August 26, 2010 - Breakfast

At home we've been talking about catnet: That's when the cats rub their musk-mouths onto shoes and bags; the bags have come in from the outside world and are filled with strange scents--sometimes even other cat-scents. Packets of molecules that indicate all sorts of things. So our cats smear themselves all over these bags, owning them, claiming territory. And then the bags and shoes go back into the world and the markers left by our cats are transmitted to other animals, who react in their own ways. That is catnet.

The scale was miscalibrated, so I've lost quite a bit of weight in a hurry. Six pounds. Part of me is of course glad--if things were going to break at least they broke in the right direction--but I'm also disappointed that I've been working hard and now won't know exactly how hard. Science is badly served by poor instrumentation.

Two observations among many: This has been as much as a difficult time an isolating time. As a couple we've retreated; our lives are dominated by the interactions over fertility, the schedule of egg-release. We go out less than we used to, especially as [Wife] can't drink. We live on the south end of the park, among mostly strangers. It's not as drastic as that sounds--I see a few people a week for drinks; our downstairs neighbors are quite nice; I check in on tons of people through chat and phone. I'm in pretty regular human contact. But not as much as when I worked in an office. And not going to work any more has made it even easier for me to enter into a kind of observational flow in which I see people less as humans and more as animals; this happens to me from time to time, from year to year, when I am locked into huge projects.

I lose the basic thread of connection, the fundamental optimism (which one person described, humiliatingly, as a kind of "Joshua-Tree era uplift") that I want to define my personality. Humans are animals, but they are a superset of animals; it's not entirely sensible to see them purely in terms of territorial interactions. Meaning: Computers have all kinds of operating systems and software, for billions of uses, but relatively few hardware configurations.

Now I'm focused on hardware. When I go into the park I don't see people with goals and desires, but rather shaved apes hooting. I see patterns, not people. I've lost the sense of being in a tribe of my own. And I come to strange conclusions as a result, mostly of the everything-is-awful-why-bother variety. Given that most of my thinking lately is about territory--about how we create territories and then colonize them (the world "colonize" has itself been colonized and shaded, which makes me nervous about using it; language is another territory), it leads to a kind of numbing. The rest of my thinking is about apes, and eggs, and strong monkey-family desires, the way that apes interact with other apes. I've become, again, isolated, distrustful. Listening to Catnet.

One of my greatest fears in starting this diet blog was that it would be discovered and I would be attacked, because I was encroaching on the territorial claims of various obesity experts--the fat advocacy people, the paleo diet folks, the Atkins-types, etc. Just the pressure of their opinions was enough to fill me with fear; I was defensive, afraid to begin. How could I be part of that conversation when I am in fact the subject under discussion? They trumpet their rightness. The Biggest Loser, an update of the evangelical tentpole meeting where the body is purified not by fire but by a tiny woman perched like a vulture atop the leg-lift machine, plucking at your spoiling innards. Why are people so intense in their opinions on this subject? Why is it such a passionate topic for so many--so likely to rile them up, to get them to admit hatreds and prejudices, to bring out cruelties? It is a chance to control the bodies of others, and that is power.

Weight: 306.5 lbs