Imperfect

I wonder about food and love and drugs. I sit with a belly so full in the middle of a hotel filled with people who got sober young. There is a hospitality room on the seventeenth floor with tiny candy bars and bags of chips. I must have eaten eight or ten of these mini square bars when I thought, “It’s not even the size of a full candy bar.”

They’ve done studies recently that show that sugar is one of the leading determinants of Alzheimer’s. I try not to eat it. I am often successful, but once I start, something takes over inside of me and I need more and more. It’s truly a drug. A trap that started last night.

I asked the girl behind the cash register how much for a banana. She told me a buck fifty which I thought to be ridiculous. From the third floor of the hotel I could look down to the second floor and see slices of pizza, shiny and glistening on silver plates. I thought they might be three or four bucks for a slice. I’d give a tip and lose a quick five. 

The woman there told me six bucks. Unconscionable! I would not be pulled into that trap. No banana. No pizza. Only the free candies on the tables where you can sign up for other conferences throughout the United States. 

In the midst of this craving, after the candies, I can feel the need for more coming on stronger. I end up eating a flatbread pizza and a cookie for twenty bucks, and I can’t sleep at night, long past midnight, back home in bed in the 9th Ward.

I wonder about whether there are people who are able to eat foods high in sugar in moderation. I wonder whether there are people able to eat dough and things that are fried without going overboard.

I consider the country and the fast ways we move through our days without even time enough to prepare the fuel needed to build our bodies. 

I considered this, eating at Daily Beet this afternoon. Wild rice and kim chi with avocado and peas and eggs. I considered the way my body feels when strong, when putting vegetables and nut butters and fruit in my body. And now Zi consider how I want coffee at seven in the evening.

I wonder whether the want comes from a need to escape, from the overstimulation of all the people, from a sense of nervousness that is alleviated by snacks. Too much. Too fast. 

Maybe there are others like me, those not visibly affected by the overconsumption of drugs, but stuck nonetheless. Those unable to control and enjoy their eating. I would say that this does not happen with food that is actual food with nutrients and other building blocks for the body. But that would only be a half truth.

I must admit of the voraciousness with which I attack jars of almond butter, especially after a day without eating. And I must admit the way i stood in the kitchen of a client, in the afternoon, sweat soaked shirt, red forehead and loss of breath, refrigerator door open and water in hand, and vaguely sensed i was being none to smart as I took the half pound container of freshly ground almond butter into one palm, popped off the lid, and before i knew it had run a ravine with my index finger and knew better than to stop, knew that nobody wants to eat anything has had somebody else’s finger drug through. I thought maybe he’d blame his daughter.

To be free I had to admit this to my client. I told him that I would take twenty-five dollars off and said that the sun must have erased my rational brain. He understood. He wanted to pay me in full. For this and for the extra wood chips I had not calculated. And for him, I want to do the best. And for the kids in the school across the street, I want to show them that even an imperfect being can create beauty when he is honest, when he believes.