Culinary Lemming Syndrome

Blood was 4.6 again this morning.

Also, slept late, so notsomuch with the major-league return to walking form I was planning.

Made a fairly major realisation today.
It's all Craig Ferguson's fault.

Craig Ferguson will be familiar to any Americans reading as host of the Late Show, and in his previous incarnation as "English Guy from the Drew Carey Show". It takes a serious comedy addiction to recognise him over here in the UK, as either "Lister's Confidence" from an early episode of sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf, or as Craig Ferguson, hysterically funny, pretty edgy Scottish stand-up from The Ferguson Theory. That's where I know him from, because, let's face facts here, I am that geek. He kinda dropped off the UK's radar, and mine, for a couple of decades, then popped up in the States, causing anyone who remembered his work in the UK to go "Is that the Craig Ferguson? Ohhhh yeah, it is...oh, cool..."

Ferguson's latest reason for being on the radar is that he's just become an American citizen, and written his autobiography based around that fact. It's called American On Purpose, and it's really with that book that today's problems begin.

I'm listening to it on audiobook at the moment, and what I didn't realise until recently was that the reason he dropped off the UK's radar for a while was that he'd dropped off his own life's radar for a while too, as a seriously dedicated alcoholic and sometime drug user.

Relating his experience of "becoming" an active alcoholic, Ferguson, this morning, said some words into my ears that stopped me dead fucking cold.

"What people don't realise," he said, "is it's not about how much you drink, it's about the effect the drink has on the drinker. What they also don't realise is that if I could drink like a normal person right now, I would. But if I could drink like a normal person, I'd have absolutely no interest in it at all..."

I recognise that feeling. I think a lot of fat fucks do. And, to be fair, I don't know why the words had such an effect on me today - after all, waaaaay back at the start of this thing, I told you all that "my brain works differently" to most people's, that I don't understand people who say no to pleasure, or just have enough to be satisfied. It's not like the writing of this wasn't clear enough on the walls of my 'perspex box principle', by which I've been living since I started this schtick. So why it should have come as a shock to me today, to hear the experiences of an addict and think "Oh....that's me!", I don't really know, but it did.

Every fat fuck is different of course, but if you understand any of this, you'll know, deep down, what it is that the food does to you. In my case, it has always done several things - it's made me abundantly safe from the murky waters of levels of social interaction that frightened me, cos no woman fancies the guy with bigger tits than they have. It's stopped me thinking, and god knows I need that more often than I can possibly explain to you. It's made me momentarily forgetful of the impact of previous binges, and it's been a thing I (laughably) have thought I could control, a thing that I could do to myself that no-one would think of as mental. You become an alcoholic, people notice. You start cutting yourself, people hold an intervention. You eat - nobody says a fucking word. It's wonderful and sneaky and pushes you safely out of their gaze, because somehow, nothing's quite as embarrasing, as untackled, as unpitied, as a fat fuck. And above all, I think above all the other things I've used food for over the years, I have used it as a cliff edge. A marvellous, enjoyable, sugar-high headlong plunge into oblivion, into spectacular self-harm, and ultimately into an early grave. And I've done that knowingly.

What that says about the state of my psyche on some level...I think we can all take a fairly accurate guess at, and the thing is, it happens irrespective of how well your life seems to be going. People around an addict often break their hearts in two, thinking that they're not enough, that they didn't do enough. Parents of an addict think they did something wrong, and chastise themselves endlessly about what it might have been. The truth is, it was nothing. Nobody around an addict does the wrong thing, because there very often isn't a right thing. There's no Holy Grail to find, no amount of love that can be poured on them that somehow is enough to make it stop. That's another thing people don't understand - addiction doesn't give a fuck about the circumstances of your life. Happy? Rich? Loved by all you see? Using hundred dollar bills as condoms seven times a day? Nothing matters, not to the addiction. It's a patient little fucker, cancerous and whispering, and it can wait. All it has to do is stay alive, and it knows, whatever the object of the addiction is, you will feed it. And the more you do, the more it wins, and when it wins completely, when you let go of resistance, it can tear your world to shreds around you, happy as you might be...and the honest, heartbreaking thing is that more often than not, you won't care when it does.

Unless...

Unless you break it. Unless you starve it. One...fucking...day...at a goddamn...time...

"If I could drink like a normal person right now, I would. But if I could drink like a normal person, I'd have absolutely no interest in it at all..."

He's right. If you put a chocolate eclair in front of me now - just the one - I'd eat it. But there's no way it would be enough. You've all heard me rant, ad nauseum, about what it is I really want - and without fail, it's an orgy of excess - to dive into not one cake, but three, or four, or five, and onward till I couldn't eat any more, and then on that little bit further for the safety feeling, the full feeling, the 'guaranteed heart attack' feeling that - not unlike alcohol, actually - would make me warm and happy and everybody's friend, and then later, would leave me cold and empty and wretched and so fucking needy it beggars belief, and self-disgusted but always, always, always needing more...I don't crave 'just enough' of something - who, in their right or wrong minds, craves 'just enough' of anything? - I crave excess, even now, and the effects it brings to me.

I'd just about realised that, properly, fully, when the next bombshell hit me.
That means this isn't what I thought it was.
I can't just do all this, and get healthy, and then eat what I like. Not even a little of what I like - because a little is never enough. This godawful culinary 'wagon' I'm on...is gonna have to be for life.

The exercise, presumably, doesn't entail any similar eternity - I'm not, oddly enough, addicted to sloth. But the logic of all this, of understanding and feeling and knowing all this, would seem to suggest I've eaten my last cream cake...ever. My last ice cream cone...ever. My last chocolate bar...

I was wondering, earlier, what to call this addiction I'm admitting to. Overeating doesn't come close - it's only certain things that seem to trigger the addictive cascade. Compulsive eating? Yeah...maybe, because one is certainly compelled to do these things, against one's conscious, daylight, sunshine-smiley will...Sucraholic? Hmm...speaks to the trigger, but, if we're honest, sounds far too twee and flowery and New Age for the visceral sensations of this thing...Personally, I think I'm a Culinary Lemming - seems to speak to the ultimate goal, and allows any trigger that you stick in your mouth and swallow. Yeah, that's it - I have Culinary Lemming Syndrome.

And the only way to survive, as a Culinary Lemming, is to stay on the top of the cliff. To not take the single mad step into whirling, delicious oblivion.

Ever.

I want it on record, right now, that this is not what I signed on for. I signed on for a year, an evil-bastard year of getting healthy, losing weight, escaping the need and the qualification for having half my stomach sliced out of me - AND THAT WAS ALL.

This...this is a whole different ball game.

Thanks a lot, Craig...ya bastard...