I HATE FOOD

And a few other things. But I have no standing animus toward even the most wayward good-faith actors

When I was around seven, I learned in school that humans had four basic needs: Air, water, food, and shelter. This was in the late 1970s, and although “adulation from strangers,” “free porn” and “the perfect selfie” have since been added to the list, I consider the original four sufficient.

Atmospheric gases and liquid dihydrogen oxide are universally free, although in many parts of the world, clean drinking water is not only not free but not even available. But most people would agree that if they were walking around a typical modern community dead broke, they’d be able to relieve their thirst at a water fountain or in a restroom at some friendly business establishment. Or using creek or pond water, depending on their level of desperation.

Food and shelter are, for most adults who are heads of households, unavoidable expenses. Or at least things people anticipate spending money on. For me, one of these needs has set off a series of internal proxy wars.

It’s not the roof over my head. For some reason, I don’t resent paying for living space. I have opted to spend more in this area at times when it may have made more sense to spend less without sacrificing anything besides a smidgen of privacy. I think it’s because I only make these payments, like most people, once a month.

Food is different. Even people who live alone and diligently stock their cupboards are at the supermarket at least every other day—in need of some fresh fruit, to buy specialty items for guests, to hit on a certain cashier. I live alone but do not diligently stock up on anything besides coffee, because I like to come close to having literally nothing in the refrigerator (besides cold water) or cupboards just to see what I’ll resort to preparing from the few dusty cans on the back of the top shelf.

I’ve mentioned having some formally deranged behaviors around eating in the past, but that’s not what’s happening now. It seems that as my attitude toward life has slid further into the sewers in recent years, I have found eating a chore and a nuisance. Whereas pre-covid I was neutral toward going grocery shopping, I now detest it for the same reasons as everyone else, although with the psychological factors reversed in some cases: Masks or the lack thereof, six feet apart, constant product shortages, Amazon vans all over the roads delivering individual one-ounce butt plugs in tiny boxes to bored stoners and adventurous divorcées.

I have never had what anyone would call a healthful diet. (“Healthy diet” is a nonsense term, though I’m sure I use it all the time. Concepts can’t possess qualities such as health or diseases.) If you only knew my “macros” in my intake of key minerals, the data would look solid. At my size and activity level, I need about 100 grams of protein a day. That’s 400 calories, a small portion (well under 20 percent) of my overall intake. Easy.

But if you could see the source of those glucose molecules, triglycerides, and amino acids, you might wonder who taught me to hate wholesome foods so much. I eat most of my starch from bags of Chex Mix and most of my simple sugars from Sour Patch Kids. I get protein from milk and quixotically heated poultry and beef. Since I don’t cook often but am very active, I graze semi-continuously on things that don’t make too much of a mess when eaten in a recumbent position.

I consider eating a chore, even though I like the taste of food as much as ever. Maybe. This is because eating—and I think I’ve gone here before—is an affirmation of forcibly sustaining an existence I no longer fully embrace; a commitment to being in the same general place at the same approximate time one day later, having extended the movie for another 24 hours and dismissed most of the scenes in the previous 24 as macabre or ill-conceived or unconvincing or hostile. I don’t eat around other people because I feel vaguely like I’m walking around tramping mud on someone’s nice carpet.

I know how bleak that sounds. But that is the attitude I had before prices skyrocketed a year or so ago.

Even when I am maximally flush, I spend next to nothing on food because I buy the opposite of organic. The cheaper it is, the more likely I am to get it, except for meats (there is no reason in my mind to bother with shitty, low-protein meat like sausage). If I die of cancer from the hazards of processed foods, all the better. But everyone who spends $350 a week at Whole Foods is doing nothing to extend their lifespan or improve their exercise capacity compared to the slop I shovel into my kisser, although I gaily concede that their food tastes and smells a hell of a lot better and they get to see a different slice of the citizenry than I do. Genetics determine when people naturally die, except in those with diets somehow toxic enough to overwhelm these mostly hereditary and thus pre-ordained factors.

Now that even a box of dry pasta seems expensive, I see food as something “they” can use against me. I can’t get it for free, like air and water and porn. But I can’t avoid it. In fact, because I scamper around like a rat all day and night, I need a lot of it. “They” have me by the balls, unless I want to resort to shoplifting, food banks, or waiting for Cosmo’s Pizza to close at 3 a.m. and intercepting the guy on his way to the dumpster carrying a stack of wide boxes holding unsold, still-warm pies.

If my cells had chloroplasts, I could “east” for free. I could swallow carbon dioxide and let it drift into me through my pores, and my cells could manufacture six-carbon glucose molecules from one-carbon CO2 particles and some of that free H2O. Sunlight would knock the electrons in the pigments in those chloroplasts askew, and the energy released in their returning to their baseline configuration would be used to power photosynthesis. People would love me because I would be a major source of oxygen. I would also look even more like Kermit the Frog.

