New Soul

To Benny, Bruce, Cameron, Rich, Ray, Rob, Ro and Felipe, and to anyone who thinks they can never be athletic.

I weighed two hundred pounds by the time I was in sixth grade, and three hundred by the time I was in eleventh. Between the ages of five and eighteen, gym class was my hell and the jocks were the demons.

Before

After

I lost one hundred fifteen pounds at the age of seventeen.Then, from 1988 to 2014, I rode the weight roller-coaster. I'd gradually gain forty pounds and lose thirty, gain fifty and lose forty. I always told myself I was getting it under control, yet my weight trended upward.

By the time I hit my forties I was about eighty pounds overweight. I launched into one final, heroic skirmish with my eating, and again I lost most of the weight. But again, I faltered and stumbed. Again I told myself I was getting it back under control. Who knows how many years I would have kept telling myself that.

On January 27, 2011 I slashed my knee open on a broken television screen buried under the snow. I spent two nights in the hospital on IV antibiotics, and that kicked off three months of binging during which I gained back thirty of those seventy pounds I'd fought tooth and nail to lose.

By the spring of 2011 I no longer believed my own bullshit; I'd lied to myself one too many times. So I got help. I got clean from the food on May 1. On October 1 I hit my goal weight. I've been within five pounds of that weight for two years and ten months.

When I talk about those two years and ten months, you may not understand what the hell any of it has to do with anything. That's par for the course. If you spend any time listening to food addicts like me you'll hear a bunch of nonsense, starting with the term "food addict". Believe me, we get it. That's why we tend not to talk about it. We know that those who've not been through it won't understand.

Absurd as it sounds, the story of addiction is not about the substance. It's about what we've used the substance to escape from. So if you talk to an addict who knows you well, or who has lousy boundaries, you'll hear a lot of talk about the emotional and spiritual progress they've made since they got clean. It probably won't make sense, any more than the stories I'm about to tell.

In February of 2012 I was sitting in my favorite cafe listening to some acquaintances talk about the upcoming Super Bowl. I started to chime in, making a point to let everyone in the room know that I didn't know when the Super Bowl was happening or who was playing. Then I heard the words coming out of my mouth, and stopped.

Ever since junior high school I'd been advertising to everyone in the room that I was a freak who didn't know about their silly little games, and didn't want to know. And for the first time I saw how this reaction came from those days spent steeping in humiliation and dread. But I wasn't that fat kid any more, and I didn't have gym class that afternoon. I didn't need to act like that any more.

During the following months I altered my behavior. I even went so far as to watch a Jets game with a friend to make it more difficult for me to say I knew nothing about football. I was challenging myself to let go of my exceptionalism and become less of an intentional freak. Of course, the universe was listening. And the universe has a sense of humor. I was about to get a hell of a lot more of a challenge than I'd bargained for.

In August I went to work at Ellington, and nearly lost my mind. I spent the first six weeks or so grinding my teeth and trying not to scream as everyone around me talked about weight lifting and sports all day, every day. In my head, I was transported back to high school. I was a fat freak who would never be anything more than a fat freak.

Of all the people there, I liked Benny and Bruce the least, because they never shut up about weight lifting. Hard as I'd worked to change my reaction to jocks, it was impossible for me not to dislike them. But within a few weeks, that started to change. They saw how assiduous I was about my food, and got curious. I was touched by their efforts to relate to me. Within a few months, I came to like them the most.

During the months leading up to February 2013, the Ellington crew had been petitioning me to join them at CrossFit. I was 100% sure that I never would. After all, if listening to them talk about CrossFit had made me want to scream, going to CrossFit would drive me completely insane.

I was closest to Benny, and he'd been trying the hardest to bring me around. So I shared a bit of my history with him to let him know why I kept saying no. But I had a secondary motive. Aside from that part of me that was sure I could never set foot in CrossFit, there was a small part that suspected I'd made just enough progress to be ready to take that terrifying leap. Part of me wanted to be pushed.

Well, I got that push. I suspect Benny rallied the rest of the crew, because they redoubled their efforts to get me to join. And since I could go for free in February, I had no excuse not to give it a try. On February 26, I got up at 5:00 AM, got on a train and got a ride with Benny from the station to the gym.

It's hard to describe that first day because everything I say sounds like hyperbole. I walked into that room and saw... a bunch of guys and some weights. And that was all. In all the rest of that volume, there was nothing but empty air. It wasn't a hell, and there were no demons. All the shit I was trying to bring into that room was my own baggage. And it was a lot heavier than the weights.

So my first days in CrossFit were as hellish as I expected, but not for the reasons I expected. The only way I could have been less comfortable was if I'd been in physical pain and danger, but I could see that there was no justification for that discomfort. It was all on me.

Contrary to my expectations, no one was acting like a dick-swinging alpha male. No one was laughing at me. Everyone was helpful and supportive. But even more striking was the way the guys interacted with each other, which bore no resemblance to the thirty-year-old images in my head of how jocks interact. They weren't putting each other down. They were lifting each other up.

