People Health Bodies
All the Things I’ve Loved to Death
Am I ever going to know where I hope to escape to? I understand that I’m trying escape from reality, but I’m still not clear on what the destination is.
Every week I buy five large nonfat tubs of Wallaby and seven small containers of kefir-style yogurt by a local brand called Aris Natural Foods. They only come in one size and cost about eight dollars each. My favorite flavors are plain and blackberry. When I’m feeling adventurous, I throw in a new brand. Recently, I tried Lavva, which is made from pili nuts, young cassava, and coconut. It’s an ugly color (grayish with specks), but it has a nice-enough texture (only slightly lumpy) and a taste that is both pleasing and peculiar. Cocoyo is another brand I recently tried. It’s made from living young coconut and “brimming with probiotics,” and eating it feels like a mild chemical peel on your tongue. I didn’t like the Cocoyo at all, but I ate the whole jar anyway.
I have a specific order for eating my yogurt. I eat the Aris tubs first, because they are like gold. Usually, I eat four on the first day and three on the next day. My love for Aris dictates how often I go to the store; I try to go only once a week because my love is so intense. The Aris is like the coke, and the Wallaby is like the weed. It’s less expensive and less good. I bathe it in maple syrup to improve its tastelessness and add a pinch of Maldon salt on top.
Recently, I found out that the Erewhon in Venice carries flavors of Aris that I didn’t even know existed, like lemon and coconut. So I broke my routine and drove there (it’s far) and bought ten tubs. I ate them within two days. Then I wanted more lemon and coconut, so I did some research and learned that Gelson’s, which is not far, also carries them. I went there and bought ten more tubs.
As I ate the first five, my life still felt brighter. I told all my friends about the new flavors. I posted a picture on Instagram and Aris reposted it, so I wrote them a message.
I’m your number one fan. Can I please come to your factory sometime?
Tub number six was when my life started to dim, and by the time I was licking the bright yellow kefir-style cheese (because the lemon one is labeled as cheese rather than yogurt for some reason) from tub number ten, my stomach hurt. I had eaten a hundred and sixty dollars worth of yogurt in four days, and I’d done it to hurt my stomach. Why? Because physical discomfort makes letting go easier.
As I threw tub number ten away, I mentally threw Aris into the graveyard with all the other things I’ve loved to death. She was ruining my peace, and probably my arteries.
*
There’s a homeless woman named Jane who I often see on Vermont Avenue in Los Feliz. Sometimes, she’s sleeping on a dirty blanket, with all her things scattered out around her on the sidewalk. Sometimes, all her things are in a shopping cart and she’s sitting nearby, rocking back and forth and whispering words to herself that sound mean. Sometimes, she’s angry. She walks into the street and yells.
“Jane is angry today,” the owner of the French restaurant said one night. That’s how I know her name. The Frenchman had gone to get her a tea and when he came back, Jane was moving north on Vermont with her fists in the air, yelling words I couldn’t hear over the traffic.
Within the apparent chaos of Jane’s life, there’s a distinct pattern. The rocking. The yelling. The tea. The way she takes her things out of her cart and puts them back in again. I know she has a reason for doing that, and I know that it makes sense to her.
*
Many years ago, when we were living in New York, my brother introduced me to his new boyfriend, Big Eyes. The first thing Big Eyes said to me was, “Your brother tells me you’re always on a schedule.”
*
In the fall of 2021, I drove to my hometown to see my brother, who’s living there again. We ate at a restaurant I liked for lunch so I suggested we go back for dinner. “When I like something,” I told him, “I love it to death.”
He said, “I know.”
On the first day of the trip, we went surfing at the Shores. As we walked across the sand, I said, “This is right where we were when I asked you if I had a drinking problem.”
Flashback to 2010: I woke up at dawn, still drunk. Then I woke my brother up and said, “Let’s smoke a bowl and go jogging at the Shores.” My brother said okay. I knew that he would, because he always said yes to me. He always told me what I wanted to hear.
Half an hour later, we were stoned and jogging on the beach and a voice in my head said, You feel like shit right now. But it’s not just now. You feel like shit all the time. Why? And another voice—I still don’t know if it was god or the weed—said, Drinking.
And I thought, Is that true?
