Park Slope is probably the East Coast ground zero for people who want to observe radical diets, so it’s not like I’m short of gluten-free options.  The Coop and Union Market each stock and abundance of gluten-free delights, so I was able to dive into my new lifestyle with no trouble at all.

And I immediately encountered my first annoyance, specifically on behalf of people with actual celiac disease.  I bought a bowl of cornflakes – my first foray into gluten-freedom.  Cornflakes, being essentially baked corn meal, should have no gluten, but you’ll definitely find it in Kellogg’s.  I bought a European box of cornflakes advertised as gluten-free.  The box depicted a pastoral scene.

  They were shitty.  I’ll go into, in the future, why lots of g-free things taste like shit, but here the issue was not the lack of gluten.  It was that the cereal contained no sugar, salt, or other flavoring agent. 

This is a pattern in gluten-f offerings.  Rather than just removing the gluten and leaving the consumer to fend for his- or herself, companies like to also take out anything that’s considered remotely at odds with healthy eating: fat, salt, refined sugar.  Basically, they’re forcing the celiac consumer to amend his or her lifestyle and become some kind of food zombie.  It’s like if you lost your license but were then told you weren’t fit to ride a subway either.

It gets worse.  Try buying gluten-free granola (which shouldn’t be that hard, given that granola is basically oats and sugar) and you’ll find that not only can’t you find any that’s not sweetened with fruit juice, but you can barely find any that is not alive.  I’ll repeat that – the granola is alive.  It’s so raw that the sprouts have not been killed.  There are little green shoots all over it.  All you wanted was not to have to eat gluten.  But now you basically have to swallow a cactus every morning.  Or, to look at it another way, you have to slaughter a village full of new life at the start of each day.

If I really did have celiac disease, I’d be pissed.  My life is restricted enough without being forced to go without sodium, real sugar, and the knowledge that everything I eat is at least not going to continue to grow inside of me.*

*I refused to eat more than a bite of the living granola, on account of I was paralyzed by the idea that I’d wake up in a few weeks and have a vine snaking out of my ass.  Sorry for that visual, but there you go.

A grim postscript to my last post (which was over a month ago – I’m sorry):  I have been temporarily (I hope to god) forbidden by my physician to consume any alcohol whatsoever*.  What began as a game…turned horrifyingly real.

Anyway…on to No Gluten.

*You vomit blood one time and all of a sudden you can’t drink anymore. 

THE CONCEPT

I used to have a colleague who had celiac disease and could eat no gluten.  It was great because he would give me the pita bread he got with his salads.

But celiac disease – and the dangers of gluten – has gotten a lot more popular since then.  Popular is probably the wrong word, since of course no one wants to have it, but it’s become kind of a buzz disease, like ADD in the 90s or Asperger’s a few years ago.  It’s the hot new disease for your kids to have, and who am I to buck a trend.

THE PARAMETERS.

No Gluten implies a prohibition of any foodstuff with gluten in it.  What contains gluten?  Primarily you need to avoid wheat flour (which is in…every fucking foodstuff on the planet), which of course means bread, most cereals, pasta, cookies, bagels, muffins.  Gluten is also found as a thickening agent in things like ketchup and ice cream.  It’s kind of like a food land mine.  Just when you think something doesn’t have gluten…it does.**

Gluten also appears in rye and barley based foodstuffs.  I’m making one massive exception here.  I’m allowing myself the consumption of beer (health permitting) due to the fact that a). I just did no alcohol and I don’t want you guys to think I’m not original, and b). I am contributing to another blog for which it is my duty to drink.

**That was a good metaphor but it got a little anticlimactic.

HOW MUCH DO I DO THIS THING THAT I AM NOW DENYING MYSELF?

I generally start the day with some toasted potato dill bread.  Then I have a sandwich for lunch and mop up my dinner with bread.  I also eat cookies, pretzels, and raw wheat flour every day.

HOW HARD DO I EXPECT THIS TO BE?

There are two sides to this question.  One is: do I have the willpower to do this?  In that case I think it will be very, very hard.  I love bread.  Often, bread is my favorite part of any meal.  Pizza?  I love the crust.  Sandwiches?  I mostly need good bread; screw the filling.  Even with burritos my favorite two bites are the first and the last. 

The second question is: is this even possible?  To make sure not a speck of gluten goes down your throat is basically a full-time job.  Gluten pops up in everything.  I seriously doubt I’ll be able to completely avoid the stuff, and I probably won’t even know that I’ve failed.

WHAT ARE THE HEALTH BENEFITS?

If you don’t have celiac disease, I don’t think there are any specific health benefits to not eating gluten.  I think the benefits are more like side benefits – you eat fewer carbs, less ice cream, that kind of thing.

CONCLUSIONS.

Prepare for more of my trademark utter misery!