I have a memory from those early days, the vividness of which is telling. Felipe was directing or correcting me, and he said "...I know you think I'm a douchebag..." and I thought "Is he joking, or does he really think that I think that? Is that the way he sees me?" It wouldn't have surprised me. I was so damned uncomfortable, I have no idea what I looked like from outside my own head.

What Felipe couldn't know is that I had been expecting him to be a douchebag. I was a fucking Geiger counter of douchebaggery, sensitized to the most infinitesimal amounts of gym class radiation. If he'd acted according to my expectations, even a little, I would've been gone. But he hadn't. Neither had anyone else. They hadn't given me an excuse to leave.

So I stayed. And I quickly got a second unpleasant surprise. I could do only a preposterously small fraction of what those guys could do. I'd always thought of myself as a big, strong man, but compared to them, I was a baby. It was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. For the first few months of CrossFit, I had the mantra "...weakest and slowest... weakest and slowest..." running through my head nonstop.

During those first months, I came to see the depths of my own prejudice against athletic people. Cameron, one of the most accomplished athletes in the group, is a touchingly considerate young man who's polite to a fault. Ro, who is the physical embodiment of everything I demonized for thirty years, is one of the most soft-spoken, kindest guys I know. Everywhere I looked, I was faced with the maddening realization that "...Oh. I'm the asshole."

But I stayed. I'm stubborn like that because I know that progress—especially the kind of spiritual development in which I was engaged—takes time. And again, I have no idea what I looked like during that time. To me, it felt lonely. I had no way to relate to anyone, and no one was trying to relate to me. But for all I know, I just seemed like a miserable, unapproachable asshole.

There was another formative moment during those early days. One morning I was watching Ray do a clean, and suddenly I saw not only complexity, but beauty, in the form. That was a new experience for me. Up until that day, I'd been too full of anger, resentment and fear to see anything positive in athleticism.

The moment I saw that there was math and music in those motions, I became open to the possibility of taking pleasure in my own athleticism, and of loving my body. I'd never loved my body before; I'd never allowed myself to. I'd spent most of my life hating my body, and living in my head.

So, after six months or so, I was no longer miserable most of the time. Moments of real joy came more frequently, as I discovered I could do things I could never do before. I went from barely being able to control a 35 lb. kettle bell to confidently swinging a 53, and eventually to doing 70 lb. American swings. Boy, there were few moments of pleasure like that day when I picked up a 53 lb. kettle bell and had to check the weight because it felt like a toy.

On August 8th I had one of the most deliriously cathartic moments of my life when I climbed a rope to the ceiling for the first time. On January 9th—three hundred seventeen days after I walked into CrossFit for the first time—I did my first string of two consecutive double-unders. A few weeks after that, I noticed that I was getting a lot stronger at handstands. Now it feels like I'm close to being able to do actual handstand pushups, and my double-unders are getting better each time I do them.

One year ago, I was in the best shape of my life up until that point. But now I'm leagues ahead of that in terms of strength, stamina and flexibility. Even more stunning, though, is the fact that I want to be in that room. The part of me that looks around at what others are lifting, sneers at me, and calls me weak and pathetic is still there, but these days it's not as loud as the voice of pride in my accomplishments. I've worked like hell and I've earned that voice. I no longer feel like an outsider. It feels glorious

Of course, it's come at a cost. The frequency with which I've injured myself has become something of a joke among my friends. But only one of those injuries—a box-jump scar that needed three stitches and then got infected a week later—occurred in CrossFit. The rest resulted from my overdoing it while trail-clearing and running.

But here's the thing about that cost; not only was it more than worth it, but in retrospect, it was inevitable. During the last year, I've learned to relate to my body in a way that is new to me: a way that most of my peers learned during childhood. It's natural that I had to learn my limits by exceeding them—to learn how to respond to injury by getting injured. And not for nothin', look where I am now. I'd gladly suffer worse injury than I did for the fitness I've achieved.

I suspect you think this is all nonsense or, at the very least, that I'm making a big deal out of nothing. But see, that's just the thing. To you, it is nothing, and that makes all the sense in the world. But from my point of view, it's everything. I find the most remarkable experiences in life to be those instances when a person changes me simply by virtue of being themselves. Without ever intending it or knowing you were doing it, that's what you did for me, simply by being the decent people I never expected you to be.

Have you ever heard the proverb "Learn a new language, get a new soul?" One year ago, I wouldn't have imagined it could apply to athleticism. But that's exactly what being in CrossFit with you has done for me. I've let go of prejudices that I was clutching so tightly to my chest that I couldn't even see them, and I've accepted that I might call myself an athlete without mockery or even irony. I've got a new soul. Thank you.

Buying Crampons: More Complicated Than You Think

I've noticed during the last few years that there is no better resource for finding answers than Google. No matter how obscure the problem, I always find a forum thread or blog post detailing how someone solved that same problem. So when I go through a hilariously aggravating experience and come out the other side, I like to document it in the hope that someone will Google it and find succor. So, if you're thinking of buying crampons... you're welcome. 

