THE LOST DOGS OF LANGSTON.

Entry 32.

Okay so in my vicious vengeful quest to eat up my own body so that it would be smaller than all y'all and therefore more Christian and more superior and more out of your way, so that I could step aside and just not BE here so that I wouldn't BOTHER anybody,

...which is how I felt a lot of the time with the third anorexia episode...the first episode, I was busy feeling self-righteous that I was getting skinnier and skinnier which of course to me meant that I was doing something RIGHT

LITTLE DID I KNOW that would all come crashing down as I gained all the weight back and 40 pounds more and then lost 30 and then tried SO HARD to lose that other 10 and then gained the 30 back and then lost it again but this time it was only 25 or 26 pounds or so that got lost so it's looking like in the great scheme of things that that is pretty much the pattern, lose some, gain more back, unless you get off the fucking wheel like all these Caroline Dooners and Isabel Foxen Dukes and Summer Innanens are talking about here now today in our very modern world.

(Is that a complete sentence? Not sure...don't care.)

And then of course later on I got back down to my high school weight one more time just before getting married because that's when you do it so you can wear the Size Four dress and be SO PROUD of yourself because you're smaller than almost everybody else. But Jesus you're not in a lab discovering a cure for cancer, are you? Or figuring out how to get clean water to all the peoples of the world, or housing the homeless in America, or restructuring the wealth in our society so that we can actually have peace on earth and justice for all.

BUT BY GOD YOU'RE A FUCKING SIZE FOUR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And with all that crap, climbing up big hills downtown to get to your scary parking deck to get in your car after your job every day and eating nothing but an occasional bagel and whatever else you can afford on your meager food budget after everything else gets paid for, maybe a Lean Chisine here and there or maybe some crazy old hippie guy takes you out to dinner on the weekend so you can go back to your "diet" very visibly and audibly in your stinking office environment during the week in a building full of rats and squirrel turds in the ceilings, and STILL, people are always expecting you to "be nice." Well how schized out is THAT gonna get you. "Just be nice."

I guess you're supposed to go HOME and process all the UNPLEASANT stuff. Or sit in your car with your Pepperidge Farm Chocolate Chip Macadamia Nut Cookies and your chocolate milk and your sugarless gum because it relaxes you during PMS. Eating and listening to the radio.

Well here's a little more. there was a time in my life when I was dealing with the anorexia and the bulimia and the compulsive eating episodes and the jumping on the scale every day thing, so much so that I couldn't even EAT in public because I was scared of somebody's JUDGMENTAL REMARKS.

So I just didn't. I either ate in the car, or at home, or somewhere I could hide. I got real good at consuming one and a half Taco Bell bean burritos because back then they were 59 cents apiece and I didn't have much money so I got real good at eating them in the car on the way to work or wherever it was I was going.

And then the guy who was dying of AIDS said to me one day, as I was getting my plate of Thanksgiving food at work when we had our work Thanksgiving lunch, so that I could go back to a control room and hide whilst I ate it, "Don't eat too much, you'll gain weight."

Yeah don't fuck anybody or you'll get AIDS. And when you're withering up and dying in a bed somewhere, you'll just WISH you could eat too much and gain some weight, won't you.

(Of course I didn't say that. And of course he eventually died and it was sad.)

Yeah it makes you really MEAN. All this stuff makes you REALLY, REALLY MEAN. And hanging out with a vicious queen for fifteen years of your life also shows you how to do this. That vicious queen, I owe him a huge debt. He is responsible for whatever backbone I'll have and/or display in this life.

Thank you, vicious queen.

So there were various things that felt bad and I'd love to tell you about the guy I was having sex with one time who told me, Yeah you've lost weight but now you're body's just flabby. Oh but he managed to have sex with me anyway, apparently my flabby body wasn't beneath having sex with.

He was an asshole and I'm glad I didn't end up with him. I probably would have figured out some very smart way for him to meet his demise such that it looked like suicide. There are people who can do this. Not so much now, that we have the Internet.

But there are people who can. And it's just one very painful part of life, because if you have children or something, or even if you just have people that you care about, you don't want killers walking around scot-free.

That's one of those questions that you take on the list for Heaven. When you go you'll have a lot of things to ask about, such as why this and why that and why did we have to have this or that and why did this happen, etc.

Well I remember all kinds of things being directed at my body. It was kind of like the Universe just WANTED me to get cancer quick and get the hell out of the way. Or die in some other way. You're ugly, you're not pretty enough, why don't you just the hell DIE or something.

It's like that! It IS!!!!!!!

The frat boy that yells out FATASS BITCH as he goes by in his little expensive car to his beer party where his brain cells can be further eliminated by his conspicuous consumption of alcohol.

I wonder whatever happened to him. I hope he got mangled in a combine one afternoon or eaten up by a bushhog.

I do!!!!!!! I DO hope this!!!!!!!

