Herculodge

Let's Lose Weight by Making a Deal with the Devil

People are so beholden to their raging appetites and the self-loathing of not having a svelte body conducive to underwear modeling that they capitulate to another form of slavery: The Extreme Diet. One that piques my imagination is the current Cookie Diet, in which you eat cookies, allegedly chockfull of nutrition, throughout the day and then eat a lean protein dinner and salad at night. I imagine if we ate only ONE food every day, we’d be bound to lose weight. But there is something unseemly and dehumanizing about being so desperate to shed pounds that we would eliminate our food choices and curl up in a fetal-like reductionary diet. Desperately sucking on the teat of some doctor’s prescribed “nutritional cookies.” Others would take a fat-blocking substance like Olestra that leads to “underwear staining” and incontinence. I smell a Faustian Bargain-like stench in today’s asinine culinary zeitgeist.

Geriatric Satyrs

My favorite essay in The Best American Travel Writing 2005 is William E. Blundell’s “My Florida,” about his father retiring to a condo in Naples, Florida. Located on a “senior executive” golf course, the condo affords us a disturbing, nightmarish laboratory experiment of what happens when old people cannot let go of adolescence. Blundell points out the aggressive manner in which Florida denies death while marketing itself as a fountain of eternal youth:

"Fan out the brochures on the dining room table. You will never find in them the faintest hint of Florida as the nation’s cloaca, where predigested lives, the nourishment pretty much sucked out of them, await final extrusion. You see instead a hustling, bustling state, youthful and energetic, one in which the alter kockers of Miami Beach legend are an embarrassment to be airbrushed out of existence and replaced by images of tanned cleavage and pastel hotels at South Beach, phallic rockets thrusting upward on gouts of flame at Cape Kennedy, wholesome white-toothed families at Disney World. Not a wrinkle in sight. Come to Florida and live. But absolutely nothing about coming to Florida to die. Does Iowa deny its corn? Does Kansas disavow its wheat? Is Texas ashamed of its oil? Florida may be the only state that would rather not talk about one of its major industries."

In this would-be fountain of youth, the elderly are described as being boozed-up, playing golf “as a sacrament,” driving Lincolns and Cadillacs and, wearing “raspberry slacks and hunks of jewelry the size of golf balls.” The promiscuity of the foppish tomcat is still extolled: Dressed “in huaraches, white canvas pants, and shirts cut low to show gold chains and chest hair,” old men brag to each other about their “alleged conquests.” Blundell describes one incident in which “a young woman suffering from an excess of silicone and naked except for pasties and thong, lap-danced for a man in tasseled loafers who appeared to be at least eighty.”

With death and old age propped up as the great enemies, the elderly cannot age gracefully. At one point Blundell’s father says, “This getting old business is the shits. Inside, I’m still eighteen.” Other senior citizens rage at their old age with even greater vehemence and insanity, which Blundell attributes to Florida’s intoxicating environment: “Its fragrant air and vivid colors, its warmth, its night whispers hinting at impossible rejuvenations—these snuffed out realistic anger at the dying of the light and replaced it with hormonal silliness. These people came to think they were eighteen.”

Simply put, then, what we have when we cannot let go of adolescence is nothing more complex than tackiness. Refusing to grow up results in moral failure and that failure translates into an ugliness and a vulgarity that should depresses us more than old age itself. This ugliness alone should be sufficient motive for us to let go of our youth, our past failures, our recurring fantasies of returning to our teen years and “setting things right,” of vindicating ourselves, of seizing those opportunities that we were too self-conscious and awkward to embrace. High school ended a long, long time ago. It’s finally time to let go.

So Just What Is a Chanel No. 5 Moment?

