The winter before I moved away from Erie, I made this video on a wintry, snowy trip out on the Presque Isle peninsula. It showcases the song “Jetstream” by the band Doves; this is a really amazing song that I come back to for a week or two every year, but the day I spent with the song making this video (the song starts a few minutes into the video) will forever tie this song to cold weather for me.
Just now, I went out on a short bike ride. I have found that with riding my bike to work and back every day, I often lose sight of the fact that I truly love riding my bike for pleasure.
It is extraordinarily cold out today, but after the horrors of last winter, I am now incredibly prepared to dress appropriately for cold-weather biking. As I hopped on my bike this morning, I found myself quite pleased with how comfortable I was, despite the 28 degree temperature. The sun was fully out and beaming its glorious rays onto my face. Was I cold? Yes, very much so. But comfortable, for sure.
I rode west and then south, through the trenches of what is known as South Philly. The morning was relatively quiet and calm, still almost like a mid-summer afternoon. Here and there the sounds of a truck backing up, or the birds in the trees that nestle the power lines. Every few blocks I would get stopped by a crossing guard ushering school kids across a not-busy intersection. I didn’t seem to mind.
I parked my bike by my bank so I could step inside and get some cash out of the ATM, and also warm my hands for a bit. A scruffy but polite older gentleman held the door to the inner lobby open for me, not realizing I was just stopping at the ATM in the foyer. Oh, no thanks, I’m staying right here, I said to him. He said Oh alright, well have a great day.
I hopped back on my bike and rode a few more blocks down to the local soft pretzel joint. It was 10am and 28 degrees, and the pretzel joint is just a walk-up window with no seats anywhere, so of course I was the only one there. I waited for the portly lady inside to see me and open the window. She was wearing a winter coat. What’ll it be? she asks. I could smell the fresh-baked carb-and-salt goodness mixing with the crispness of the morning air; it’s a special blend of perfect that is exceedingly rare. Just four pretzels, please. A few seconds later she handed me a brown paper bag and I handed her four bucks. I took my backpack off and slid my precious cargo inside. All the way home, I could feel the warmth on my back, as the pretzels heated the inside of my bag. At stop signs, I could even smell them. In the cold, still morning, I had a little bag of warmth and perfection riding on my back, like a secret.
I was really into this song for just about two weeks in the winter of 2009. It remains a notable winter song in my mind because once, I had to drive home at night in an HUGE snowstorm (from York, PA to Carlisle, PA) and I had this song on repeat. The storm was so bad, I didn’t dare take my eyes or concentration off the road to turn the music off or take it off of repeat. It’s a GREAT song, but now, it is simply, to me, all about that horrible, terrifying wintry drive:
I used to go with friends sometimes over to the
hotel bar–I forget its name–that shared a parking lot
with the diner I worked at. Get drunk and sing
karaoke. This one time, on St. Paddy’s Day,
the karaoke guy’s father had died
earlier in the day, and suddenly he tells us this
(through the microphone!)
and I thought at first that there would be a punchline,
but there wasn’t. Just:
“in a plane crash”.
And so then he sings a song to his dad—
that Clapton song about
when I see you in heaven—
and a woman from somewhere in the bar
goes over to him and hugs him,
and he’s singing and crying
while she hugs him.
Then the manager of the bar gets up there
and says how close the karaoke guy
was to his dad, and says
how it’s a demonstration of character
that he came in to work tonight.
I wouldn’t have come in, he says.
So let’s support him,he says.
He’s a great guy.
We cheered.
There were twenty-five of us in the dim bar
(give or take),
twenty-five souls.
We cheered.
We confessed to being still alive.
Without irony, we were suddenly able to believe
in the shapes shifting in the dim light,
able to name our fear and swat it away,
able to breathe the heaving breaths of living kings–
we sang drank and danced.
But there was nothing we could do to support him.
As winter nears, I being to again turn to the songs that I most associate with this most dreadful of seasons. We all have different ways we experience music, and our own unique ways we have them tied to specific sensory sensations or memories from our own pasts. Many of “my winter songs” have little to do with winter; I was just listening to them heavily during winters, or maybe even just once during a very winter-specific moment. Of course, the same goes for “summer songs”, etc. Over the next few weeks I’m going to post a few of the more prominent of my own winter songs; usually without personal commentary, but sometimes with. In the process, I’d love to hear about some of your own “winter songs”!
This first one is one I listened to a lot during a winter, but is also thematically about winter. “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” by Arcade Fire is an almost wholly unique song in the rock world, at least lyrically. It tells the story of two kids (who are next door neighbors) whose town is subjected to an enormous, almost apocalyptic snow storm. They dig a tunnel from one bedroom to the other, and then escape to the surface (supposedly their houses are actually buried) and they begin a life by themselves in this new winter world, eventually almost forgetting the details of their past, and their “skin gets thicker/ from living out in the snow”. Using very few words, lyricist Win Butler has crafted a song with layers of intense meaning and emotion that I can only begin to write about in this space. Interspersed with this tale is the love story of these two kids…and perhaps your love story, with the person you love. Perhaps YOU are the couple living alone in the barren white world. For my money, you don’t get a more romantic line than
“You change all the lead
sleepin’ in my head to gold.
