August 30, 2010 - Breakfast

We awake (at 4AM) with new hopes. Perhaps the indicators from yesterday were being misread; perhaps this is a sign of that. It almost certainly will turn out false; there is no real reason to hope, just one tiny possibility, involving blood, that has yet to be ruled out. Testing starts at 7AM. Results at 3PM.

I should not allow my hopes to raise but I can't help it. Hopes go up and down like elevators in my body. Gut to throat and back again. I am a busy building.

Never before have I realized how exploitative the Web has become. A search on the word "implantation" becomes a journey through oddly processed text, collaged and manipulated. Strange experiments in SEO, but still I read them despite the telltale off-kilter hideousness of multiple Google ad panels.

There is some ur-text regarding these issues, and it is stolen--often, I assume, by people who do not speak the language--and carefully destroyed, claimed, turned into territory. It evolves.

I imagine these people, the SEO-optimizers, and I see them in dark shirts with broad collars. Way out in Brooklyn, or in Florida. They smoke but do not read. They are realizing their own genetic destiny, conquering and colonizing the language in order to trick machines into presenting this single text as definitive. Thus they trick the apes like me, the ones that trust the machines, into parting with a few simple clicks, in the hope that someday this will fill a coffer. In the distance the bell of a cash register, a miniscule ding as a penny drops into the jar of the undeserving search-engine manipulator. Power over the rubes. SEO is a poor man's game.

At least after today it'll be over and we can take a month before the new thing, the $10,000 thing, starts. Or rather, things, because that many be the first of the new, expensive, laparoscopic invasions.

It occurs to me as I write that I didn't need gastric bypass. This is good. You want to keep the amount of surgery in a relationship to the minimum. And losing weight is ultimately a psychological matter, albeit one with strong physiological echoes. I have my caloric confessional, my bleak little pocket of text, mostly unindexed, entirely untrafficked except by friends. Used to be every utterance had 10,000, or 20,000 readers. Now.... But that feels good, to be unsearched, unoptimized. The web has grown too big for this site to matter.

Is this the first thing I have ever truly wanted but could not have? No, of course not. But compared to the apes of history my desires are realized with some frequency. When I go down the list of things people wish they'd done when they're dying, I seem to be doing okay. Not enough travel, but definitely enough love. I've made a habit of success.

I read through my websites, trying to work. Eventually I'm sure I'll get to some place where I sleep enough and have time to think everything I need to think but for right now it feels like I'm stumbling from thought to thought without time for any of them. The thoughts exist as bright globular lights amidst a massive gray plain. My job as a thinker is to drape wires between those globes--to connect them. It's not the ideas but the tissue between, the actual network. That's my job, where I happen. But right now the minute I string a wire I notice that the other end has come unplugged.

When I try to sleep I think to myself: You must lose weight; you must control your body; you must exercise constantly. If I control those things, I believe, I will be able to control other things.

Up a few pounds.

Weight: 308 lbs