In January my wife and I climbed Mt. Washington as part of an Eastern Mountain Sports guided trip. We had a blast. I can't recommend it highly enough.

The gear that EMS Climbing Schools provided worked out very well for me, especially considering my double-wide feet and my experiences with cold extremities. The Koflach Degre mountaineering boots fit me as well as I could ever hope a size twelve would, and my feet were never cold and never sweaty. The crampons behaved like rock-solid extensions of the boots, and the 70 cm Black Diamond Raven Pro ice axe seemed just right for me. So on the day after the climb, I called the school and found out that the crampons were Black Diamond Sabretooth Pro. Then I waited for a sale on EMS.com and bought all three items.

The package arrived in the mail, and the gear worked just as the climbing school and the EMS website had led me to believe they would.

Ha! No.

The package arrived in the mail, and the gear was bewilderingly incompatible. The crampons had not one, but two problems. The toe bail—not that I knew the term "toe bail" at the time, but boy was I about to learn—did not fit securely in the front toe groove of the boot, as I remember it doing so well on the Mt. Washington climb. But this was irrelevant, because even at maximum extension, I couldn't get the flanges on the sole plates to fit around the boot.

I called EMS and they started throwing baffling terms at me like "wide toe bail" and "long center bar". Well, OK, "long center bar" isn't baffling, but the question of why the website mentioned no such options most certainly was.

After doing some digging and getting back to me, the guy at EMS essentially threw up his hands and directed me to call Black Diamond. I wasn't happy about this, but I figured there was no point in grumbling, so I made the call. I described the problem and, sure enough, there are two different options for both the toe bail and the center bar. I needed the wide and the long, respectively.

The guy at Black Diamond said he'd throw in the toe bails for free and knock 35% off the $20 cost of a pair of center bars. With shipping, this brought the cost up to around $20. I was still less happy, but I figured "What the heck. Black Diamond probably has no control over what EMS puts on its website, so there's no sense making a big deal of it. It's only $20." I gave him my information and he said the items would ship immediately.

So the other day I get the package and... man. Rarely have I been so furious over service that I feel the need to convey some of that fury to a service representative who's almost certainly got nothing to do with the problem, but that did it. Because when I opened the package, I was looking at a pair of center bars... and one toe bail.

All I could think of was the maddening image of someone actually putting one toe bail into a box, sealing it, slapping on the address label and sending it on its way. I called Black Diamond and boy, I had to work hard not to yell "You sent me one toe bail? ONE?! What the hell am I going to do with one toe bail?!! HOW MANY GODDAMN FEET ARE ON THE HUMAN BODY?!!!"

Instead, I limited myself to saying "I'm furious right now, and I'm going to try not to take it out on you. I've had two experiences with Black Diamond so far, and both have been HILARIOUSLY bad." I proceeded to explain the problems, and he offered to send out a new toe bail. I asked him "Could you please FedEx it? Because I'd like to use this equipment this weekend." He agreed, and I was satisfied.

So F- to Black Diamond for not making their gear options clear and for shipping me one toe bail, but A for their responsiveness during my second customer service experience. And to all of you who are considering purchasing mountaineering gear: do your research, and even then, don't expect to use it immediately.

A Justification for Diversity

OK, this is going to be a long one. That's what she said.

The other night I had one of the most stop-me-in-my-tracks stunning flashes of insight of my life. Now, it could be nothing. But just bear with me. When we reach the end together, you may not agree with me, or even know what the hell I'm talking about. But I promise, you will have been entertained. Because I will illustrate my points using only the choicest Anchorman animated gifs.

Like most liberals, I've long accepted the assertion that diversity is a Good Idea. Yet I've never kidded myself that I have a rational reason for this. Historically, monolithic cultures have met with some success. Ancient Rome sure made a big deal of it. I've never claimed my way is better for empirically demonstrable reasons. I've claimed my way is better because diversity makes me happy.

But now I have a quantifiable, rigorous reason to favor diversity. Or so it seems to me. Let me explain.

If you understand apostatic selection and polymorphic equilibrium, or if you just can't stand to listen to me expound on my half-baked understanding of population genetics, skip ahead.

Apostatic selection is frequency-dependent selection by predators. Simply put, predators prey disproportionately on the most common form of a prey species. For example, say you've got a species of beetle with two possible patterns: spotted or striped. The spotted and striped varieties are equally cryptic, i.e. neither is less conspicuous than the other. Now, say that 75% of this hypothetical population is spotted and 25% is striped. A predator species will eat about one striped beetle for every three spotted ones, right? Well, as it turns out, no. Spotted beetles will actually make up considerably more than 75% of the predator's diet. That's because birds, like humans, are good at pattern recognition. They develop what researchers call a "search pattern", the upshot of which is that searching for something improves their ability to see it. Because there are so many spotted beetles out there, the birds come to see them better than they see the striped ones.