I motioned to my brother to take his earbuds out, and then I asked him, “Do you think I have a drinking problem?”
I waited for him to say, No, you’re fine.
But what he said was, “Maybe?”
After that, it didn’t feel like we were in reality anymore, especially because of the sky. It was apocalypse orange, the color of the fiercest part of a flame.
*
Every week, along with yogurt, I buy lettuce, sprouts, black beans, coffee, beet kraut, seaweed snacks, and Qi’a cereal. The cereal comes in individual packages, which means I am less likely to love it to death.
An abridged list of things I have loved to death:
Alcohol, weed, meth, coke, whippets, mushrooms, LSD, ecstasy. Adderall. Ritalin. Percocet. Hydrocodone. Vicodin. Catalina Crunch cereal. Lundberg rice cakes. Bread. Mentos. Red Vines. Tic Tacs. Insomnia cookies. The cookies from Levain Bakery on Seventy-Fourth Street in Manhattan that are the size of small heads. The cookies from 7-Eleven. All cookies. All cake. Raisins, dried cranberries, dried mango, dried apricot. All dried fruit. Cashew butter. Almond butter. Peanut butter. Pistachio butter. Sunflower butter. All nut butters.
I’ve tried to love nicotine to death thousands of times, but she keeps not dying.
Am I ever going to wake up in the morning and think, Wow, I have no desire to escape myself today ?
Am I ever going to know where I hope to escape to? I understand that I’m trying escape from reality, but I’m still not clear on what the destination is.
My guess is that the destination has something to do with home. Not home itself, but the idea of it.
*
After my brother’s “Maybe?” I couldn’t jog anymore, so I suggested we go get some Mexican food. We went through the drive-through, ordered nachos and quesadillas, and ate them next door in the US Bank parking lot. The steam rising off the nachos was beautiful in the foggy morning light. I ate fast, then smoked the last cigarette of my life. “This is the last cigarette of my life,” I said to my brother.
The smoke rising off the cigarette was beautiful too. Once I was done, I threw the rest of the pack into the trash can at the US Bank. Then I got back into the car and said, “Let’s go through the drive-through again.”
The redundancy in that sentence might be enough to explain that entire morning and my entire life. That the repeated word is through is either ironic or pure poetry, the kind you read in a self-help book: The only way out is through.
Am I ever going to know where I hope to escape to? We ordered more quesadillas and another round of nachos. The steam rising off them was beautiful again. I didn’t feel full after eating. I felt bottomless.
“Actually, I’m going to smoke one more cigarette,” I said to my brother. I fished my pack out of the US Bank trash can, sucked down the final final smoke of my life, and threw the pack away again.
The only way out is threw. And thru. And through.
I got back into the car and asked my brother, “Should we go through the drive-through again?”
This time, he said no.
*
Pivotal scenes between me and garbage receptacles have echoed over the years, although echo isn’t the right word. An echo gets quieter over time. These echoes have gotten louder.
In 2013, I ate the last Pepperidge Farm raspberry thumbprint cookie of my life, then threw the rest of the bag into a Santa Monica dumpster.
Less than ten minutes later, I climbed in to get it back. I bulldozed the remaining cookies, then walked down the alley to 7-Eleven for a fresh bag.
In 2019, I threw my vape into the dumpster at my apartment building, which is visible from my office window. For three days, I looked down at it cockily, thinking, I am so powerful now. I am doing so well now . I can do anything now.
On the fourth day, I had an annoying phone conversation with a self-centered socialite who wanted me to write her idea into a novel for free. I was out walking while we talked. When I got home, I watched myself go not to the door, but rather to the dumpster. It took me a few minutes to find the correct bag. My hands got sticky rifling through other people’s trash. I found my vape next to an apple core and some squeezed lemon wedges. For the next few days, smoking it tasted like rotted fruit.
*
Every week, I put an amount of nicotine into my body that is immeasurable, at least to me, because I don’t measure it. Cigarettes are easy to count. The vape is a more mysterious creature.
My vape is bright blue, which is funny, because I don’t like the color blue.
My vape is my best friend, my lover, my god.
Last year, I dated a smoker and started smoking again. So now I’m vaping and smoking every day, and also every night, and also in the weird interim hours that belong to neither night nor day, like 3 and 4 a.m.
