Fast

Let me tell you about this fasting business.

The lemonade, the maple syrup, the cayenne pepper. Two weeks of it. This can't be good for your body. No doctor would ever approve this.

I tell everyone that it's a psychological fast more than anything, that it's a hard reset, a way of pushing Control-Alt-Delete on myself. Going from Excess to Nothing to Moderation is child's play compared to going from Excess to Moderation. At least for me.

K says I have no discipline.

But I do, I reply. I do have discipline. Circumstances just have to be extreme, that's all.

I broke my fast yesterday and ate some spinach. Goddamn if that wasn't the most delicious spinach I've ever tasted. Anything saltier or more complex than that would be too much.

I have the taste buds of an 85-year-old man. Give me the blandness.

Craving for my three vices has vanished however. Coffee, sugar, and a drink before bed. Amazing how easy that was. What I'm craving, however, is a steak quesadilla from the taco truck that used to park in front of my place in Koreatown.

Meat and cheese. Umami.

I remember seeing the first time I saw a quesadilla cost five dollars. Highway robbery, I said to myself. Do kids still use that phrase? Highway robbery? Anyway, when I got it, I understood. This was no Taco Bell quesadilla. This was a flotilla of meat and cheese and veggies. A whole damn raft it it.

That's what I want. And that's where I'm going when this is over.

What else can I say about this fortnight of self-denial?

Oh yes, the BO. What is it like to have somebody else's body odor? That is what is like on this fast. I smell weird BO emanating from somewhere and then I realize it is myself.

My tongue is coated white. I tell K that if this were a Warner Brothers cartoon I'd stick my tongue out and it would be covered by a rain slicker.

But my skin is cleaned up and glowing. K says I look ten years younger, a boy. She marvels that the man convicted in the terrible salon shooting is 42, barely older than me, my brother's age. She suddenly feels lucky to be married to my vibrant youthfulness.

Hear that? Suddenly feels lucky, yes.

My stock has gone up, huzzah!