Neil Gabler’s Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality describes our society as “A Nation of Gatsbys,” in which, like that perennial teenager Jay Gatsby, we promote an image of ourselves, a “personality,” which trumps character and substance. Gatsby embraced the adolescent longing to find self-worth and acceptance by becoming a larger than life celebrity figure. It is a pathological longing that now possesses millions of Americans. As a result, advertisers sell their wares by promising us that their products will make us the center of attention everywhere we go. For example, one commercial from my high school days showed an elegant woman wearing Chanel No. 5 perfume inside an expensive restaurant. Her suitor, a dark, piercing-eyed Romeo, gave her an engagement ring. Normally a private experience, their intimate moment consumed the restaurant’s other patrons.  But the invasion on their privacy was not a source of consternation. To the contrary, the romantic couple smiled with arch delight at knowing they were the center of attention and they positively glowed.

In the mid 1980s, I heard the comedian Sandra Bernhard on The David Letterman Show referring to this celebrity moment of glory as a “Chanel No. 5 Moment.” This experience is so coveted that millions of Americans live pay check to pay check in order to sustain their addiction to these Moments and in fact their lives have been reduced to enduring the excruciating intervals between one Chanel No. 5 Moment to the next.

Commenting on our obsession with dramatic “self-presentation,” Neil Gabler quotes the twentieth century playwright Nicolas Evreinoff who writes about the human penchant for high drama or “theatricality”: “The birth of a child, education, hunting, marriage, war, the administration of justice, religious ceremonies and funeral rites—every important event in life is made by the primitive man . . . the occasion for a purely theatrical spectacle. His entire life is a succession of such ‘shows.’”

Perhaps blogging is little more than one’s pathetic attempt to procure a Chanel No. 5 Moment. Nothing like a little confessional self-incrimination for the soul. 

A Nicotine-Stained Crystal Ball

A few years ago, I was in the middle of an earnest six-mile treadmill run at the gym when Laura, my former composition student who works as a personal trainer, came up to me and said she had a story she knew I’d like.  I slowed down the treadmill considerably so that I could fully listen.

The story had happened a few days earlier in the women’s locker room.  Laura saw a seventy-five-year-old, artificially-tanned, bleach-blonde woman stripping out of her gym tights, and as she did, she revealed her spectacular, smooth, milky white silicone breast implants. Laura said that about ten other breast-augmented women, mostly in their early twenties, had their eyes fixed on the seventy-five-year-old’s nude body and all at once their jaws dropped. It wasn’t the upward-pointing, massive artificial breasts that made the old woman such a remarkable and frightening sight. It was the stark contrast of those missile-like breasts, the appendages of a nineteen-year-old, with the woman’s nicotine-coated, wrinkled, leathery body, her skin’s creases and grooves reminiscent of an aged elephant’s sun-cracked hide. Laura said there was this moment of collective terror, evinced by the shared glances of the young women, because they knew in that instant that they were, thanks to their chain smoking, their breast-enlargements, and their frequent trips to the tanning booths, on the same path as the old woman. They had in that instant, I inferred from Laura’s story, access to a sort of nicotine-stained crystal ball that afforded them a snapshot of themselves a half century later, and what they saw inside that crystal ball made them gasp and shudder with horror.
I suspect most of us have some variation of a nicotine-stained, silicone-breasted figure, some lugubrious, repellant doppelganger that we are molding ourselves into.

For a deeper look into this terrifying crystal ball, take at peek at Bravo TV's The Real Housewives of Orange County.