Now, let's jump over to polymorphic equilibrium, a delightfully fun thing to say. Go ahead and say it out loud a few times. I do it every chance I get. "Polymorphic equilibrium, polymorphic equilibrium, polymorphic..." Ahem. Yes. Polymorphic equilibrium is stability in the relative proportions of different forms within a population over time. Take that same population of beetles as an example. The proportion of spotted to striped will remain conspicuously constant from year to year. In nature, we see this all the time. It's the number-one cause of divorce among population geneticists, who, upon witnessing such a phenomenon, start screaming the name of the Grant Review Committee Chair during sex.

Now here's the mind-blowing part--the part that's taken me years of reading research articles to get my head around. Predatory selection seems not only to maintain, but to create, polymorphisms in prey species.

To understand this, start by imagining a species of spider with only one form. It doesn't matter how inconspicuous that form is; the bird that eats it is going to get really good at seeing it. It's pretty darned easy to see how this constitutes an evolutionary pressure, yes? The bird will leverage its searching expertise, gobbling up those spiders least divergent from the phenotypic mean while failing to see the oddball mutants.

Fast forward a million years, or maybe only a thousand. I've heard lately that researchers are reexamining their ideas of how quickly evolution can act. Whatever. Fast forward however long it takes for an evolutionary shift to happen.

Now your spider comes in not one, but three, forms, also known as morphs. The first morph is a uniform and inconspicuous creamy light green color. The second has two red racing stripes running along its abdomen. The third has the same racing stripes, but the space between them is also red, so that most of the abdomen is covered in a red shield.

That's Enoplognatha ovata, a fascinating species of spider on which I've read tons of research articles. I have no proof that predatory selection got Enoplognatha to where it is. No one does. What we do have is some damned compelling research that demonstrates the evolution of polymorphic equilibrium in virtual prey. Researchers are quick to point out that this does not prove anything about evolution in natural systems, but boy is it intriguing. It lends credence to the idea of polymorphic equilibrium as a response to apostatic selection, and helps one visualize this intricate dance.

To see what I mean, imagine you're a bird, and you just can't get enough of the squirty, spidery taste of E. ovata. Roundabout June, the spiderlings are getting mature and active enough for you to notice them, and you start snapping them up. Every once in a great while, you might eat one with the brilliant red shield. That's the ovata morph, which usually composes between 1% and 10% of the population, but you don't know that. You don't understand population genetics; heck, you can't even see colors. The pattern is conspicuous, but you literally failed to see it because you were focused on its more common peers. The only reason you ate it at all is that you happened to see it move.

You end up eating the redimita morph--the ones with the red racing stripes--more often than ovata, because redimita composes around 30-40% of the population. But mostly you eat the lineata morph--those with no red at all--because they're so thick on the ground. Even though their unbroken creamy green color makes them inconspicuous in the foliage, an inconspicuous pattern is still a pattern, and you get hella good at finding it. The more you see it, the better you get at seeing it.

But there's a problem. As you and your bird buddies mow down the lineata morph, its proportion in the population drops. With each passing day, you have to work harder to find your preferred meal. You slow down and search more carefully. You start to notice more redimita individuals because now they compose more like 50% of the population. Eventually you're forced to abandon your strategy of looking for lineata, and shift your focus to redimita.

Days pass, and you feel pretty good about yourself because you've gotten just as good at finding redimita as you ever were at finding lineata. But you're bound to hit that same wall of scarcity you hit before, and since redimita composed less of the population to begin with, this time you hit it sooner. Again, the morph you've made such an effort to find gets scarce. Again, you're forced to restrategize.

Maybe you'll switch back to hunting lineata, or maybe you and your chums have already wiped out so many lineata and redimita individuals that you'll be forced to go hunting the rare ovata. It'll happen eventually, and when it does, good luck seeing a plain old lineata when you're going blind looking for that distinctive red shield on ovata.

You focused on the most common morph, but soon, by virtue of your focus, it no longer was the most common. So you shifted your focus, and that gave the first morph a breather. And so it goes. The more you specialize, the less effective your specialization becomes.

Note that this dynamic is self-stabilizing. Your own predation forces you continually to shift back and forth between search patterns, so the proportion of lineata to redimita to ovata levels off.

Note one other thing. Enoplognatha ovata has an inverse relationship between morph conspicuousness and morph frequency. In other words, The most flamboyant morph is the least common. This relationship is caused by a tri-allele dominance heirarchy in which the most dominant genotype corresponds to the most flamboyant and least common phenotype. Again, this is seen frequently in nature.

OK. Deep breath. Bring it on home.

Polymorphism arises in response to predation. Apostatic selection causes polymorphic equilibrium. Dominance hierarchies which produce an inverse relationship between morph conspicuousness and morph frequency further enhance the effectiveness of the polymorphism by pitting the predator's tendency to notice common patterns against its tendency to notice conspicuous patterns.

Or so says science.

