d play until midnight or later, pissing off the students in the dorm who were actually studying. One night a guy shot bottle rockets at us from his window. But we had another reason to stay up. Jon Bauer worked delivering Domino’s, and at the end of the night they’d split up the leftover pizzas—ones where they had gotten the order wrong, or somebody didn’t pay. He’d come back at one in the morning with two or three pizzas in hand. We never had pizza delivered to the house when I was growing up. The idea of somebody bringing you pizza felt like a gift just by itself. But free pizza, in the middle of the night? God almighty. We’d sprawl out in a dorm room, sweaty and exhausted, downing greasy slices while respectable students slept. It was better than found money on the street.
Free pizza, cheap beer, microwave subs, unlimited ice cream. That was my diet my first year in college. All the basketball in the world wouldn’t have burned off those calories. The normal freshman fifteen became my freshman forty.
• • •
Over the next couple of years I settled into a life of half-assery. I half-assed my studies, half-assed the few dates I managed to score, half-assed figuring out my future. I blew off classes, coasting on good memory and a way with essay questions. My A’s drifted into B’s and C’s, then into an eddy of incompletes. I declared my major as prelaw, because I had to put down something, but the only thing I knew about my career was that I absolutely did not want to be a lawyer. Lawyers wore suits.
As a freshman I had written a couple pieces for the Red & Black, UGA’s student newspaper. One of the stories was about an expensive rug the university bought for one of the administration buildings. When somebody at the university complained about the story, I got spooked and quit. But the rush of writing a story, then seeing it published, buzzed in my blood. My mom and dad had subscribed to the Brunswick News as far back as I could remember. When I was a kid, I’d listen for the thump of the paper landing in our yard every afternoon. I’d run out and grab it and peel off the green rubber band so we could split up the sections. I was always curious about how the world worked—how the cops figured out who broke into somebody’s house, how the bridge over the river got built, why the Atlanta Braves kept losing every year. All those years of reading, and all those family stories, made me better at writing than anything else. I was built to be a journalist—I just hadn’t figured it out. In my junior year, I went back to the Red & Black. I wrote a story, then another, and that’s all it took. It felt like dancing with a lover. So long, prelaw.
College newspapers always have people coming and going, so if you stick around you get promoted fast. Within a few weeks I became a senior writer. It was a paying gig—three hours a week at minimum wage, even though I was working thirty. We got paid every other week. My first newspaper paycheck, sometime in the fall of 1984, was for eleven bucks and change. I’ve written for a living ever since.
As my workload at the paper rose, my GPA sank in direct proportion. Every quarter I booked my classes to be done by noon. After class I’d have a burger and beer for lunch at a bar called the Odyssey, then head over to Jackson Street to the newspaper office. There’s an old line journalists use: We don’t put out the newspaper, it escapes. Every day it felt like the Red & Black barely got out the door. Until my senior year, we worked on typewriters. One spot in the middle of the newsroom floor was so rotten that we covered it with a traffic cone so nobody would fall into the Kinko’s below. It was an independent paper, not controlled by the university, although we did have a faculty adviser nobody listened to. One day he stomped up the stairs screaming, “WHO THE FUCK THOUGHT IT WAS OKAY TO PUT FUCK IN THE PAPER?”
I banged out hundreds of stories and columns, most of them terrible, because most of us are terrible at anything before we get good. But once I started doing journalism I never wanted to do any other kind of work. I still can’t believe it’s a real job you can get paid for. We get to talk to people and find stuff out and tell the world about it. That’s the job at its core. Guess what I heard today? Holy shit, you’re not gonna believe it.
As much as I loved the paper, it made my bad habits worse. We worked every night until eight or nine and had late, boozy suppers, usually chili and margaritas from Gus Garcia’s across the street. Most of my clothes didn’t fit anymore. For a while, I had outgrown just about everything but a white sweatshirt and a dishwater-gray bathing suit that I declared to be shorts. I wore that ensemble three or four times a week for months. It’s stunning that I didn’t hook up with more hot college girls.
I’d moved off-campus with a few buddies by then, first to a couple of apartments, then to an old house on Oconee Hill that was missing its back stairs—it was a ten-foot drop straight down from the back door. Somehow nobody ended up splatted on the ground at one of our parties. On Saturdays we’d head out on Atlanta Highway to Sonny’s, a Southern barbecue chain. They had an all-you-can-eat deal on weekends and we’d leave the place in ruins. Well, Sonny’s might not have been in ruins. Our stomachs definitely were. My favorite time of the week was Sunday during NFL season. The games started at 1:00, and I’d wake up about 12:55, take a leak, grab cold pizza and leftover beer from the fridge, and watch football until I fell asleep on the couch. Other days I’d have happy-hour bar food, takeout subs, or spaghetti at home washed down with knockoff Coke from Kroger. It was twenty-five cents for a two-liter bottle, and overpriced.
