2005-10-06
Meaty
If you have ever thought to make a skillet full of ground chuck with a handful of shredded cheese, some ketchup, some mustard, and a thin slice of turkey bacon, let me be the warning signal:
STOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP,
I wish someone had stopped me in the midst of a stress-driven feeding frenzy during America's Next Top Model last night.
I wish I was joking.
You know, like so many things that I come up with, theoretically, there's not a problem.
The execution of my blood lust's satisfaction needs a lot of improvement. Looking back, I bet a slice of pizza would have done the trick. Instead, I sat squarely in the middle of the couch with a bowlful of meat and 3 carnivorous pets watching me, desperate for SOMETHING to drop or for some indication that it is their turn.
Now, at this point, I could lie and say something like, "I made this bowl of meat last night and, wouldn't you know it! I had 3 little old bites and I was full! I was so full I couldn't breathe! I don't think I'll ever eat like that again! Not little old me, no ma'me!."
That's an obvious lie. I already described the carcass carnival in the skillet and I already alluded to discomfort.
I'm not a tease. I won't lead you on.
I ate a bowl of meat last night and this morning?
I ate a sausage biscuit from the McDonald's in Wal-Mart.
With OJ. I think the juice is making me feel a little ill.
I used to date someone who claimed that anything but meat and grease made him sick. Given his alcoholism and the number of Advil that he ate per day - 1 4, minimum - it is no surprise to me that dude couldn't handle a little nutrition. He would start the day with a rib eye, three eggs, hash-browns, a glass of beer and if we were fighting, a shot of vodka. So, yeah. And a shot of vodka. I was with him for years, right after I had gone on a fucking journey of weight loss. I mean JOURNEY. I looked awesome.
Until three years later and a lot of mixed messages that I wish I'd been better equipped to sort through. Ironically, though maybe not to anyone else but myself, I was fat again by the end of that relationship.
A relationship that no matter what I do or don't do, I can't seem to shake.
Emailing with Superfan yesterday, I had an epiphany. Well... not so much an epiphany as a Moment.
I had been thinking along the lines of AA and had been trying to work out some comedy form that ridiculous "accept what you can't change" clich�.
I got to thinking about Steve and how, rather than fightfightfight and retaliate every time a hot spot flares up, maybe I just accept that there are hot spots and they will flare up. Although I would never commit serious libel and say that he's has herpes, I will say that he IS an emotional herpe. I'm one, too. I can be fair. It's cool.
We are gone for months, sometimes years and then re-appear like a sore.
Just when I think that my suppression medication (tranquilizers) is working and I'm going to be outbreak free for the next little while, I get a nasty one on my message board.
Why so bent out of shape about a little comment, DJ AZ-IS?
I'll tell you why.
We broke up YEARS ago. He's engaged. I'm.....
a doggy-mama.
I'm a fucking yuppie sno-cone with the 19 flavorings that some 8 year-old selected from the available 47 offerings.
Here's why it bothers me. At the end of the day, that comment references sex that I had in another lifetime.
I'm not okay with that at all.
There's nothing that could bring me to act on his life at that low of a level and you all know that I am the same person who used to call him and mess with his head.
From Arizona.
I'll own that.
I fucked with him.
I thought it was my right, my payback for being called fat or being told that independence is bad or his spending the night that I presented my thesis drinking at a biker bar with a woman who used to be my friend but who no longer was allowed that distinction.
No, trust me. She wasn't right.
I believed that I had some payback to take care of. Maybe I was right, maybe not.
I don't buy into that shit anymore, except for fun. My Gay Husband Matthew and I TP'd Namoli's house shortly after we broke up. That's nothing, compared to the mental game I wanted to run on Rakers.
Nothing.
But time passes, you know. You have some crap things go down in your life and you realize that maybe you owe an apology.
Or three.
Or none.
There are people who can't break cycles. There are people who are so repressed and hurting that they would rather sit, hunched up in a very deep and very dark hallway, frozen by what they know, than risk standing up and feeling their way along the wainscoting until they get to something different. A door? A chair to stumble over? A person whose arms are waiting?
It doesn't matter.
Rakers is one of those people who would rather stay cramped up and afraid than risk what he doesn't know.
That's part of why we shove each other around every once in awhile, I think.
I don't know why I do it except that I am nostalgic and sometimes lonely and I haven't had the easiest year, to say the least. The personal trauma that began about this time last year and ended about a month ago was harrowing. I don't know if you have ever had your skin peeled off, systematically and slowly but that's what it was like for me.
It hurt.
I wanted to feel some kind of familiarity and some kind of comfort and thank god, the comfort that I sought was so wrong and that it was so obvious to me how wrong it was.
Immediately.
And I let it go.
And now, yes, I take great offense to a man that I will stand up say very loudly, "I loved him so much." but about whom I also will say "We were not okay together."... great offense. I take it when he references sex in my work.
I find that offensive.
And I think I've moved to somewhere new in all of this. I don't expect either of us to go away forever. I don't expect that we'll moon over each other, or use each other as excuses to a better partner but we're old.
As you get older, you stop expecting that your partner has no history prior to your advent.
The history makes us richer and more stable but regardless of what it is, it's there.
It lives.
So I think from now on, instead of expecting that we will just ignore each other and hate each other and all of that nonsense, I think I just want to accept that he's part of my history and that this is how he was and it's how he is.
When I find an unsolicited sexual reference about myself her, or anywhere else on the World Wide Web, I'll note it and I'll call Chippers and I bet I'll even throw something breakable.
I'll demand from whomever might be available to refute the comment, should there be someone available for that type of comment.
But I won't be surprised by it.
I won't be irate.
I'll know that I need to call in a script for some Stevex and salve by psyche with it, as directed.
If I had a different history, I couldn't do this. I couldn't live in Tucson. I couldn't write. I couldn't be Sarah without it.
Oh!
It's lunch time!
QP with Cheese, anyone?
KIDDING!
arizonasarah at 11:20 a.m.