Yes. As a matter of fact I do have a damned good excuse for taking you through all that.

So the other night, I'm walking from the living room to the kitchen and it hits me: "Homosexuals make up about 1.7% of the population. Extend that to people who identify as otherwise non-straight, and that number goes up to about 3.5%... 3.5%. Huh. 3.5%! That's in the same ballpark as the percentage of the ovata morph in a population of E. ovata..."

"...the most flamboyant morph is the least common..."

"Homosexuality is a morph!!!"

Yeah, I know. It's a stretch. But keep in mind that I'm not suggesting anything as simplistic as a tri-allele dominance hierarchy that yields heterosexuality, bisexuality and homosexuality. I'm not even suggesting that human sexual preferences, or any of the other traits I'm about to mention, are based on alleles at all. I find that question largely irrelevant.

What matters is that the polymorphic equilibrium model works. You've got a predominantly heterosexual population, so by definition heterosexuals are highly cryptic. You've got bisexuals, who blend into their surroundings with relative ease. And you've got homosexuals, who have the hardest time of all being inconspicuous.

"Aha!" you say. "If the population is in polymorphic equilibrium, then where's the predator?" Yeah, you're right. We're apex predators, so there is no literal predator working its apostatic voodoo on us. But look at human history. We were murdering the shit out of each other millennia before Quentin Tarantino made it cool. If humanity's self-destructive tendency ain't a predator, it'll do 'til somethin' better comes along.

So I say humanity's predator is humanity. Or, if you want to get more conceptual, humanity's predator is humanity's rich suite of self-destructive tendencies. After all, it kills off a hell of a lot of us, so why not call it a predator? Once you accept that notion, the polymorphism model becomes strikingly apt.

To see what I mean, just think of the sixteenth century. I'm sure you were thinking of the sixteenth century already, as any sensible person should. But just for the sake of argument, say you weren't already musing on the psychology of Elizabeth I, the confessional fervor that led to the formation of the Holy League, the near-impenetrable historiography surrounding the Battle of Lepanto, and the role of global socioeconomic factors in the Spanish Armada. It's crazy, I know, but there are people like that out there.

So say it's August of 1572, and you're a wealthy Protestant. You've traveled to Paris for the big wedding. You're having an awesome time... and then this happens. So sorry to hear about the savage beating, the slit throat and the defenestration. But perhaps your spirit can take some consolation from knowing that not only are there a lot fewer Protestants around to murder, but the remaining ones will blend in much better. So the Catholics will focus their energies on more noticeable targets for a while.

Sounds a bit like the birds and the spiders, doesn't it?

Now let's circle back to the Dada exhibition that is human sexuality. For whatever reason, we have a remarkable preoccupation with who is rubbing private parts against whom, and in particular with the disposition of semen. We're so preoccupied with this that we think straight-up murdering folks over it is a Good Idea. So on the morning after the St. Bartholomew's Day du jour, when there's no longer a ready supply of heretics, you know that sexual deviancy will be the next stop on the murder train.

As go the birds and the spiders, so go humanity and its human prey. Having eaten a lot of one morph, the predator must abandon its specialization and refocus on another. This continues until a stable point is reached in which the percentage of each morph in the population levels out, and the predator's tendency to specialize becomes useless.

And now we come to why I'm preoccupied not only with gay rights, but with larger considerations of human self-predation. I'm straight, so I don't have a lot to worry about when the predator comes looking for obvious sexual deviants. But I'm conspicuous in other historically dangerous ways. I don't believe in God--at least not in any conventional sense--and I think religion is, in its very best moments, a transparent if charming delusion.

But my current of oddity runs deeper and more subtle than simple agnosticism. I'm an odd duck. I choke on the zeitgeist. What my peers think so obviously right as not to be remarked upon, I think insane, and vice versa. I have a perniciously contrarian, countercultural streak running through me like a persimmon strand in a skein of brown yarn. I don't know if it's nature or nurture that put it there, but you can see it from a mile away.

Throughout the vast majority of human history, when that predator went hunting, it's people like me who stuck out like a sore thumb and got snapped up. I'm lucky to live in a place and time where weirdos are accepted, even celebrated. But that set of circumstances is an anomaly. It's still happening in a lot of the world today, and I have no reason to think it can't happen here again. There are plenty of folk tryin' to make it happen here as you read this.

I may not have a solid red shield on my opisthosoma, but I damn sure got the racing stripes. And I have no reason to believe the birds won't come 'round again. If Europe's old predatory ways reassert themselves on we bloody colonials, it's people like me who'll be the first against the wall. He said, as if one need range so far to find precedents for oppression, murder and genocide in the United States.

Go ahead. Say "opisthosoma". I swear to god, it will add a week to your life. Saying "posterior dorsal opisthosoma" adds a month.

Anyway. Human populations consistently exhibit a spectrum of more and less cryptic individuals. Much as religious conservatives would love to believe otherwise, homosexuals, atheists and a constellation of other outliers have existed in every human culture. We're not going anywhere.

