three months of salad

After three months of a gluten-free diet, I can safely say that I am tired of this brave new salad-riddled world and want to go home, my fluffy pastry home with the doughnut doorknob. Initially, I was more than happy to give up gluten if it meant feeling good again. There is no question that even my bad days now are better than my best days were back then. I won’t go back to how it was before, no matter how bleak it seems right now. And right now it seems very bleak. I suppose this is merely a slump, an expected one since I jumped into a gluten-free life without real consideration to how my eating habits — ALL of my eating habits — would have to change. Today I am mourning the ability to be the effortless dining companion I once was. Some...

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Posted on 27 Jun 2008 | 7 comments

sick feels me

I awoke to the shaky, bad-gut feeling of my days with gluten: each stretch of intestine its own serpent, stick-poked and salivating and wanting out.   Slamming behind my left eyesocket was the quickened tattoo of my blood: dah-duh-tump, dah-duh-tump.  “I feel sick” doesn’t cover it on these days, that tepid stain of a phrase.  Sick feels me, pinches my larynx, bends back my elbows, kicks my shins.  Sick is the subject and I its weakened, palpated object. This is why I must remain humble: just when I think I have beaten it, fooled it, run around the block on it and sneaked into its end-zone, I do the classic horror-film turn and it is closer than ever, my cute little ailment, my snack of a disease.  I scream; it gapes its maw.  I stumble...

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Posted on 26 Jun 2008 | 3 comments

two misplaced cars

FunkyPlaid’s car was stolen today.  When we went to my car to drive to the police station to file the report, we discovered that mine had been towed, from what we can only guess must have been a half-inch in the red paint next to someone’s driveway.  My eloquence has been squelched by the sacrifice of our one day off together all week, but he remains as compelling a writer as ever. Tomorrow I hope to be as generous and wise as he is right now.

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Posted on 22 Jun 2008 | 3 comments

on length and depth

As I was about to post to my various “status dumps” today, I noticed that I have become mired in my own narrow-minded view of what this website should contain. For example, I have no problem with Twittering two sentences about my crappy day, or tossing up a short vignette on my tumblelog, yet I won’t put anything here for a month and a half. Why is that? Why do I view this place as some sort of sanctuary while the others receive my most scurrilous thoughts? Ten years ago, when I started my online journal, the shorter-format tools did not exist. Everything I published on the Web was in essay format, and perhaps my writing was at its highest quality then. In 2000, when I discovered LiveJournal, I was much more comfortable with the immediate,...

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Posted on 22 Jun 2008 | 4 comments