At midnight on the first day of renewed alcohol consumption, I cracked a nice bottle I’d been saving and had a drink with my roommate, good friend, and fellow beer enthusiast.  I can tell you without any hyperbole that it was one of the best beers I’ve ever had, and that I really, really needed it at that instant.

Of course, it was also the worst possible time to have a beer, since I had a paper due the following day and I still needed to pad it out with ten pages worth of material.  I had planned on having one, but that turned into two.  Still golden, I though.  Two beers never hurt anyone.

However, I failed to factor in the fact that my body had not had a drink for a solid month, and that my tolerance was essentially reset to the level of an infant.  I was druzzed* after two beers.

So while I do some of my best writing while drunk (I looked over the stuff I’d written and it was pure gold), I also fell asleep after like three pages.  I had to finish the whole thing the next day.  It was miserable.**

In a nutshell: it’s good to be drinking again.  I just wish I’d waited until the next day.

*I just coined this now.  It’s when you think that at the time you’re just buzzed but then you look back later and realize you were stone drunk.

**I told the professor I wasn’t happy with it and he graciously let me have another two days to work on it.

POSTMORTEM

WAS IT HEALTHY?

I’m sure it was.  95% of my alcohol consumption is in beer-form, which is the least healthy.  However, it wasn’t really healthy emotionally because I didn’t feel invincible once the entire month.

WOULD I EVER DO THIS AGAIN?

Nah.

DID I FEEL BETTER?

Not much, but it did feel good to never ever have even the semblance of a hangover.  I’ve realized that as I get older, my hangovers have really evolved.  Since I don’t go out and get shit-faced much anymore, I rarely have those daylong hangovers where you can’t really do anything but groan and mourn and swear that you will never drink anything ever again.  Instead, I have more of the I’m-groggier-than-I-should-be feeling when I wake up and kind of squint at the world in a more irritated light than usual.

Anyway, it’s been nice to have neither of those.

DID I FEEL BETTER MORALLY?

A little bit, yes.  It’s strange, but ever since I was a child I’ve had this weird morbid fear of alcohol consumption.  Every time I drink I feel guilty, like I’m betraying someone.  I don’t know who.

Oh wait – yes I do.  It’s my mother.  This condition is 90% her fault and 10% DARE’s fault.

DID I CHEAT?

No.  Like I posted earlier, I had to reset at one point, but I did not cheat.

DID I LOSE ANY WEIGHT?

Probably?  Again, I have no scale.  I had one when I started this blog, but no more.

WHAT’S NEXT?

We’re journeying back into the realm of food-related denials with…

NO GLUTEN.

Last entry I talked at length about how people who are drinking do not like to be around someone who is not.  Let me reiterate it: people who are drinking profoundly dislike being around someone who is not drinking.  Now I understand why recovering alcoholics have to leave all their friendships behind.

So it’s been another week of going out to dinner or to bars and being shunned by people.  When I order seltzer and mention breezily that I’m not drinking anything, the table unsettles.  Even people who themselves will only have one or two drinks don’t like that you won’t be joining them.  I think it’s because we have inculcated within us this feeling that alcohol is morally wrong.  We like others to sin with us.  If you don’t drink with friends, you’re like the guy doing a crossword puzzle in a middle of an orgy.

The other thing I’m realizing is how situational alcohol is.  Unlike with meat, I don’t feel this constant craving to drink.  Most of the time – like 99% of it – I don’t even remember that I’m not drinking anything.

But then…

There are certain situations where I go from zero to sixty on wanting to drink.  Social situations, mostly.  It’s a little strange.  One minute I’ll be sitting there and the next it’s all I can do not to grab a beer out of someone’s hand.  Why?  Because I realize that I know some terribly uninteresting people.  I’m not going to get into specifics, considering that everyone I have ever met can basically read this blog, but suffice it to say that I never knew quite how much some folks bore me.*  Or make me uncomfortable.  Or make me anxious.  I don’t know.

What I do know is that drinking is absolutely fantastic for these situations.  Even one drink just gives me a fuzzy little cloud of social complacence.  I can handle anything, from tirades about how shitty it is to fly to digressions about the proper way to dice cucumbers.**  I can just sip and nod and not want to stab myself in the aorta.

Of course, I have to come to terms with the fact that these people are probably thinking, “Jesus, that guy is so boring when he’s sober.”

*Don’t worry.  It’s not you.

**It’s not how you think.

I don’t have a set schedule for the different denials, so I did not know at the end of No TVE that No Alcohol would be next.  As a matter of fact I kind of stumbled into it.  As I’ve alluded to before, I have been pretty sick this past season.  After a particularly rough fever week, I realized that I hadn’t had anything to drink for a week.  Perfect, I thought.  I’ll just start No Alcohol with a week already under my belt.