Why is that? Given all the predation that's gone on over the millennia, you'd think the freaks would've been weeded out.

But maybe it's the intense weeding that's made the freaks so persistent, just like the birds' predation made those telltale red marks on the spiders so persistent. Having been preyed upon, our species evolved morphs that force the predator to shift back and forth between search strategies.

In other words, getting people riled up about the fags is easy, but once all the fags are dead or closeted, it takes time and energy to shift the bogeymantle onto the shoulders of the heretics and weirdos--two sets of which I have the dubious distinction of occupying the Venn intersection.

And that, folks, is why we need diversity. We can't allow the predator to get comfortable with one search pattern. After all, to do so would be to betray our heritage. We are the species-level response to predation.

We are fragile little spiders, and I have no illusions that the birds will ever stop coming. But we can own our red marks, and keep those buggers confused.

No Mere Mockery

During the days leading up to Christmas I suffered a hilarious lapse in my usual cynical pessimism. I went to the morning service at The Church of the Holy Innocents with hardly a thought in my head that I would be uncomfortable there. I wanted to hear Grace sing, and for that I had to go to the service. I suppose that sense of inevitability caused me to sweep any realistic expectations under my mental rug.

Regardless of why my expectations were unrealistic, it didn't take long for the service to disabuse me of them. A sarcastic narrative spooled out in my head. It sounded something like this.

There was this dude with an awesome hat and a fancy white and gold dress with a matching cape, and he had these two other dudes to hold up the cape for him whenever he sat down or stood up. Well, at one point he got up and walked over to this other dude who had this giant metal tea-infuser ball hanging from a chain. The ball must have had something burning inside it, because there was all this smoke coming out. So Cape Dude took the chain, turned to this big book on a lectern, and swung the ball so that the smoke went onto the book. There was lots of chanting during all this.

And I said to myself “Right on, man. Because that is exactly what Christ meant when he never said anything remotely resembling that.”

With each mental draft I relished my wit and anticipated posting it in a private Facebook group I run. I'd created the group as a safe space to say things one isn't comfortable saying in one's public stream--a place where people can share potentially embarrassing or incendiary thoughts and get honest responses without the usual assumption of ill intent that breeds posturing and flame wars. So my little satire seemed like a perfect fit.

But I knew it wasn't. The more I thought of posting it, the more I knew I wouldn't. Even in that place where I trusted myself to say things I couldn't otherwise say without fear of giving offense, I was afraid of giving offense. I knew there was a problem.

By the end of the service, I understood what the problem was. I wasn't being humane. I was taking cheap shots at the structure and ritual without considering it in its historical context, and I know better. To read history from a modern perspective is worse than useless. One can only understand history by placing historical characters in their historical context.

Just a few centuries ago, Christianity was the only game in town: the substrate of physical, social and spiritual existence. That way of life is nearly impossible for the modern agnostic or atheist to fathom, yet if we don't at least try, we'll never see clearly. The church was the only social cushion at a time when humans lived closer to the bone than we can readily imagine.

I despise what religion has wrought. I believe even the most cursory glance at history shows that religion has done more harm than good, and that the world would be a better place without it. Yet lacking a control for reality, I can never prove my beliefs.

For all I know, we couldn't have gotten to where we are without our ancestors having that social cushion. For all I know, the ritual I was mocking had roots in a structure they couldn't have done without.

To dismiss religion and mock religious people would serve nothing but my own in ego. If I were to indulge in such simplistic thinking, I would be no different than those who have lumped me in with misogynists because I don't regurgitate every feminist talking-point. I have to be better than that, my thoughts more granular. I have to be able to parse adjacent concepts.

Neal Stephenson wrote that “the difference between stupid and intelligent people – and this is true whether or not they are well-educated – is that intelligent people can handle subtlety.” That's what my satire was lacking: subtlety.

I'm uncomfortable, scared and angry about the ritual I sat through on Christmas morning. To channel  those feelings into mere mockery would be easy. To respond with measured, contextualized criticism takes an order of magnitude more effort. Yet it's the only honest response. I have to do the work.

To My Daughter: Common Ground

To the reader:

I used to think I could take an idea in my head and write about it, and that you could read my words and get the same idea in your head. But after writing about feminism for a while, I no longer believe that. The language is too charged, and too many people have drawn monstrous inferences from my words.

Fear of being misunderstood has nearly paralyzed my writing. So I'm taking a suggestion from my wife, who agreed that people would get the wrong idea unless I prefaced each piece with an unambiguous statement of intent.

Here are the basic precepts on which I and feminists agree. They are the reasons why I write about feminism, and why I consider myself a feminist. If you find something monstrous in my writing--something that seems to conflict with any of these precepts--please ask me about it. Odds are, you're seeing something that was not in my mind.

COMMON GROUND

1. The United States has a male-dominated culture. By default, men tend to have advantages which may or may not be visible to them.

