Ketosis
Ketosis; a metabolic state characterized by elevated levels of ketone bodies in the blood, a normal response to low glucose-availability brought on by, in my case, fasting. I’m approaching the eighteenth hour of a planned 48-hour fast and I’m reading Jonathan Gold, while considering a pilgrimage to L.A. to trace the silhouette of a culinary-lit world pioneer. But who am I kidding? Gold is a writer-hero I discovered too late, and now I have to sort through his catalog posthumously. I’ve never even been to L.A. but this does seem to be a good reason to visit, but maybe that’s just the ketones bouncing around my skull.
I keep coming back to food and writing. Not necessarily food-writing, but I feel the need for both. Food is the constant — farming, cooking, eating — I’m not sure I want to do any of those things full time but they all feed me. Writing feels like the thing, the elusive final piece of the puzzle that is my confused creative mind. Every time. I sit down and finally carve out some time and here I am, words flowing. Nothing I’ve written here is particularly good, but it’s here. No blank page staring me down, intimidating me. I’ve command of the page today. It’s a good feeling, it’s good to be back. And all it takes is some discipline and commitment. How to maintain is the question.
Fasting today is part of a beginning-of-the-year healing and reset to which I have been looking forward since the haziest days of the foregone holiday season. The embers of alcoholism were beginning to flare up after such a year as the last; and the final months of any year necessarily involve plenty of coping. The stress and frenzy of past years’ holidays seemed notably absent this season, but the inertia had already set in and the bottle train wasn’t stopping until January. January is a check-dam along the gully of hedonism and I’ll cheers to that every New Year’s Eve.
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Rest and reset. Repeat. If I understand the signals clearly, it would seem to me that everyone was a little more tired this year; an observation I’ve made a few years in a row now. The sacred foundations of traditions sealed in my celluloid memories have been eroded by the years of adulthood and debt in-between, not to mention nascent autocratic rule. I simply have no more energy left for the shallow pageantry offered up to the warm corpse of American consumerism. And yet, I am still overcome by consumption. Today I starve myself, not only to heal the wounds of last year’s consumption but also as an act of resistance. A hunger strike against the masters of Sodom. But I would be dishonest to claim to be pure of heart in this pursuit. There is no righteousness in Capitalism and there cannot be. And so also, I fast as practice — practice for some uncertain time in the possibly(probably)-near future when the available palate for debauchery won’t be quite so delicious, or broad.
I kid myself when I am hopeful about the future, just as I do when I am regretful about the past. Neither is here, only there, and decisions can only be made here in the present. Hope is dinner, and thus, I have decided to have no hope today. I can only maintain my current trajectory — momentarily I may hope that it passes through something delicious tomorrow night, but in that moment I would be dangerously close to veering off into that cozy, old dream. Hope is believing that nothing has to change or come to an end, an immortal dream that never ceases, a slumber so complete as to be comatose. Hope is a future without a past or present, which is an impossible place. I like to hope that at some point in the future there is harmony and balance between humans and the rest of the planet. That future requires reconciliation of a destructive past and overpopulated present. I’ll take my hope to go — box it up for tomorrow’s succulent return to the carnival.
Settling in to a fast can be a dicey thing, and regretfully mine has ended sooner than I had planned. Upon reflection, it occurs to me that I could’ve done a few things differently this time around, but ultimately the body decides what it wants. I resisted dinner time, opting instead to read more Gold, and dream about the next time I would eat. I followed that up with a few episodes of various food shows, and apparently angered my stomach with all of the teasing. I also had a couple cups of tea, herbal, but perhaps a mistake in any case.
I felt fine up to the point of reorienting to the horizontal, which would prove to be too much. After an initial sleep, I awoke cold and pained. I could feel my body going through the shocks of ketosis as my liver had no carbohydrates to munch on. This is supposed to happen, I told myself. After a valiant attempt to move through this phase of the cleanse, I finally yielded to my body around hour 30 and ate a handful of pecans and a bite of some kimchi — don’t underestimate the power of probiotics after a fast. Soon after I fell into a deep sleep as my liver, now satiated, let me be in peace. I’m feeling a little let down today, having not made my goal, especially given that I’ve made it 72 hours a couple times before with no real issues. I’m speculating that the tea I drank didn’t help my situation (though black coffee in the morning is fine) and also that my body is generally detoxifying right now (see holidays) and didn’t need the extra stress. Regardless, this is good data and I intend to keep up with this practice.
The act of fasting, deciding to, is quite a privilege. My body rejected going longer than 30 hours without food largely because it knows it doesn’t have to, and it’s not used to doing so. Weaning ourselves off of the teat of Gomorrah isn’t going to be an easy challenge and I don’t have high expectations that it’s even possible. There are simply too many humans on this planet now and the damage we’ve already done will take hundreds if not thousands of years to heal — that’s assuming we stop the bleeding sometime soon. Those are fears though, and like hope, fear exists sometime in a future that doesn’t exist yet. Fear is no dinner, and not knowing when the next one will be. I am lucky because I’ve never had that fear but I’m not too proud to see that my luck can change and likely, is running out. I’ll take my chances fasting in the meantime, and doing my best to live closer to the Earth otherwise. I don’t see a way to avoid the fire and brimstone coming for us — we are too far down this road. Our best option is to choose a different path when the one we’re on closes forever. If we don’t look back — if we can avoid that temptation — maybe the fires will actually light a new way. Maybe they will warm the stones to bake our new bread.