David and Zane had generous parents who would come to Athens sometimes and take us all out to eat. The big place to go in Athens back then was Charlie Williams Pinecrest Lodge, out in the woods a couple miles from town. Charlie Williams served family-style, and in my memory, everything was fried—fried chicken, fried fish, fried pork chops, fried potatoes, fried okra, fried coleslaw (I might be wrong about the slaw). We devoured it all and staggered out into the Georgia night, high on grease and sweet tea.
I thought about food more than classwork, more than the newspaper, more than soft lips in low light. It showed. By the spring of 1986, the end of my senior year, I was on the wrong side of three hundred pounds. That’s an educated guess. I wouldn’t go to the doctor and I didn’t go to the gym. I never wanted to be anywhere near a scale.
• • •
My first apartment out of college was a one-room upstairs unit behind a dry cleaner’s in Augusta, Georgia. A king-sized bed took up just about the whole room. The landlord had squeezed in a couple of dressers and a mini-fridge. There was no way to cook—not even a microwave. The guy in the apartment next to mine was a boxer, or wanted to be—he hung a heavy bag on his balcony and banged on it for hours. The rest of the time, he and his girlfriend banged on the bed that backed up to my wall. That was my entertainment—pounding of one kind or another—as I watched baseball alone and ate takeout fried chicken from a place called WifeSaver.
It was the summer of 1986 and I was working for the Augusta Chronicle and Herald, the first and only place that had offered me a job out of UGA. They were two newspapers, the Chronicle in the morning and the Herald in the afternoon. You wrote the story for one paper then moved the words around a little bit for the other. The editor in chief had taught at Washington and Lee, so we had a bunch of reporters from Washington and Lee. He also liked beautiful redheads, so we had more than our share of beautiful redheads.
My first beat was night cops reporter, three to midnight, chasing every car wreck and armed robbery in a county of almost two hundred thousand people. In Athens I had written about university politics and frat parties. In Augusta I saw a motorcycle cop take off his shoes, dive into a canal, and pull a drowning boy from the bottom. I called mothers of teenagers who’d just been murdered, letting them talk through their tears and asking to borrow a photo. One day I drove way out to the east side of town to cover a wreck. I got there and saw that a woman had run her car into the back of a logging truck. One of the logs went through her windshield. The EMTs cut a hole in the top of the car and tried to lift her out, but they couldn’t get a good hold and her shirt came up over her head. She hung there for a second, lifeless and topless, until they could get her out and make her decent.
Every other day I thought I might get fired. I accidentally put a police officer’s home address in a story. One night I rewrote a story from scratch instead of going into the version the editor had already worked on. It caused her an extra half hour of work on a brutal deadline. She sent a letter to the city editor that night saying I didn’t have what it took for the job. But they kept me around and finally, slowly, I got better. The editors promoted me to the politics beat and let me write features on the side. I did one piece about teenagers who took over a shopping center parking lot on Friday nights, cruising a big loop in their cars. A reader wrote in to say she knew the story wouldn’t be any good just by looking at my byline: Tommy was a “childish euphemism” (instead of Thomas or Tom, I guess). For the next couple of months, my nickname around the newsroom was Childish Euphemism.
Back then, at least there, it was still considered OK for newspaper people to have a drink or two at lunch. Some days we’d walk down the street to a place called the Sports Center for beer in frosted fishbowl glasses, plus burgers from the griddle. Wednesday nights we’d go to the Red Lion for $1.50 pitchers. Fridays we’d drink gin-and-tonics at a hotel bar that was so dark we called it the Batcave. When I worked night cops, some nights I’d wait around for the guys in the pressroom to finish up and we’d cross the Savannah River to North Augusta, South Carolina, where bars could stay open all night. Augusta is a big hospital town, and once or twice I saw nurses stop by for a quick beer at sunrise on their way into work. I decided not to get sick in Augusta.