2. Systematic inequality exists.

3. All forms of emotional, physical and sexual abuse are monstrous.

4. I want to work against the inequality and suffering implicit in the above.

Not Listening to Body Dysmorphia

Today I met some online friends in Manhattan for a 5k run. Afterward, the organizer of the get-together posted some pictures. Here's one of them.

I'm the fashionable one.

Do you know what I said to myself when I saw this one?

God I look fat.

Yup. Seriously. The voice in my head even had a tinge of Valley girl drama 'tude.

I'd like to reassure you at this point that this post is in no way intended to solicit sympathy, or even support. I don't need support. Know why?

I aint' listenin' to that voice any more.

Far from wanting support, I want to express gratitude. I want to convey the bizarre view from inside my head. And I want to write words that might help someone else who, like me, looks at their body and doesn't see reality.

I was morbidly obese for the first seventeen years of my life, and during most of the subsequent twenty-three years I was none too skinny. Finding a sane relationship with food and attaining a healthy weight has been the primary struggle of my life.

A few years ago I got help, got clean and started losing weight. As I approached my goal weight, I was scared out of my mind. It had all gone to shit each time I'd tried before, and it would all go to shit again.

Except this time it didn't. This time I was doing things differently. Despite my certainty that it would all fall apart... it didn't. I hit my goal weight on October 1, 2011. Words couldn't describe my amazement.

Ah, but my life had hardly begun to get weird. At that point, I had no clue how radically my metabolism had shifted as a result of the enormous change in my eating. I added a few hundred calories to my daily intake, figuring that would be enough to halt my weight loss. Didn't even make a dent. I scratched my head and threw another few hundred calories at the problem, and this time my weight loss slowed... a little? Maybe? Huh. More head-scratching, a few hundred more calories thrown in. My weight loss finally slowed markedly, but still didn't stop.

In the fourth round I rolled up my sleeves and, with a mix of disbelief and irritation, added another few hundred calories to my daily intake, bringing it up to well over four thousand calories. Finally, my weight started to go back up.

And I had to let it.

See, I'd committed to a sensible, healthy goal weight, and I'd shot past it, so now I had to gain a few pounds to get back to that weight and then stabilize. Simple, right? Well, if you think so, you've probably never been obese. There's no thrill like the thrill of finally being skinny, and there's always a voice that says "Yeah... I could be skinnier."

But I didn't listen to that voice. I let my weight climb slowly. And if I was scared out of my mind before, now I was scared out of my mind, out the door, into a cab to the spaceport, onto the next long-range ship, out of the solar system, through the nearest black hole and into some other dimension of shrieking, pants-filling horror where no one had ever heard of minds, let alone being in one.

Now here's where the body dysmorphia made itself apparent. In the midst of my fear--in the midst of thinking "No way am I going to be able to gain weight without it all falling apart"--I started to look in the mirror and poke at my face, thinking that it looked too fat. Keep in mind that when this behavior started I had gained at most three pounds.

That's when I started learning the skill of getting a stranglehold on myself. "Dude." I would say. "You cannot look fat. At most you have gained three pounds. And you were too skinny before you gained those three pounds, so there is no way you can look fat. So SHUT THE FUCK UP. And CHILL THE FUCK OUT."

I had to start not listening to the voice that said I looked fat, because every other input, from the people in my life to my own internal logic, told me otherwise. That voice was loud, but it was vastly outnumbered, so I had to let it be overruled.

I overshot my goal weight by a pound or two, decreased my calories a bit, and settled into a groove. Within months I got really good at maintaining my goal weight. I spent two years within five pounds of that mark. Whenever I gained or lost a pound or two between monthly weigh-ins, I tweaked my food intake to compensate. My fear seeped out of me. I no longer believed everything would go to shit.

Then, two months ago, I took a huge step. I'd been going to CrossFit for about seven months, and I knew it was past time to adjust my goal weight. Gaining muscle without gaining weight is the equivalent of losing weight, so if I was going to be honest with myself, my weight had to become a moving target. So I started gaining weight intentionally.

At the beginning of November I weighed myself and found that I'd gained three pounds. I'm happy to say not only that I felt only small echoes of that old fear, but that I resolved to continue. Three pounds was a good start. I was still on the slender side of fit, and my pants were still on the loose side of comfortable. I judged that, if I were to gain another three pounds during November, it wouldn't be a bad thing. So I let it ride.

I'm in the middle of that second month now, and it's... a bit challenging. I still have those moments when I walk by the mirror and stop and examine and poke, and that old voice returns. It's always a negotiation. Which leads me to today. I've looked at that picture ten times, and each time, here's what still goes through my head.

I see my man-boobs and my upholstery. I see that I'm a size 42 frame in a size 52 skin. And I wouldn't change any of that. If I had a million dollars, I wouldn't get liposuction, because that flab is part of me. I like who I am, so I won't deny my past. Moreover, I know the difference between flab and fat, so although I see those flaws, I know they don't make me look fat.

I see that I'm wearing sweats, and I know sweats make a person look dumpy.

