Cloud-Seeding for Manna 2

Day Two of a two-day fast

6:00 am

Got a good night's sleep. The sleep of the just. Veritable manna from heaven. For an inveterate insomniac, fasting may be the new melatonin. I feel great. Coffee!

Manna from Heaven

7:00 am

I feel terrible. I don't know if I can do this again. I'm halfway done, I know, but the brain fog has returned and it feels more like brain acid, like I took hard recreational drugs.

I felt exactly like this the second time I documented a fast. Read below for details.

8:00

Distraction is of paramount importance. Typically reserved at this time of day, I welcome conversations. I have to refrain from embracing my interlocutors. I am grateful for all human interaction. The blowhard who drives me up the wall by showing me videos of his son doing box jumps and muscle-ups is now my greatest ally in beating back suicidal ideation. He's not so bad after all.

9:00

Occasional spells of dizziness pop up. I'm not so sure I'll be able to withstand the two-hour jiu-jitsu class tonight at 6. Sure, the last time I did a two-day, I trained at the dojo and on the mats in my garage, and I did halfway well, receiving second winds like a Spanish galleon trapped at the equator gets a gust from the gods.

Stubborn adipose tissue that has haunted me for over a decade gets exorcised off my waist. “The power of Christ compels you!”

10:00

Biology tells me I should eat something. Nothing crazy, just a few shortbread cookies. Would a Chobani kill me? Lies. The world says I should eat. More lies! Stop peddling these falsehoods, Pharisees.

11:00

Glorious will be the moment around this time tomorrow when I shall be closing in on the feast that will be my lunch. A deep, downy bed of Romaine lettuce awaits my swan diving into it, dried cranberries sparkling all around me like rubies, two boiled eggs fat and glistening like oversized pearls, and enough shredded Monterey Jack to massage away whatever seemingly permanent intestinal damage I have done to my neglected ciliae.

12:00

Nap time. My wife says relegating time to unconsciousness during a fast is cheating. I disagree. A coma patient still gets the IV drip, am I right? When I wake, I watch jiu-jitsu tutorials on the kimura, a devastating lock that snaps the opponent's humerus bone with a spiral fracture as well as damaging the shoulder’s rotator cuff and labrum. Improving one's endogenous weaponry is a great distraction against withering away.

1:00 pm

I try reading volume 3 of the 20-volume The Zohar, the definitive text of Kabbalah. Not only is it hard to concentrate on the English text and make sense of any of it, because it's deep and exegetical, but because the English paragraphs alternate with the original Aramaic paragraphs, and the Hebrew letters, which I know only individually, resemble Ramen noodles. They don't ramp up food cravings, but they do make me nauseous.

That The Zohar

2:00

I try knocking out 20 minutes on Duolingo. I've been learning German. I always wanted to learn German. I already did the Pimsleur lesson, but that only required listening. I don't have it in me to push through the gamefied lessons involving talking bears and lost owls. I must go easy on myself. Plus, I'm busy writing this. And writing this is great therapy and a great distraction. Thanks for still being with me. The hours are speeding by. Kronos is on crack.

3:00

Why live? No, seriously. Why live? Because such questions are not bound to be given adequate answers, since the only authority capable of providing the right answer doesn't bother, appealing to said authority with a supplication as lame as a two-day fast is a terrible tactic to have to resort to in order to infuse life with any meaning. I should end it all right now.

By end it all, I mean crack open the bag of Cheez-Its kept intact in my backpack for emergency glycogen dumps.

4:00

Latte with monk fruit sweetener. Divine. Almost divine enough to forgo food for the rest of my life. I have a shoestring epiphany: two people, within a ten-minute span, we're kind to me when they need not be. Society owes us nothing. So it is nice when it still treats us kindly. How not to pay it forward? How not to be grateful for all existence? I am not fleeing for my life. I have a wonderful family, a steady job, and books to read and music to listen to. When gratitude settles in, anxiety gets squeezed out. Out!

5:00

Time is like a cat. The more you demand of it, the less it cooperates. When I forget about its inevitable march forward, it works quicker. Can you blame Time for not wanting to be bothered? We are that annoying kid in the back of the celestial station wagon, asking God, “Are we there yet?”

God won't pee when you keep staring at Him. Turn away, son.

6:00

I decide to go to jiu-jitsu class. If I can handle trained killers on no food for two days, I can defend my Slurpie against a 7-Eleven junkie. We are back to the first sentence of yesterday's post, when I called myself a glutton for punishment. Yes, a glutton I am. Only a deep-seated masochism will lead you willingly down the path of most resistance. That, or a martyr complex.

8:00

I didn't do so well during the two-hour jiu-jitsu class. I wasn't lethargic, but my reaction time was off. I guess I did okay. I did well against the people I should have and not so well against the people I shouldn't have. I fell right in the middle of the pecking order of skill. The silver lining was that I stayed distracted. It's hard to think of five-cheese ziti when a guy is hunting for your neck.

*****DECISION TIME******

In half an hour, at 8:30, I will have already completed the 48-hour fast. I could undergo temporary mouth pleasure by engorging on four carb-conscious quesadillas, my usual after-training fare, or I could do what I did last time, which was go to bed and wake up at 6:00 am to complete two full days of fasting. This would make for nearly 60 hours. This extra credit I did.

THE TAKEAWAY:

I didn't sleep well at all. One reason was that I was all jacked up on adrenaline from training. The other reason was that I had so much anticipation to eat something once I woke up that I couldn't turn my brain off. This meant that I had not fully let go. By the middle of the following day, a deep sense of accomplishment set in. It was the satisfaction borne from having undergone a tough ordeal, along with a newfound gratitude for everything I was fortunate to have in my life, including the ability to, at a moment's notice, pull over at a Shell gas station to buy a King Size Reese's Fast Break.

For the most part, all the strife in my life is self-induced. These two days have served as a recalibration of my baseline contentment. The magnifying glass hovering over me from above, burning a hole in my stomach, has zeroed in on my deficiencies. That in turn spurs me on to reshuffle my priorities.

Yes, I can keep improving my fictional storylines and my jiu-jitsu. Yes, I can get better at German. No, I shouldn't read so much. Instead, I should get back on social media and focus on my literary career way more than I do. These are all things belonging to the mundane world.

More importantly, I should be more tolerant of others, more appreciative of friends I may occasionally take for granted, more patient with strangers kind enough to smile. Most importantly, I should shower endless love on my wife and child, because if they are not the reflections of God, who is?

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Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK.

Crushed Trachea Blues is a fun, literary murder mystery featuring suicide by jiu-jitsu, an AI Charles Manson, and lots of tacos. It is available in ebook and paperback.I