As the day grows dim
I hear you sing a golden hymn:
the song I’ve been trying to sing!”
If you watch the video below and really like the song, there is a BADASS live version if you click here.
And if the snow buries my neighborhood,
and if my parents are crying
then I’ll dig a tunnel from my window to yours.
Yeah, a tunnel from my window to yours.
You climb out the chimney
and meet me in the middle of the town,
and since there’s no one else around
we let our hair grow long and forget all we used to know.
Then our skin gets thicker from living out in the snow!
You change all the lead
sleepin’ in my head.
As the day grows dim
I hear you sing a golden hymn.
Then we tried to name our babies
but we forgot all the names that,
the names we used to know.
But sometimes we remember our bedrooms
and our parent’s bedrooms and the bedrooms of our friends.
Then we think of our parents.
Well, what ever happened to them?
You change all the lead
sleepin’ in my head to gold.
As the day grows dim
I hear you sing a golden hymn:
the song I’ve been trying to sing!
Purify colors. Purify my mind.
Purify colors. Purify my mind.
Spread the ashes of the colors
in this heart of mine.
Making a statement like I’ve struggled with weight all my life would be an exaggeration for me–but only a little bit. Throughout my childhood and teens, I was a small guy; very much the opposite of heavy. I’m short–I was then and, surprise, I still am–but I was also just small. The perfect word for it is diminutive. I wasn’t so tiny that I got mercilessly picked on, but I suspect this is more because I’m a badass dude with an enormous personality. I grew up hearing the occasional snide remark about my size (one of my favorites is when my first girlfriend related a story to me about how she was talking to some alpha male redneck prick on the bus one morning, and when he found out she was dating me and asked if she loved me–to which she replied yes–he said to her How can you love him? He’s so short. Shit like that sticks with you for the rest of your life) but generally I skated through adolescence being able to forget I was a small guy. I wrestled for two years in high school–I did it very poorly, but I did it–at the 103 weight class.
One-hundred and three pounds, ladies and germs. In ninth and tenth grade, my most formative years, physically, I weighed as much as two big bags of flour. I was little, although I was, I will say, swathed in a fine layer of muscle.
My early-to-mid twenties saw me (like most folks nowadays, once we leave high school) plumping up. I got bigger but not to any point of really being unhealthy. I never watched what I ate or thought about exercising. I gained a belly and a nice round face but generally didn’t really think about it. There would be moments when someone I hadn’t seen in ages would make a comment about my weight gain (do I just know a lot of assholes or something?) but I didn’t really care. I felt fine and women still seemed to really like me, so my weight, for the most part, wasn’t on my radar.
Sometime around age 25 or 26, however, I started getting plenty bigger, and this is where the “weight struggle” starts. I’ll spare you the long version. Let’s just say that from 25 until about 32, I would sometimes gain more weight than seemed practical, and then I would feel pretty bad about myself, and I would take great pains to lose that weight. Part of the problem there, however, was that I was still a heavy cigarette smoker, and smoking seemed to affect my respiratory and circulatory systems even more than most smokers. For me, exercise was basically not even an option. Losing weight meant starving myself, living off of Slim Fasts and developing coping mechanisms for the sensation of extreme hunger. My only path to weight loss in those days was through simple calorie deprivation. It would work to get my weight down to somewhat acceptable levels, but you don’t have to be Dr. Sanjay-fucking-Gupta to know how those kinds of diets work out. Time and again, I’d be right back where I’d been just a short while before. Plus, by this point in my life, I liked to eat REALLY bad food. And lots of it. So, when I wasn’t dieting, I was really going for it.
Then, around age 32 or 33, the company I worked for moved me to Erie, PA, about a five hour drive from everyone I knew. I loved it! But for reasons not fully within my grasp–I like to think I’m a fairly good self-evaluator but who can really make sense of all the nebulous bullshit stirring in our own depths?–I almost immediately started really going for it with food. Now, there are surface reasons for this which I can testify to: I had recently quit smoking (some really smart people aren’t sure what this has to do with how much we eat, but most agree it affects it somehow), I was all alone and had more time to kill, I wasn’t afraid of what anyone thought of me because I didn’t know anyone there. As I got more and more visibly fat, I was less and less concerned. I wasn’t in the market for a woman, so I wasn’t trying to attract anyone, and like I said, I wasn’t going to run into anyone I knew. I loved eating. I loved eating whatever I wanted. And at first, getting fat was kind of fun. It was neat to see what it was like to get bigger in this area, that area, etc. It was like I was growing more me, which seemed, at first, like a pretty cool thing to do.