One huge perk of working for the Augusta paper is getting to cover the Masters—the most famous tournament in golf and one of the biggest sporting events in the world. Augusta National Golf Club lets commoners visit the course that one week a year, just to watch, but otherwise the place is vacuum-sealed to keep away everybody but the (rich and powerful, mostly white and male) members and their guests. After the Masters is over the club hosts a media day, when newspeople who cover the tournament get a chance to play the course. If you’re not into sports, understand this: a round at Augusta National is the golden ticket of golf. Fans consider the course almost a literal cathedral. If you are one of those fans, take a deep breath before you read the rest of this sentence: I played Augusta National wearing Converse high-tops, swinging mismatched clubs I bought at a pawnshop.
I know. I’m sorry.
I was a fairly regular golfer back then, playing with my buddies Andy Marlatt, Kevin Procter, and Robert Naddra at a public course correctly nicknamed the Cabbage Patch. The four of us played Media Day together. Maybe I shouldn’t tell this, because I’m not sure if the statute of limitations ever runs out at Augusta National, but at one point Kevin tried to brake his golf cart on the rain-slicked tenth fairway and accidentally threw the cart into a power slide. We thought we might be shot on sight. The course was dumbed down for hackers like us, but I still shot 118—a tidy 46-over. However! On the sixteenth hole—a gorgeous par-three across a pond—I swung my pawnshop three-iron and landed the ball ten feet from the flagstick. I missed the putt, of course, but tapped in for par. It is, and always will be, the athletic highlight of my life. I might have mentioned this to several thousand people since that day.
Those few years in my mid-twenties should’ve been my physical peak. But I was eating those Sports Center burgers and that WifeSaver chicken, and staying out late for drinks every night. I might have had a fleeting thought now and then about cutting back, but the moment I got that first chemical jolt of pleasure, the rational part of my brain switched off. One day I was visiting Andy, my golf buddy, and told him I was trying to get in shape. “Maybe you could start by not eating all our candy,” he said. I looked down and saw I’d eaten every Hershey’s kiss and Reese’s cup from the bowl on the end table between us. It was pure reflex. In the back of my mind, as we talked, I knew I was eating candy. I had no idea I was eating all the candy.
• • •
After three years in Augusta I thought it was time to work for a bigger and better paper. North Carolina had some of the best in the country. I lined up interviews in Greensboro and Charlotte. I got to the Greensboro paper early on a Monday morning, only to find out that they had been trying to reach me—this was before cell phones—to let me know they didn’t want to interview me after all. The secretary took pity on me and let me fill out a generic application. While I was doing that, the editor walked in and did a double take when he saw me. Clearly I wasn’t supposed to be there. He gave me five minutes that were wasted on both of us.
The next day at the Charlotte Observer changed my life. The Observer is still a fine paper, but in 1989 it was a powerhouse—it had just won a Pulitzer for exposing Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s scams at the PTL Club. The paper’s reach covered both Carolinas. You could buy a copy from the Smoky Mountains to Hilton Head. After the disaster in Greensboro I didn’t think I had a chance. But they kept running me through interviews with what seemed like every editor in the building. At some point, a reporter told me that if the editors really wanted me, they’d ask me to stick around for another set of interviews the next day. They asked me to stick around. I was too wired to stay in my hotel room that night. I scanned the paper to figure out what was going on in town, and saw that Buckwheat Zydeco was playing at a blues club called the Double Door. I went over there, walked in the back, and saw Bill O’Connor, one of the editors I had met with that day. He was drinking beer and playing foosball. In that moment, I knew I was home.
The Observer put me in a one-person office in Lancaster, South Carolina, forty miles south of Charlotte. The paper had a bureau up the road in Rock Hill, and my office was a bureau of that bureau—a subatomic particle of journalism. That September, three months after I took the job, Hurricane Hugo wrecked the South Carolina coast and churned right up Interstate 26, far deeper inland than anyone expected. At some point it became clear that Hugo would hit the Charlotte area at nearly full strength. I dozed off watching the weather on TV. The hurricane woke me up at three in the morning, screaming through the eaves. I lived in an old duplex and the front door wasn’t square in the frame. The wind flung it open and a bucket of rain flew in through the screen. This happened three times, until I grabbed my old Royal typewriter—a gift from my mom and dad—and jammed it against the base of the door. There was a pecan tree outside my bedroom window, and every new blast of wind bent it over the roof of the house, like a hammer clawing a nail from a two-by-four. The power had gone out and all I could see was the silhouette of the tree in the blur of the rain. I could hear it creak and crack. I wondered if this would be how I died. But the tree held, and the front door held, and around sunrise the wind trailed off. I walked outside and started filling my notebook.
