I remember standing in the shower, in sixth grade, disgusted with my body – clutching my soft belly with my hands and saying to myself, “This isn’t who I am.” I was reciting, unconsciously, the text. And so, at the age of 12, I gathered my will and started running. By the end of middle school, I was pretty skinny. By high school, I was already a good athlete. Looking back, I think what really made me slimmer was the hormones and the growth spurt. But that achievement has become a mainstay of my teenage identity, a story I love to tell about myself: I was once a fat kid, a kid living under a genetic curse – but then, through the miracle of willpower and self-discipline, I overcame .
Or did I really pass? The diet stories that tend to get dismissed are that, after restriction, people almost always gain weight back. The story of a life is much longer than the story of a diet. Over the decades, my weight has fluctuated wildly as I swing around the extremes of excess and restriction, appetite and control, abstinence and snacking. Or, as my grandfather might say, taste and nutrition.
I have one The alter ego my wife calls, with affectionate surprise, Fat Sam. She first met him on our honeymoon. We’d driven all day, rolling through the high desert near Santa Fe, watching massive thunderstorms flutter above dark clouds, trying to get where we were going – and finally in the middle of the night, hungry Thirsty and exhausted, the only open restaurant was Denny’s. And the only thing on my mind is union, body and soul, with the first cheeseburger coming through.
By the time my meal arrived, the universe seemed to split in half, like an eggshell in the hands of a chef – and a whole new character appeared: Fat Sam. Fat Sam attacked the dish in front of him with extreme urgency. As I eat, my wife keeps trying to say something, to start a conversation, but I’ll chew midway, or near the end, or right at the start, and I’ll hold up a finger. If I had to say, Yes, wait a minute, I’ve got the answer for you – but then in that moment of swallowing, when my mouth is clear, when I can speak, I’ll immediately pop the sandwich. cheese back in. mouth and took another bite. I am in some kind of trance. I am like a trumpet player breathing in a circle. At one point, the waiter came and said, “How are things?” and with my mouth completely full, sounding like a drunk man, moaning with almost sexual pleasure, I yelled, “Oh, it’s REALLY good!” – and everyone in the room at once realized that she wasn’t even talking to us but was just coming to the table behind us. Fat Sam doesn’t care. He keeps stuffing the universe in his face.
That moment suddenly turned grainy – the absence of his body, my presence – made me, in that moment, so odd and strange, sad and embarrassing and funny at the same time. .
The classic diet tagline that made a big impression on me as a chubby kid – “Inside every fat person, there is a thin person waiting to come out” – should, in my case, be reversed. No matter what my body looks like at any particular time, Fat Sam lives inside of me. In fact, I realized that Fat Sam represents some of my best qualities: curiosity, bubbly gluttony, longing for life, moment gratification. Fat Sam’s mission is to consume the world in giant bouts of ecstasy. It doesn’t even have to be food: It could be a nap, or a video game, or telling a joke at a party, or going for a walk, or free-ball, reading, or petting. a dog. Anything that satisfies a need, whatever I’m hungry for. And in that transition, in that passage from outside to inside, in that radical penetration, there is a confirmation of existence, a proof of existence, which I cannot disprove. Fat Sam is, in many ways, precious and good. He is a funnel into which the universe pours, the clamp in the hourglass. He reminds me that all life is, in a sense, an appetite. Even restriction satisfies hunger – hunger must be restrained. When I choose to deny myself something, it is Fat Sam who is feeding, covetously, refusing it.
One of mine Favorite pictures are a selfie that I took 10 days after my dad passed away. It contains a strange paradoxical energy: mourning and joy, comedy and sadness, ending and continuing. I got it in the guest bathroom at my father’s house when, looking through his old pieces, we discovered a treasure trove of vintage running shirts. My father was an avid runner — he moved to hot joggers Eugene, Ore., during its heyday in the 1970s, when the local shoe company, Nike, was growing and legendary. Steve Prefontaine running on the street with his famous mustache. My father had a mustache like Pre’s, and he ran those streets. Every year, he amassed a huge collection of t-shirts from Eugene’s annual race, Butte to Butte. Looking through them feels like time travel: wild colors, outdated designs, fonts that transform to keep up with the styles of different decades.