And then on some other hand (I don't know how many hands there actually are), I kinda don't. I kinda hope he had to grow up and live a loooooong time with his miserable self and become a drunk and go to rehab and therapy and realize what a shit he was or maybe still is and that he had to feel BAD about it all for the rest of his pathetic average unillustrious life.

MEAN!!!!!!! Hanging out with a vicious queen for fifteen years will make you MEAN!!!!!!! But you should still do it because if you're NICE to everybody, people will take ADVANTAGE of you. That vicious queen will tell you the TRUTH about how people are and about how the world is, and you had better listen up and take note.

You have to know WHEN to be mean. And when to be nice. It's all in the timing.

But if you aren't grounded enough by eating enough and taking good care of your body, then you won't have any real sense of how to time things because you'll be paranoid as hell and you won't trust ANYBODY so you'll have real twisted ways of communicating with people, if you are able to communicate at all.

And yeah that should scare the shit out of you. Because how are you gonna get along in this life if you can't communicate?

One time I had a boss on a university campus who asked me to come into his office one day and sit down. He closed the door and sat down at his desk and said, "Are you a Christian?"

And I forged some complicated spiel of parisology that was probably instantly designed to fake him off and be something super-esoteric and scholarly that he probalby couldn't understand, but it was very thoughtfully and respectfully and seriously presented. You woulda laughed your butt off if you had heard me. I don't remember what it was that I actually said, but I'm sure it went about like that.

The conversation ended and I went back to work or wherever it was I went, I don't actually remember.

What I DO remember is that I went to the Dean of the College that was in charge of my job and TOLD on the basterd. Hell yes I did!!!! And we discussed my job and everything else and the Dean said, Well you'll need about 20,000 dollars a year at any job, to earn a decent living.

And now you'll know about when that was if you calculate it right because back then 20k was a pretty decent living. So it would have been in the late eighties or early 1990s sometime, if you're calculating correctly.

So you see. Living with a vicious queen for fifteen years will teach you how to navigate in society. That boss got in trouble and was eventually fired. I was not the only person in the office that he terrorized with his ignorance and with all the chips on his shoulder. He was also using office money to buy a cell phone for his girlfriend that he had on the side, and he was also trying to appear to be a very super audible and visible Christian married family man at the same time.

But coming down to having fundamental compassion for someone else, after years and years of time and distance have happened, well it's easy to see that the poor man probably had TONS of insecurity. I mean we other office people knew he would hold his breath whenever he would drive by a graveyard, because of his endless catalogue of superstitions. We knew stuff like this about him, I don't know how we knew but we knew. Maybe it came out in that conversation, I don't remember exactly. My whole life was focusing on eating and starving and trying to be thin and trying to be nice and trying to stay out of people's way.

I guess that's why I'm taking up so much cyberspace NOW with this stupid blog. Blah blah blah, all day long. Yadda yadda yadda. I'm going and telling it to Sweeney, I'm going and telling it on the mountain, I'm going and telling Aunt Rhody and I'm taking it to the Lord in prayer, all at the same time, as much as I can.

That little incident in the office was probably the beginning of a long train of people jumping on me telling me I'm going to hell. How do they KNOW this shit? Do they have personal videotapes of God's little visits to them? And can I please see these tapes? I just do not know where some people get OFF sometimes, for chrissake.

So here's the kicker for this one.

When I was in high school I was in ballet and we danced a lot after school and one little gangly white girl started calling me "N----r Butt." So that was I guess my nickname for awhile.

And not only was she insulting me and my body, but she was also insulting an entire race of people. And their bodies. And the whole thing didn't make any sense because not all the people in that cross-section of humanity look the same, anyway. They all look different and they all have different bodies. So her comment didn't really make any sense but I didn't know how to process thought this way at the time and I knew what she meant by the comment and that it was meant to be hurtful. Even though I don't know why she did it, to this day I don't know what her actual motivations were, I thought we were pretty friendly.

And then there was the other little girl who started shouting "Beth gained two pounds, Beth gained two pounds!" when we were getting weighed in at the beginning of ballet class. Which was another thing that contributed to my already super-hard-wired anxiety complex.

Hell, I guess I could have quit, and had I had any sense I probably would have done so. But I loved ballet and I loved the idea of being a ballerina and a choreographer. And of course all the comments and the underlying sense of competition that was probably fostered by the adults (ballet class is just another word for Little League baseball, in some circles, after all) (those parents are more vicious than vicious queens, I've heard), well it was just more motivation to starve myself to death even more and get myself "together" by becoming skinnier than everyone else in the class. Which I managed to do and I got the pas de deux for the upcoming ballet competition because I worked hard and I really did "get myself together" in that very limited and narrowly focused way.

So what if somebody called YOU "N----r Butt?" Or did they? Did anyone else get called that? Am I alone here? Please help me figure this out. Or don't, I don't care. You're probably mean too because of all the stuff they called you back in high school where kids are meaner than at any other time except for fifth grade when they are probably the MOST mean. Or sixth grade, or whenevs.

Hell, you're prob'ly meaner than me.

N-----r Butt.

Did you really think I wouldn't remember?