I made some lifelong friends at the paper right away. While I was writing about Lancaster school board meetings, my buddy Joe Posnanski was writing about high school volleyball games for the Rock Hill office. Now he’s one of the best and most popular sportswriters in the country, author of the best-selling biography of Joe Paterno. We’ve done OK for two boys from the bureaus. But outside of work, I spent my time in Lancaster trying not to be lonely, and failing. I struck out the few times I tried to socialize in town. I lived alone and worked alone and it brought out all my worst habits. My office was littered with fast-food bags—I didn’t even have the gumption to throw them in the trash can. One of the paper’s advertising reps stopped by the office one day to use the phone and was so disgusted she reported me to my boss. I worked a lot of late nights, and sometimes the only place open on the way home was Hardee’s. One night I ordered half a dozen cinnamon biscuits at the drive-through. The cashier raised her eyebrows when I came around to pay. I told her they were for my dog. She knew I was full of shit. She laughed in my face and pushed the biscuits through the window.
• • •
That Christmas, it snowed in Brunswick. We got a trace of snow every four or five years down there—just enough to get a flake on your tongue—but this time it snowed for real, four inches. I made angels in the yard and threw snowballs at Mama on the porch. Daddy watched from the window. The emphysema had just about stolen his breath. He had worked fifteen-hour days in cotton fields, cut down pine trees in the Georgia swamp, built houses from a pile of lumber and nails. Now our little house was his whole world. He was so glad to see me come home. He told a couple of his favorite old jokes and we watched wrestling on TV. He never could understand how Ric Flair could get away with cheating like he did.
A couple weeks later, after I had gone back to work, he went in the hospital. He had been admitted half a dozen times since I was in middle school, but this time felt different. I came back to see him in the ICU, and he was a fraction of the man I’d just spent Christmas with. He recognized me at first but then he drifted away. He kept reaching into the space between us, grabbing at something in the empty air. He said they were spoons. He asked me if I saw spoons.
On January 8, 1990, four days after my twenty-sixth birthday, Mama was in the ICU with him when he rose up, drew one big breath, then fell back and died. I was in the waiting room, not thirty feet away.
My belly, in a weird way, is a monument to the incredible feat that he and Mama pulled off. They survived the cotton fields and scraped together a better life through hard work and good sense and kindness. They raised a boy who never had to worry about having enough to eat. That has caused its own problems. But I would take these problems every day over the ones they had to face. Just one generation ago, my people rode to town in a wagon and used an outhouse. Now I have a closet full of clothes and a frequent-flier account. It is only fair, in some ways, that I haul this weight around. My mom and dad carried the heavy end of the load long before I got here.
Every so often, my dad shows up in a dream. He never says a word. He doesn’t need to. He knows I know.
• • •
I spent the next couple years feeling sorry for myself. Looking back, I was doing a lot better than I thought. Some of my stories started landing on the front page of the main Observer. I got a promotion to the Rock Hill office to write a column. I ended up with my first girlfriend in years, a woman from the Lancaster paper who had long legs and loved the blues. But I kept expecting to get promoted to the Mothership—the main office in Charlotte—and it didn’t happen. Other reporters got called up before me. One of them, Paige Williams, now writes for the New Yorker, and another, Carol Leonnig, has gone on to win three Pulitzers with the Washington Post. So my bosses were probably right. But I thought my career had stalled out. So I thought about it—not nearly long enough—and then I walked in one day and quit. I left my friends puzzled and my girlfriend hanging. All I could think about was how the paper was holding me back. I threw myself a going-away party and puked up the remnants the next morning. My friend Perry helped me load up the U-Haul. We drove to Atlanta and I moved in with Virgil—my other best friend from home—and his roommate Randy Lockey. A former coworker had a connection with the Cartoon Network. I’d get a job there, freelance on the side, set the city on fire.
It did not go that way. I wrote a couple pieces for magazines, but the only steady job I had the whole time was chasing down high school football scores for the Atlanta paper every Friday night. I rode the last MARTA train home with a group of drag queens. At least I learned a few things about fashion. I spent my little paychecks on chili dogs from the Varsity and fried chicken from Mrs. Winner’s. Virgil and I started playing tennis again—we had played each other since high school. He had gotten better and I had gotten slower. One night we decided to play a set. I went up 5-love. But then his big serves started going in, and every time I came to the net he’d drop a lob over my head. I was too slow to run them down. He came all the way back and won. I threw my racket over the fence. I was furious because I kept losing, and not just in tennis.