I see that I'm running like a spaz because I tore a muscle in my calf a few moths ago, and it hasn't healed yet.

I think of all the times since I lost weight when I've seen a video of myself and I said "Holy shit I'm skinny!" and how bizarre it is that I can look at a still picture and have the opposite reaction.

I think of how people have different body types. I think of my mesomorph frame. I know I have a pernicious tendency to compare myself to ectomorphs and think that I'm fat.

I take all these factors into consideration. I extrapolate and interpolate. I weigh it all like Indiana Jones with his bag of sand. And I come out the other side knowing with dead certainty that I do not look fat.

And still I look at that picture and think "God I look fat."

The cool thing is, I'm getting good at not listening to that voice. It's still there, like the imaginary people in the room in "A Beautiful Mind". It's just that, in the convocation that informs my judgment, I've allowed that voice to be drowned out.

I'm feelin' good about that. I'm amused by my crazy brain and tickled at having learned how to rein in one of its more quizzical aspects. So again, the last thing I need is sympathy or support. What I want is to reach anyone who might find this a bit familiar, and tell you that this body dysmorphia shit is real. As real as it gets.

And you can get help.

One other thing. A few months back, a friend and fellow compulsive overeater invited me to speak at a weekly meeting that focuses on body issues. There were twenty-five people in the room, and I was the only man.

That's bullshit. Come on, guys! I know for a fact that I'm not the only man whose perception of himself is compromised. So that stuff I said above, about how it's real and there is help? Yes. It applies to you, regardless of gender. This whimsy doesn't discriminate.

The Abuser In My Head

The other day I was walking down the hallway at work when the thought of a sandwich popped into my head. The neat stack of bread and fixings coalesced before my mind's eye with no apparent associative chain leading up to it.

But just because there was no associative chain doesn't mean there was no cause. Moments before I thought of the sandwich, an old, angry, embarrassed feeling had surfaced. I wouldn't have noticed this two and a half years ago. But since then I've gotten good at seeing how my mind leaps to thoughts of food to avoid feelings it doesn't want to feel.

I visualized the sandwich and remembered how it felt to reach out for food without a thought in my head of stopping. My behavior was a simple reflex arc; I saw food that I liked, my hand reached out and it went in my mouth. I touched that old feeling, and the contrast between then and now shocked me. I no longer exist in a state of perpetual hedonistic freefall.

In the midst of that overwhelming contrast, there were striking similarities. My new way of eating has so deeply ingrained itself in my behavior that I spend very little time thinking about it. So when I start eating, I have exactly as much thought of stopping as I did years ago, which is none at all. The difference is that the structure provides limits. I'm no longer in freefall. I'm standing calmly in a landscape that has fallen deafeningly quiet.

Now here's the odd thing about that sense of quietude: it felt lonely. I was bemused and curious at that. I wanted to explain the loneliness. At the time, the closest I came was to say that the act of mindlessly eating everything in sight had carried with it a sound and fury. It was reckless and exciting, like a wild party in my head. Now that the party had fallen silent, I was experiencing the silence as loneliness.

But that didn't do it. The feeling of loneliness still didn't make sense. After all, every fiber of my lucid self saw my new way of eating as joyous and free, and saw the loneliness as peacefulness. I was feeling the hush in the wake of decades of binge eating and self-loathing. But that's not how my emotional self experienced it. So for days I rolled more metaphors around in my head, wondering if I was merely overthinking it.

Then the muse came to me unexpectedly in a conversation with my sister about my ten-year-old nephew. She said that he feels constantly pestered by his eight-year-old sister, yet recently he had a day at home without her, and he missed her. I smiled and exclaimed to myself "That's it! That's the feeling!" My relationship with food had been a constant, pestering presence, but once that pestering was gone, I missed it.

I mused on the sibling metaphor and soon found myself extending it, shifting from sister and brother to abuser and abused. I thought of how often people stay in abusive situations. This image of the abused struggling against all reason to stay with the abuser resonated so strongly with me that it seemed like the metaphor I'd been fumbling toward all along.

Maybe my loneliness is analogous to the urge to stay in an abusive relationship. Maybe the silence in my head is not that of the house after the loud party, but rather that of the house after the abuser has left. For decades my house was full of tumult. It hurt, but it was exciting and I didn't know how to live any other way. Maybe, no matter how long I stay away and no matter how good I feel about being away, part of me will always want to be back there.

And maybe this all seems fatuously Freudian to you. Maybe you don't think of yourself as a convocation of sub-selves. But when you ask yourself a question, to whom are you speaking? To whom do the voices belong that debate ethical questions in your head?

To a greater or lesser degree we are all sandboxes in which cavort calved-off aspects of ourselves: personality constructs granted sufficient autonomy to compose the dialectic on which cognition thrives. And maybe it's that granting of autonomy that gets people like me into trouble. Maybe a brutish, heedless part of me overpowered the rest.

Maybe my addiction was an abuser in my head.