THE LOST DOGS OF LANGSTON.

Entry 33.

More shit.

I went to work for one of those diet people once. I was a weight loss counselor and I didn't get the number of hours I was promised so I called my friend in my suicidal despair and then I walked out and went off in her navy blue Cadillac and we ate popsicles while she was driving. I forgot where we went because I was so traumatized at the time.

And I was drinking a whole lot of water, so much so that I probably washed half the essential minerals out of my body, and I was eating the diet food that that diet place was selling and once the raspberry sorbets melted and had to be refrozen and we all got a lot of free raspberry sorbets because we couldn't sell them. And we ate the shit out of those things and we didn't just eat one at a time, I'll tell ya that.

And then I remember a video that the head of that place was doing in Italy and they were baking bruschette and she took one and put it on her little plate and had her lovely little tidy neat little portion control all right there just perfect on the film but I bet you the moment that camera was turned off those girls were all hoockin' down the rest of those bruschette like nobody's business. I'm sure they didn't just throw 'em into the trash. And I bet you also that they weren't eating that damn nonfat raspberry sorbet when they were there, either, because when you go to Italy you eat REAL GELATO unless you are just a COMPLETE FOOL. That's what I did when I went to Italy and I'm glad I did it and diets be damned. In fact I was walking by the fashion houses and looking at all the size two outfits in the vitrines and stuffing pastries into my mouth the entire time I was out there walking around. Because the Italian pastries were somewhat smaller than the French ones were (I also went to France then) and you could therefore get more of them to put in your little bag and stuff more of them into your mouth while you were wandering through the streets and gawking at the high-fashion vitrines.

And then there was the story about the supposed murderer I was dating and how I just sort of "forgot about it" when he told me that he and his friend had killed two people and I started grinding my teeth in my sleep and then the eating disorders therapist freaked out when that all came out while I was under hypnosis one day and then he broke up with me that same week and went off with the blonde with the red Mercedes convertible. But how much can you say about that? You sure can't use the names.

And it's like I SO MUCH WANTED to be IN LOVE and have a BOYFRIEND and be and have all these THINGS that "They" have always told me I needed to want to HAVE and that's such BRAINWASHING because I absorbed all that SO STRONGLY that I would even go out with a MURDERER in order to have the things I was "supposed to" have and that's really troubling that I would be that brainwashed or that desperate.

And then there was the story about the laxatives and the guy with the snake in his dorm room and he was the son of one of the bigwigs of the college and he was really cute but I think he was bisexual although that didn't matter at the time, I was down to my lowest weight that I could possibly go to because I was calorie-counting and doing aerobics all the time and I just was hoping and hoping to still lose more weight but I went to this guy's dorm room one night to mess around and I was going to his bathroom in his dorm all night because I had taken a laxative and I stepped on his scale and weighed, lo and behold, one-twenty-five!!!! And I was SOOOOOOO HAPPY!!!! I finally had broken past the "plateau" or whatever it is all the diet people talk about when you get to a weight and "can't" seem to lose any more weight for awhile! Oh yeah they used to talk about all that stuff but it is VERY UNFASHIONABLE now.

But at the time I didn't know about body positivity or fatphobia or any of that stuff so I was sure that magic number 125 pounds on the scale was like a super duper miracle for me.

Jesus that's insane and just tragic. I could have been focusing on a career or something, or on building a helping organization and getting a 501-c-3 for it or something really worthwhile.

Instead of some arbitrary number on a scale.

And then there was the time a cockroach came after my best friend and I was living down the street in another apartment and I had taken a laxative that night too and couldn't come over and get the cockroach out of her house for her even though it was clearly coming after her and I think she was kind of mad at me after that for the rest of our lives. But she moved away and I think she moved to where they don't have cockroaches. She had other phobias too and so did I or at least I certainly developed some later. That was probably why we were friends, in part. Phobic people tend to hang out together I guess. Or maybe they do sometimes, I don't know.

And now I am 56 and I'm tired all the time. I mean my energy drops out in the middle of the day and I just want to collapse.

