My Addiction

When I was in high school, I had one goal.  It wasn’t a lofty goal, but it was one that I spent my ever y waking moment preparing and training for it.  I wanted to play college football. I wanted to pay for school, not with my mind but with my body. This  seemed like an impossible goal where I came from.  We weren’t known for our athletes and we weren’t known for having good football teams.  In fact, my cumulative record as a high school player was 10-22. That is not earth shattering.  I had a work ethic though.  I spent my free time running, lifting and stretching.  It was all so I could be the first guy in high school’s history to play four years on scholarship.  Since I did not think that I was a great athlete I knew it had to come from my ethic. 

I succeeded.

Then, the real work began.  I played nosegurard, and I was strong and quick, but I was also lean.  There wasn’t an ounce of body fat on me, and there wouldn’t be until my junior year when all of the supplements and seconds in the cafeteria meshed with my lifting to truly bulk me up. My fear of being fat kept me running and lifting even after I graduated, but sometime in 20000 my teaching schedule and commute caught up with me.  More to the point my fixation on unhealthy foods caught up with me.

You see, dear, dear friend, I have always had a weakness for “crap food”. Little Debbie’s... Gas Station burritos.  Copious amounts of pizza. I have been eating too much of those things for at least ten years.  My increasingly sedentary lifestyle led me to stop burning the calories that I needed to in order to eat crap and still function.  I know this. 

I know that my weight issue right now is my own damn fault.  I know that diabetes runs in my family.  I know I am ashamed every time I finish a box of Swiss Rolls on my own and feel like a selfish waste of skin. 

I know how to eat; I know how to exercise.  I even know how to work out a bit in my ridiculously busy schedule, but here is some part of me that resists.  It resists, and then, I find some measure of relief and oblivion in every sugar crusted bite of garbage.  Even my musings on Langston Hughes do not escape this fixation.  When I think of “A Dream Deferred”, I don’t think of the usual images or thoughts.  I think of the “Sugared treat”.  I wonder what kind it is, and I transpose his fantastic work in to an image from some low rent grocery  store in which I feed that something that needs satiating in side of me.  I just taught the story “Hunters in the Snow” by Tobias Wolff, and while my class discussed the merits of the story and the characters, I thought about the character of Tub.  Tub is the overweight one who never is full.  In one scene he eats three plates of pancakes and licks the syrup off of the plates.  I realized that I am probably not that far from that sort of debauch.  I am not that far from losing my sense of worth in a last bite of an Oatmeal Pie.  

Ultimately I realize exactly the steps that I must take, but that doesn’t erase the shame and fear regarding it.  My reaction when I take that first bite of crap food is probably just like some one jonesing for something else.  I feel relieved.  I feel saved. I feel safe.  Then, I go further and further and before I know it, I am lost. 

I hate my body right now.  It’s not the one I designed and created through hours of labor.  It’s the one I destroyed through poor upkeep and lackadaisical diet.  It deserves better.  My family deserves better.  Maybe I don’t believe that.  Maybe the me that I want is not the me that I deserve.  I know that I’ll have resolve after I type these last few words, and that I’ll swear that I’m through with crap and junk and feeling like shit. However, I also know that I’ll stop and get gas, and walk by the honey buns ,and it’ll remind me of a busy school morning with nor time for breakfast and the safety of riding to school I my brother’s truck while eating one.  I’ll weaken and hate myself and continue until. I just give up.  Or not.