I had saved some money but it ran out fast. I was still making payments on a used Chrysler LeBaron convertible I’d bought the year before I quit the paper. At one point I got way behind on the payments and started getting calls from a collection agency. I had to drive out to an office park in Cobb County to make a payment. The office was closed off from the public—you rang the bell and they talked to you through a speaker. They had demanded a payment in cash. I was so tapped that I had to use the coins from my change jar. I pushed a wad of bills and some rolls of pennies through the slot in the door. I could hear the agents on the other side of the wall laughing at me.
A couple weeks after that, I called the Observer and asked to come back. I would have begged if I’d had to. I was broke, and my mom was having a hard time without my dad. Our old garden back home was overgrown with weeds. I needed to take care of myself, and to take care of her if I needed to. The paper took me back with grace. They had an opening at the Mothership for a feature writer. I was thrilled to take it. I started just after New Year’s 1993. By then I must have been 350 pounds.
I moved into a little fourplex a mile or so from the office and started reconnecting with old friends. I promised myself that this time I’d eat right. I started taking long walks around my new neighborhood, grateful for another chance.
Everything felt right. Except for one thing. I had a rasp in my voice that wouldn’t go away.
We take our dog to the vet and talk about the end. Fred, our yellow Lab mix, is almost fourteen. Arthritis makes his back legs so stiff that he goose-steps down the sidewalk—one of our neighbors calls him Little Soldier. Sometimes he topples over and waits for one of us to pick him up.
On top of all that, he has started turning away from his food and throwing up what he does eat. Dr. Mary Fluke, our amazing vet, loves on him and gives him a cookie and diagnoses a kidney infection. The medicine makes him feel better but doesn’t solve his bigger problems. We ask her how to know when it’s time to let him go. She says we need to ask five questions:
Does he eat and drink OK?
Can he control his pee and poop?
Can he get around on his own?
Is he engaged with the world?
Does he seem happy?
Getting around is hard, but he’s eating better and is OK on everything else. So we give him a wishful five-for-five.
That night, as Alix sleeps beside me and Fred snores on the floor, I turn those five questions on myself.
Do I eat and drink OK?
I’m great at eating and drinking. It’s what I do best. I need to figure out how not to be so good at it.
Can I control my pee and poop?
One of the things about being fat is that your belly mashes down on your bladder, so I have the bladder of a chipmunk. Every night I get up two or three times and stumble to the bathroom. I pee before going into a movie and after coming back out. I pee twice at the airport before I get on a plane. Plus, these days, I’m drinking more water to get in shape. I might as well keep a urinal strapped to my crotch.
My other charming bodily function is fairly constant gas. Sometimes I try to hold it in and it rumbles around inside me. Alix has nicknamed it the troll. The troll tends to come out at the most awkward times, like when we’re trying to have a romantic dinner. Excuse me, honey. Keep the candle lit while I go squeeze out a couple of gigantic farts. My stomach is such an asshole.
Can I get around on my own?
As long as I don’t have to run, or go up a lot of steps, or walk a really long way. This is exactly how the average ninety-year-old would answer this question. Shit.
Am I engaged with the world?
My job puts me in interesting places and forces me to talk to strangers. One of my theories about journalism is that it attracts wallflowers, because the job makes us get out on the dance floor. Alix and I visit our families. We go out with friends. But I work from home and a lot of days I don’t see or talk to anyone after my wife leaves for the office. Inertia kicks in, and I dick around on the Internet, and here comes four in the afternoon and I still haven’t showered. Writers need time alone. It’s part of the gig. But sometimes I pull the plug on the outside world and hide. And when I do that, my sustenance is almost always food that’s bad for me.
Am I happy?
Yes. Mostly. I hit the wife jackpot, the family jackpot, the friend jackpot, the dog jackpot, and the job jackpot. But my weight locks so many doors. When I run into one of those locked doors, two things happen. First I have a flash of anger—so quick and so deep that Alix will sometimes step back and wonder what the hell just happened. That goes away fast. But then a blue fog lingers—sometimes for five minutes, sometimes for five days. Sometimes it would probably qualify as depression. It involves a lot of staring out of windows. I can’t do so many things because I have not done the main thing. And in the blue fog, I hate myself.
Here is the worst thing about addiction: In those lowest moments, what you crave is the very thing that put you in that place to begin with. I am mourning Fred even before he is gone, and it’s a cold and bitter February, and I want junk food more than I want anything else in this world. But this time, this February, I take a walk or a shower or drink some water or read a book. And I go back to question one.
Do I eat and drink OK?
A little better now.
Weight on January 31: 455
Weight on February 28: 452
For the month: -3