My hand, on its own, reaches out from under the covers to take hold of the bright blue god. My thumb knows where the button is. I don’t even open my eyes.
*
I suspect that Jane knows every crack in the sidewalk along the stretch between House of Pies and the French restaurant. I suspect that she knows where each one of her belongings is in the ceremonial scatter around her. I suspect that if she’s using drugs, they are not in the scatter. They are wrapped somewhere inside the sheet she wears like a toga.
*
Every fall, my sister gives salmon tours to fourth graders on the Yuba River. “The life cycle of the salmon is amazing,” she told me on the phone. So I asked her to tell me what it was.
The salmon are born in the river. For about a year, they stay there, learning to swim and find food. When they’re strong enough, they travel downstream and out into the ocean, where they spend the next ten or so years getting big, sometimes humongous. And then one day, for no trackable reason, a voice inside their head says, Go home .
Of all the river mouths, the salmon know which one they came from. They swim back upstream, and it’s difficult. They have to jump rapids. Some dam structures, the ones that don’t have salmon ladders on the sides, make it impossible. The salmon who do make it back to where they were born lay eggs. They’ve stopped eating by this time. The voice inside their head has said, No more food, it’s almost time to go further back home, back to the place that was home before home was a place.
And then they die.
*
After we went through the Mexican drive-through two times, I told my brother I would not be drinking for the rest of the weekend, and I didn’t. Instead, I ate so much buttered toast that I could barely change the channel.
The difference between me and my brother is that he has retained his natural instincts to preserve himself and I have not.
At some point (when?), my instincts went awry. They conflated self-preservation with self-destruction. According to my instincts, the line between what is good for me and what is bad for me is a theory, not a fact.
Will my natural instincts ever return, or will the rest of my life be, at best, a facsimile of health?
Where is my original river mouth?
Why doesn’t the voice inside my head know?
*
Along with being an Olympic-gold vaper (is this a word?), I also work out every day. I like to fight both sides of my war hard.
The reason why I’m an addict doesn’t interest me, because the answer is gray. I don’t like gray. I like black and I like white.
What I’m interested in is how much yogurt and nicotine I’m putting into my body, eleven years into sobriety.
What I’m interested in is what this will look like eleven years from now.
Where is my original river mouth? *
Every week I arrange my yogurt in my fridge. The Wallaby tubs live on the top shelf in two rows. The Aris tubs used to live on the bottom shelf in three rows. Now that I’ve loved Aris to death, I buy eight Wallaby tubs instead of five. I usually don’t eat them all, but when they’re not in the fridge, I feel a void. Or I feel The Void.
Aris still hasn’t returned my email about coming to the factory, which is good, because I don’t need temptations right now.
According to the writer Geneen Roth, how a person relates to the food on their plate is how a person relates to the world.
The World Is on Your Plate: An Eating Meditation. This is the name of one of her books.
According to Geneen’s logic, my world is a snowy mess of erratically spooned-out yogurt in an earthenware bowl.
I should probably also mention that when I’m halfway done with my bowl of yogurt, I refill the bowl. I used to do this with my vodka sodas.
Do you want to go through the drive-through again?
The world on my plate is a world that can never be satisfied.
*
According to the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön , “The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself.”
Here are some other problems:
The problem with growing up is that it makes home disappear.
What about the saying “You can never go home again”? Is this a problem? Or are memories the only home we really have?
The problem with pain is that it’s mostly invisible.
This problem is solved by the yogurt and the vape.
Look! The pain is on the outside now! Can you see it?
Every morning I wake up to the movement of my hand reaching out from under the covers to strangle the vape. I take a deep pull. I’m already filling my bowl of yogurt in my mind and making the list about the future I plan to have one day.
I like to escape reality while outlining how I will not escape reality later, which seems sort of evolved until you realize that the outlining is its own escape.
The problem is that self-awareness is not the same thing as change.
The problem is that what separates me from reality is not really the yogurt and the nicotine and the lists.
It’s the need to get home. Not to home itself, but to the idea of it.
The problem is that my idea of home is a memory I can’t quite remember.
The other problem is that my body has memorized it perfectly.
Home is the hand that reaches out from under the covers. It’s the stomach full of yogurt. It’s the voice that controls everything from a river mouth I cannot find.