After about a year this trend changed dramatically in my mind. Suddenly I was physically unable to do some things properly, from tying my shoes to wiping myself. Even though I was always alone it was humiliating. Anytime a picture was taken of me, I would struggle with ways to make my wobbling underchin less disgusting, until eventually I had to admit that no matter what I did, I looked fat. I was a fat dude who was terribly unhealthy.
So, another long story short: I lost the weight. I had been cigarette-free for about two years, so I started going to a gym. I devised a diet that worked for me; it was very, very low-calorie, but I wasn’t starving myself. And quite miraculously, I lost just shy of 50 pounds in just a few months. It was one of the most amazing things that ever happened to me. I felt truly glorious. I was ready to not just revel in my weight-loss, but totally do the “lifestyle change”: eat right, be active, live like a generally healthy person. And I meant it. I did.
Just a few months after my weight loss, I made a bunch of massive life changes all at once. I quit my job at the company I’d worked for for 15 years (basically, my entire adult life); I moved from being all alone in a remote corner of Pennsylvania to living with my mother and four doors down from my sister, nephews, and bro-in-law, in rural South Jersey. I also was working (for a new company, of course) in Philadelphia (meaning I had to learn how to navigate where I lived–the vast expanse of South Jersey–as well as where I worked, the fifth largest city in the United States, at the same time). The changes don’t stop there; suffice it to say there were many. And this is not to say this was not a fantastic move, and a golden era in my life: it surely was. But my psyche buckled under the amount of change. Again, I don’t understand my inner workings enough to know what really happened, but I know this: within two weeks, I was (this is a real thing I am about to tell you, I’m not making this up) waiting until my mother went to sleep, quietly sneaking out of the house, driving to the very close-by Taco Bell, purchasing the ten taco meal (ten!), bringing it home, eating all ten tacos, then either taking the trash directly to the outdoor trash can, or some days, hiding it in my work bag and throwing it out in the city the next day. I was hiding Taco Bell from my mom. And why? I have no fucking idea. I thought she’d be disappointed? I thought she’d tell me to stop? That’s not how she is. It had nothing to do with her, of course (readers of my blog should already know I have a history of addiction, which is certainly tied up in all this, but this is a blog, not a book, so we’re skipping that conversation. But I will say this: it felt an awful lot like a relapse).
Another long story very short: I gained the weight back. Not all of it, but most (I ended up gaining back 40 of the 50 pounds I lost). This was, to me, one of the most depressing things I have ever experienced. I had been so thrilled with my Erie weight loss; not just how I felt and looked but that I had accomplished it, I had set out a very ambitious goal and not just achieved it, but achieved it quickly, efficiently, in view of the whole world. And now here I was, in what seemed like a matter of days, just a fat bastard again. Again I had trouble performing some rudimentary household and hygienic tasks. Again I struggled with what angle to hold my head at in photographs. Again and again and again. After all those countless hours in an Erie gym, after dozens and dozens of cans of low-calorie vegetables and oatmeal and writing down calorie counts on little notepads. Somehow, someway, here I was again just a short time later, wheezing at the top of the stairs like an invalid. I was so sad.
Here’s yet one more long story short: I lost the weight again. A year and a half after moving from Erie (and about 6 months after moving out of Mom’s to my own place in the city) I decided that if I’d done it once, I could do it again. And so I did. Almost the exact same way I did it the first time. And once again, I feel really, really glorious.
Which brings me, finally, to the point of this entry: I am afraid of food. Following my “New Jersey Food Relapse”, I am now painfully aware of how easy it is for me to slip into old habits, and how quickly I can gain my weight back, and how I can be overtaken by the physical as well as psychological lure of food almost as if it were gin (which is to say, in an almost hypnotic way, where I act without full self-awareness). I have been very close to my goal weight for months now; I am no longer actively losing weight but instead simply improving my fitness and adding muscle mass. I still think about my calorie count every day: I try to get about 1800 a day, with an emphasis on a very high amount of protein for muscle formation. But I still weigh myself nearly obsessively: at least twice a day but sometime much, much more than that. I usually hover around 145 (I wake up around 142); on days when I’ve eaten more than normal, or have a lot of liquid in my belly, or have gone a few days without “passing” my food (that means poop!) sometimes in the evenings I’ll still cross 150…and that makes me freak out. My inner psyche will simply not allow a Food Relapse to happen again. And it prevents me from really, truly enjoying food.
Food is an interesting thing to struggle with because it’s not a drug. In fact, it is something you literally can’t quit. You have to relapse every day. Everyone around you is doing it all the time. Sure, you can eat better, sure, you can create a delicious and nutritious meal, but the fact is, when food or weight become a problem, for you, you can’t simply find a way to quit and get “sober”; quitting gin and cigarettes was easy compared to quitting food…
So. I don’t have an eating disorder, although I might almost have one. I eat mostly good food, every day, and just about the right amount of it. I don’t throw it back up, either. No, my eating disorder is in my mind, where every bite I take terrifies me, as I think to myself What if it happens again?
Notes From the Fire 