But do you see how fucked up I was? I mean I couldn't eat without worrying about it! I couldn't just eat! I had to lose weight all the time!!! I had to be losing weight or I just wasn't happy!!! It was MISERABLE!!!! The whole thing was perfectly, traumatically MISERABLE!!!! And I felt SO BAD about myself if I gained even like two pounds.

Beth gained two pow-ownds! Beth gained two pow-ownds!

Fuck you, stupid high school girl in the ballet class. Fuck you. Shut your fat mouth and go to hell.

I mean don't you want to say that to people sometimes? I bet you do!!!!

But wasn't there anything GOOD in your life, Beth? Was it all just SHITTY???????

Well I went to Washington DC one Christmas when I was struggling with my weight and body image and food and whatever else (which I did for DECADES and am probably still doing) and I was on Prozac and it made me really tired in the middle of the day and I recall having a really good time in Washington DC and riding on the metro and going to a really cool thrift store and seeing the Christmas trees in the museum and the big National Art Gallery and it was all so clean and beautiful and people were really friendly and for some reason I don't remember where we ate or what food we had. But I remember the green marble pillars and walls in the National Gallery and it was really cool seeing the real art pieces right there up close and personal, instead of just looking at pictures of them in a book.

And what do you intend to DO, after all this ridiculousness with eating disorders and migraines and encounters with shitheads you used to date who say they murdered someone when they probably really didn't do any such thing but the fact that they said that to you is really cause for concern, so much so that your eating disorders hypnotherapist tells you to come back and see her the very next day, because I guess she's gonna get on the horn and get some info from the police or whomever about what to do in that situation because even if she's got her masters' degree in psychology and is working on her PhD or whatever, sometimes shit happens that she actually doesn't know how to deal with? Or she might even be calling people for support? And what are you gonna do now that the diet industry has left all its big old piles of turds on you?

Good question. What DO I intend to do?

Well today is Sunday and I'm still listening to my Isabel Foxen Duke podcasts and I am NOT reading Danielle Steele novels and I don't care if you are. If you love Danielle Steele novels then you should definitely read them. Read them the hell again, if you really want to. Hell, read them three times!!! It's none of my business how many damn times you read your Danielle Steele novels.

And I'll probably go out in the yard and pick up dog poop and throw it over the fence so that my little dog yard can be at least somewhat clean for my dogs to run around and play in. And I'll be thinking thoughts and ruminating and digesting stuff on several levels while I do this and let me tell you, I come up with some of my best ideas when I'm picking up shit. I literally turn turds to gold, is what I do.

Yep, we turn turds to gold, out here at Surrealist Acres. Out here on the farm.

In fact, I'm doing that now. I'm making an entire blog entry out of all these little shitty turdish stories from several of my past lives.

And the guy across the street is running some sort of tractor across his hay field and he's cutting up hay which means Waldo the asshole cat will have more mice to catch, because when he does that they run out of the field and some of them wind up here, in fact I've been picking them up and putting them in the little dead animal cemetery under the fig tree in the big yard for the past few days.

And that's cool, I mean that's not so bad, cats catch mice and kill them, so what. Sometimes you find a dead mouse in the yard, if you have a porch cat.

But what I really WANNA do is stand on the unused foundation pylon next to the fence gate and shout at the guy with the tractor, HEY! Are you gonna set your tractor on fire again? That was cool when that happened that time before!

But I'm not gonna really do that.

But I want to.

But what I will probably do is just put all the dog turds in the same place, and then I'll put all the diet industry turds in their little same place and just hope that the wild strawberries will grow in abundance and profusion over them, to where you can't even see them after while. Because in the end the wild strawberries will grow over my coffin, or over wherever my ashes are scattered, depending on what people do with my body when I am dead.

And after that, the wild strawberries will grow over the fields, and on nights when it's a full moon, if you step out into the field behind my house, under the Bradford pears and the single staunch magnolia, you will see my spirit hovering there in ghostly wisps, hovering and flying around and chattering and singing to the big wild spirits of the Lost Dogs of Langston.