The Compulsion to Poke at Our Chancre Sores

Some of us suffer from the compulsion to fiendishly poke into our chancre sores until tears pour out of our eyes.  Replaying our past failures is a lot like that.  Endlessly hashing over our squandered opportunities, we torture ourselves with fantasies of how glorious it would have been had we only seized what was rightfully ours. In many ways, Jay Gatsby’s enduring chancre sore is his refusal to let go of his sweetheart Daisy Buchanan. He inflates his lost love into a larger-than-life myth when she is hardly deserving of such adulation. In turn, he attempts to make himself into the myth of the rich business man,  The Great Gatsby,  in order to impress her. He then lures her into his world with all sorts of parties in which he invites the town’s most popular cliques. It all sounds so very high school. In the end, Gatsby’s adolescent aggrandizement kills him and the novel’s narrator Nick Carraway considers how helplessly immature we are, largely because we seem so incapable of learning from our past mistakes: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Pulling us “back ceaselessly into the past” of our high school days is The Myth of Squandered Opportunity, which compels us to obsess over our romantic failings and wonder how much pleasure we could have enjoyed had we only seized the opportunities that presented themselves to us. For example, I know three men who many years ago were driving from their homes in Bakersfield to attend a Los Angeles Dodgers game. As they were riding over the steepest ascent of the Grapevine, they saw on the side of a road a smoldering, overheated vintage Volkswagen van of a pale orange color. Standing outside of the van were four giddy, nubile, beautiful women, all Grateful Dead followers, “Dead Heads.” Even though their orange rusted van was near ruin, the sun-darkened hippies were still giddy from a Grateful Dead concert and they greeted their rescuers by waving their tie-dye bikinis and spaghetti-strap tank tops in the air like glorious semaphores. My three mechanically-adroit friends stopped with an exclamatory screech, helped cool off the wood nymphs’  steaming engine and spent the next hour making the van road-ready. The women were grateful for my friends’ help and invited the eager teenagers to accompany them to Santa Barbara for its annual Summer Solstice Festival. These were attractive women, the men told me many years later, earthy women who, abjuring perfume, wafted the natural-producing odors of musk and desire. But my naïve friends had already bought their Dodgers tickets and were determined to catch the game, so after profusely thanking the women for their kind offer,  the three apologetic teens rode off to Los Angeles, leaving the glowing, irrepressible pixies behind.

Years later my friends do not remember the Dodgers game, but they are still haunted by all the “what ifs?” that accompany their stupid refusal to go with the harvest maidens to the Solstice Festival. Whenever they tell the story, they argue with one another over who was at fault for insisting that they abandon these luscious ladies in order to see some stupid, low-scoring baseball contest. Even ten years later, the mere discussion of their lost opportunity with the hippy goddesses reduces them to snarling, contentious animals. Bitter and resentful, they’re still possessed by all the unfulfilled possibilities that titillate their imagination and prevent them from sleeping in the deep of the night. They complain of insomnia, night flashes, half-conscious visions of splendorous encounters with those Bacchanalian sylphs. Chained to the memory of an unfulfilled opportunity, they can not live in the present and as such they treat their girlfriends, quite attractive in their own right, with flagrant disregard.

I suspect most of us are trapped in a time warp, unwilling to let go of a past “glory” that never really existed. How easier—and far more dangerous—to live inside our delusions than to tackle reality every day. I’m sorry to say but many of us are hard-wired to be eternally miserable, unable to live in the here and now because our minds and souls remain fixated on some mythical hot summer day when tie-die bikini tops fluttered in the wind like the undulating gleam of a paradise now forever out of reach. 

The Treasure of Obnoxious Bilious

I finally watched the documentary Overnight, which chronicles the manner in which Troy Duffy, hyped-up screenwriter of The Boondock Saints, behaves like a malignant bully toward his buddies, his agents, and his producers. Duffy sees himself as a working-class hero whose genius was discovered by the right people. But what we see, contrary to Duffy, is an overgrown shrieking infant seething with megalomaniacal tantrums, self-aggrandizing fantasies, and paranoid delusions who, alienating everyone, sees himself as an innocent victim. One is tempted to think that the promise of wealth turned him into such a bilious, obnoxious lout, like those characters turned rotten in The Treasure of Sierra Madre. But at the end of the documentary we are given a deliciously insightful quote from Albert Goldman, which sets the record straight:

"No man is really changed by success. What happens is that success works on the man's personality like a truth drug, bringing him out of the closet and revealing...what was always inside his head."