Great Covers

Saw this cover over on The Book Design Review, which is a terrific little blog, then kept going back to look at it again. It is simple brilliance. It makes sense immediately, to the point that it seems obvious, but couldn’t have been easy to conceptualize. This is the kind of design that makes me jealous and eager to get to work myself.

Music: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, “Gimme Some Salt”

South Beach, Self-Image, Die Hard

(Nine days since my last post? There goes my five-times-a-week plan. I haven’t been home before 10pm a single day this week, though, so at least I’ve been generating some material for posting.)

So I’m on the South Beach Diet. Three of us in the Game Studio started it on Monday, and another started it a couple of weeks ago and is blazing the trail ahead of us. Our wives and SO’s are doing it, too. We’re in Phase I, wherein we eat only low-sugar vegetables (fuck you, carrots, I guess) and lean meats (fuck you, uh, bread of all kinds?) for two weeks. Breakfast consists of scrambled eggs and turkey bacon, whereas it used to consist of a bagel with cream cheese or a scone or, more often, nothing at all. Lunch and dinner are made up of things like salad greens and chicken breast. It’s all very reasonable. Black-bean chilli is going to make up a big part of my weekend, I tell you what.

Since Monday, Brian has lost something like six pounds. It’s been in the neighborhood of 94 degrees outside, though, so half of that may be to sweat, what do I know? Unfortunately, I haven’t been to the gym all week, and that’s where we keep our scale, so I don’t know what I weighed at the beginning (I’m going to guess… 260 lbs.) or what I weigh now (I’m going to guess… 259 lbs.).

Without the instant positive reinforcement that comes with immediate results, I have only one thing to fall back on to make this work: self-loathing. Denying myself stuff is a kind of flagellant rush I can appreciate. “Good for you,” I say, “you didn’t eat that bagel.”

This is a mutation of the thing I was doing before (and that has worked as a weight-loss thing when I lived in cities where walking was something people actually did), which is based on the idea that Everything I Don’t Eat is a Little Victory. So, leave that part of the burger on the plate, eat half a piece of pie, skip dessert (or lunch) and it’s good. Dial that up to ten, and it’s the philosophy that I mine when I’m presented with the image of a toasted sub. Made with bread. Blackened-at-the-edges, dressed-with-peppercorn-ranch bread. Sweet, life-giving bread. O, bread.

Then, yesterday, standing around a theater lobby with thirty minutes to kill before Live Free or Die Hard¹ starts (and the irony pressing down on my stomach like a party platter of toasted subs), I smell popcorn. Salted, warm, buttery popcorn. Sweet, life-giving popcorn. O, popcorn.

And I start thinking to myself: Would I rather be in shape, or would I rather make peace with the way I look? Should I chase after an image of myself on an engine fueled by self-disgust, or should I accept that I cannot escape the fat slob on my tail?

I look at the candy, bright in its case, displayed behind glass like a colorful Chinese vase. “See this candy?” it says. “It is special. It is art.”

Do I beat myself into lean, healthy submission, and live enslaved to the service of a looming idea, like the slave toiling until death on the scaffolds of the pyramids? Or do I live through my senses, free to explore a world of tastes and smells, but die over and again from a long series of clogged arteries and rotten teeth, free to live but too fat to get out of the house?

I look at the little metal dish of collected butter topping that has dripped from the self-serve spigot. Self-serve — have all the butter you want.

Do I live free to dress as I like and run around like an action hero, or do I die, hard gunk filling my veins and stopping my heart?

I realize that this is a bullshit question. I can eat enough to enjoy myself, but little enough to be happier, once I get myself down to a weight that’s not ridiculous. I can be active enough to eat without shame, and I can be fit enough to be happy without feeling like a prisoner.

I tell myself, “You can have it both ways. And you love having stuff both ways, don’t you?”

“That’s true,” I tell myself.

“Just wait. Beat yourself with this whip. You’ll feel better,” I say to myself, popping a two-calorie, sugar-free mint in my mouth.

And I do feel better. I skip the popcorn. But when the cute teenage couple walks by with two bags of popcorn, I say to myself, “Fuck you, me.”

—
_{1: I’ll review it shortly, but I liked it more than I’d expected and less than I’d hoped.}

Music: Digitalism, Jupiter Room (Planetary Lobby Version)