Thursday, August 28, 2014

Wilbo has Eaten His Fill and Eaten His Fill Again, and Feels Guilty about it.

Technically, I'm fasting until early afternoon. The small coffee I am sipping is probably forbidden and yet, I cannot write without sips between sentences. Thus, it is a dependency, a condition, well on its way to being an addiction. The sun, shining through the window, is rising and now fills my face with sunshine. That feeds me, through my skin, driving my body to produce Vitamin D and melanin. In this sense, I break my fast and eat as a tree eats.

I heard a story of Madonna flying to England and she drank bottled water and injected herself with a vitamin formulation. I wondered if she had concluded that the act of putting food in the digestive system caused the body to age faster. I think about that every time I eat my fill and go into a food coma as my body strives to turn matter into energy, substance into blood. It takes work to load vitamins and sugar and proteins take a voyage on my circulatory system. Why give these finely tuned and coordinated systems too much work?

Eat my fill. That lands me directly in the Muslim world. A brother does not eat his fill while his brother goes hungry. And as there is always a man, woman or child going hungry, just when would one eat ones fill, if ever. On Thanksgiving, if one indulges in the spirit of togetherness and family? I give money to charity by payroll deduction, more than I should afford, just so I can eat breakfast, lunch & dinner with a free pass. I tell myself I give good work to farmers when I savor food, a good slice of manchego or tuck into an Amish chicken breast, grilled with lemon and dill.

Ten years ago, I was having coffee with two men from Pakistan, highly educated system engineers capable of implementing data systems for manufacturing plants. The two were slender men in glowing health. I had a sandwich and I offered half to them and said, "A brother doesn't eat his fill while his brother goes hungry". One said to me, "Too late". The two laughed with me. One had taken a screenwriting class and I had read his script. In the conclusion, lightning strikes an awning, and the doctor, lawyer and police officer are struck unconscious. The courtesan suffered no effects of the strike at all. "It's a tad Gothic", I answered to his request for criticism.

For a long time, being divorced and a non-custodial dad, I always bailed town and the state of Michigan for the Christian holidays, foremost Christmas and Easter. All the restaurants and saloons shut down for that day in the Midwest. LA, with it diverse population, keeps open most doors. With all that access to dining denied and friends treating you like an orphan, it's a good day to say, "I am going to see my sister in Ferndale", and then hop a train, bus or plane. And fast. I mean fast in the dietary sense, although the trip to the airport or depot is pretty swift. So it's been a standing practice to eat nothing before Midnight services at whatever church is my choice for the Christmas Eve. I pick a church from the abundant selection of hundred year old churches in any American downtown, besides Las Vegas. And eat nothing until the stroke of Midnight, lifting the red letter hex on everything. I usually have a nice steak dinner waiting for 12:01 AM.

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