Walser, Robert
I have said too much; I have yet to speak. This is my credo, my raison de ere for rising up from my bed each and every morning. I seem to have this frighteningly close kinship with the likes of Robert Walser, to whom I devoted much time and eye sight and still felt gypped out of a reason for it all. Madmen are like that, I suppose, or those to whom the simplicities of life pose such an odious challenge. There are days, few and far between thank gods, when I too feel the hacking away severing bone from collar, the suspicion that all is not right, and if it were, I wouldn’t know the difference anyway. This, I fear, is what has become of me; I have reached such a slovenly level of self-care that even the simplest daily attendees are fraught with despair and false hope. Perhaps the counting is to blame, or the incessant need to brush my hair or type words over and over anon. I have yet to speak; I have spoken too much.
I will often not eat for days, and when I do, I generally vomit back up an archive of poorly digested and hastily chewed odds and ends. Nothing resembling food, but bits of things eaten in a hurry to do something other than eat and vomit. This can get monotonous even when what I have eaten is something I value or take great pleasure in eating. If this continues, which given my current disgust with food seems reasonably assured, I will self-emaciate and end up in a hospital where much less edible foods and bits are served up to those scabbed over with bedsores or condemned to wheelchairs. My friend’s father eats with such great pleasure and relish that his teeth clack together causing a horrid clapping sound to issue from the glut of his mouth, resembling a post-symphonic cacophony of hand smacking and loud thumping of feet against floorboards and footrests. Eating is far too primitive for the likes of someone like me, so I limited my consumption to odd days or those in between, leaving one day in lieu for family gatherings or holidays, which, so it seems, are few and far between. Cheese, however, I will eat regardless of the pain it strafes in my ribcage and gall. My father brought hay bale size bricks of cheese home from work, some so big and unsettling that they had to be kept cold in the garage or on the cement bricks in the backyard. These we would eat slowly, almost methodically, seeing if we could eke away at them until they were sizeable enough to fit uncluttered in the refrigerator. We had an assortment of cheeses, Brie’s and Camber’s, and blues and Cheddar’s well past their expiry date. Some cheeses like Oka or those crafted by monks and aged in Sherwood casks and wet cellars, were particularly revolting and equally unpleasant on crackers, baguettes or rye melba. The crappy state of my gallbladder is in direct correlation to too much cheese, dairy products, and the need for antacids and stool softeners to counter effect a reaction to forced gluttony. I slept like a mange-dog last night, scalloped in the rigging of my sheets. I neither dream of food or eating. If one could sublimate chewing and grinding, and mastication and pulping, and griping and tearing into salvers easy enough to swallow, I’m quite sure I’d replace masturbation with chewing and griping, but as this seems highly improbable, I will not waste the bother. It is probable that I will be denatured sooner than I’d hope, which will make all this eating and chewing a passing indelicacy. When this occurs, which it will, regardless of my protesting, I might find myself lolling on saltlicks like a menace or a savant or one of Fyodor’s idiots. It will serve me right, no doubt, as fools should never tread where idiots dare to go. Another credo to place next to the canonical debris. Only when blinded with salt can one see with veracity unprecedented. All else is bad manners, dross and sycophantry.
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