Concomitant with this mirthless attitude toward stuffing my belch-maw is an absence of concern with anything going on inside me besides my iron level. I used to have a total cholesterol of 130 to 170, but even then, I wasn’t sold on the idea that it mattered thanks to ever-shifting guidelines. Now, I don’t care if it’s 400. I love fat (just not shitty meats) and can’t seem to get enough of it. The more of it I eat or drink, the faster and more ripped I become. Statins are a joke anyway.

Unfortunately, even if too much animal fat is bad for the ticker in some, I myself stand almost zero chance of developing coronary artery disease. No one in my family ever becomes seriously ill; we just all go mad and eventually keel over, presumably more enriched for the trip. I’m about my only hope for getting out of this not excessively alive.

There are probably a number of indicators above—and they’re not the first I’ve posted—that my attitude is not normative. While I am not alone in being a grateful everyday runner who spends a lot of time in morbid reflection and dreary anticipation, this kind of rejection of a source of pleasure, the near-insistence on making a basic need a veritable enemy, is not normal.

Other details about me, while mundane, are also not “normal.” Most college graduates over 50 are married or have been, and most of those have or want kids. I was never against the idea of a single life partner, but kids were a different story. Most people—even without college degrees—also want or seek a definitive career or some sort, or at least a role. I’ve been content to scrape by as a digital handyman who has done no honest work in maybe 20 years (writing while lying in bed is not “working” even if someone pays you to do it). I was never fond of being a part of formal organizations, and I can’t blame my drinking for all of my capricious behavior in years past. I guess I just get tired of listening to bullshit, which has eventually dominated the discourse and policies of all organizations I’ve been a part of, sometimes with my generous help.

None of these individual things makes me stand out, even if you spend a little time around me. Even the sum of them doesn’t, in terms of day-to-day life and random or desultory interpersonal exchanges. But someone who is essentially resolute about being lonely and combative toward life itself at times is not going to process facts about the world in the same way others will, even when they agree on the facts.

I have made observations about Wokism, the decline of the media, the unforgivable machinations of the people who brought us covid, scammers, cowards, watery thinkers, politics, and occasionally music and dogs. Sometimes I have written things that contain undeniable truths that around a third of the population simply refuses to acknowledge, leading me to mix in increasing levels of baiting and hostility.

Here’s something that happened about a week ago. I got a “congratulations on your six years” from a runner I have known for a long time. I haven’t been paying much attention to this person’s public postings lately, so when I got the text, I did some surfing. And in blunt terms, I have been dumping on a lot of this person’s allies and associates. Ruthlessly in some cases. And yet this person had the grace to go that. I’m still in a bit of a state over it.

Look: Even if I pretend that everything I’ve written here on controversial subjects is true, so what? What have I done with this information besides fume and fret? I’m convinced that things are going to become really bad in some ways, while others with access to the same information and a tendency to over-agree with me think things will slide into the hands of the globalists and suitcase-nuke-havers more slowly. People with more hope—and I supposed they’re needed, though for what purpose I haven’t decided—see things differently, and not (only) because they’re deluded.

This is not quite the segue I wanted, but I have implied and in some instances even flat-out said that associating with this or that shady person, entity, or behavior makes the people doing the associating deeply impure themselves. I’ve associated liking ugly posts or posters on social media with moral failings. In some cases I’ve come close to reading minds, something I accuse others of doing.

This is not a retraction of any points I have made. But the fact is, people see things differently, and most people I know are making choices in good faith. More than ever, the world is rife with ferociously notable exceptions—tech executives, politicians. MSM reporters, and certain influencers. But most of the people whose ignorance about certain things frustrates me are operating in good faith. They are making what they believe are morally appropriate choices. If this is because they get all of their “information” from MSNBC or The Washington Post, this isn’t their fault. I will keep trying, btu yelling at people to stop watching cable news doesn’t work, and if anything tends to make people think the yeller is the one who’s adrift of reality. In the fairly recent past, this would have often been true.

I didn’t say anything about the midterms because I don’t care. The names of the specific members of U.S. Congress barely matter anymore. If you voted Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or something else in the belief that they will advance your or society’s interests, then there is nothing to condemn about you. I am supremely frustrated by the successful efforts of the media and government to convince so many people of that so many wrong ideas are true, but these are people whose minds have been banged around relentlessly by unprecedented cultural, public-health and historical developments. I know who the “bad” people are, and they’re not the ones writing comically bad articles or being avaricious coaches or conforming to fucked-up narratives so as not to get fired with a kid in college and another hoping to go.

My frustration is with the incredible loss of human potential that accompanies enormous numbers of intrinsically similar people being pitted against each other for no good reason. While this goes on, not only do common folk wind up with scars from battles no one needed to fight, but they don’t notice what the instigators of the skirmishes are doing.

This is not an admission of comity, or an olive branch extended toward my major targets, whom I will continue to lambaste with gusto and in rancid taste. I respond very poorly to shitball tactics like deleting content and dodging editorial or creative responsibility. But chances are almost 100 percent that I don’t hate you, especially if I’ve never met you in person. I don’t even hate me as much as it seems. I do hate a lot of things that seem senseless and are not going anywhere, but that’s the excuse for taking it out on people.