That first Friday night, I went to a friend’s home for a small gathering.  I brought along Gary, an old friend whom I hadn’t seen in a while.  As you might expect, everyone was drinking.  Not excessively by any means – just beer and wine and so on.  Gary cracked a beer and asked me if I wanted one.  I explained that no, I wouldn’t be drinking anything that night, or for the next 25 days or so.

It was like one of those record scratch room freezes.  “I haven’t seen you for a long time,” Gary remarked nonchalantly, “and you’re really not drinking?”  He paused and took a sip of his beer.  “Christian, are you really going to fuck me like this?  Why are you fucking me?”

The host sidled up to me.  He explained that his girlfriend’s father had just gifted him a bottle of 30-year-old Laphroaig and he thought we’d try it together.  Then he handed me a bottled root beer.

Between the desire not to fuck Gary and the desire for fine scotch, I knew No Alchohol would be severly compromised.  Peer pressure won, and soon I was sipping single malt and double-fisting with a cold one.

So…I had to restart (two days later, because I figured I may as well wait until Sunday).  This wasn’t cheating, mind you, because I really did restart.  I also learned a valuable lesson, which is that other people get unreasonably upset when you’re not drinking with them.

Three posts in less than two weeks?  You are all so lucky.

I’m writing this from an airport Best Western in South San Francisco (which seems ominously different from actual San Francisco).  As some of you may suspect, sensibilities approaching the delicateness of my own were not made for airport Best Westerns in South San Francisco.  To wit: I don’t believe their kitchen, in which convenience has forced me to dine twice, has any cooking implement besides a deep-fryer.*

So here I am, adrift in a sea of fried foods…but not allowed any alcohol

*I read a Wodehouse on the plane.  Rereading this paragraph it really shows.

THE CONCEPT

For about seven years now I haven’t gone any noticeable length of time without imbibing.  I realized, after being sick for about a week, that I hadn’t had any alcohol the whole time.  To be honest, I was motivated by the head-start I’d received.  It had already been a week…I had no major events coming up which I’d need alcohol to see me through…it just made sense.

There are also passels of alcoholics in my family history.  I guess I had better periodically stop and make sure I’m not becoming one.

THE PARAMETERS.

No Alcohol means that I can’t consume any beer, wine, or spirits in liquid form.  I added that last caveat because I’m not going to stop cooking with alcohol or refrain from eating a whiskey cream sauce or two.  I will deny myself things like bitters, though, which I used to drink on their own (expensive). 

HOW MUCH DO I DO THIS THING THAT I AM NOW DENYING MYSELF?

I’m afraid to answer this because I feel like even if I say a limited amount someone will forward me some literature from AA that says I’m an alcoholic. 

Not nearly as much as I used to.  Not like in Prague, where my job was to drink beer**, or in college, which was college.  I would say I average out to about one drink per day?  Usually it’s two or three per day on the weekends and not much during the week.  Normal, right?

**It’s funny that my face is still all over that website despite the fact that I stopped working there almost two years ago.

HOW HARD DO I EXPECT THIS TO BE?

Wouldn’t it be depressing if this one was the hardest?  I think that internally it will be pretty easy.  Externally…

WHAT ARE THE HEALTH BENEFITS?

Alcohol is bad for you, but apparently small quantities are good for you?  I wasn’t drinking a glass and a half of red wine a day, so I doubt my heart will suffer.  Theoretically I should get thinner, but as with No Meat I’ll be replacing all my alcohol with blocks of cheese.

In the short-term it’ll nice to never be even a little hung over, but to be honest it’s been a while since I had a really cracking*** hangover.

***Fucking Wodehouse again.

CONCLUSIONS.

For more alcohol related blogging by myself and friends, visit Let’s Get a Taste.  The two blogs will soon overlap!

As we come to the end of long televisual-entertainmentless month, I need to confess something to you.

I cheated.

When I started this project, I assumed I would probably cheat.  It happens.  I figured, sure, I’ll cheat once or twice and do a mea culpa and all that.  I assumed it would be during some of the more crazier things I have planned (like later on in the summer I plan to not use anything with a motor).  Some of the things are so extreme that I have little rules that I can break and stuff.  I figured it would be one of them.

But no.  I cheated on fucking No Televisual Entertainment.

And I’m not just talking about walking into a room that has a television playing.  I can’t exactly control that (someone suggested to me that when that happens I should just take my glasses off.  I’m completely blind without them so it made a lot of sense).  No, I’m talking about of-my-own-volition, in-full-control-of-my-faculties cheating.  I did it.

Before you flock from this blog in droves let me explain that there are some serious mitigating circumstances.  One weekend, when I was alone, I developed a violent food poisoning (Marta, in another state, actually did too).  It was the sickest I can remember being.  I won’t go into any details, but let’s just say that at one point my ears were the only orifice in my body not emitting something.

So, lying in bed between bouts of violent vomiting / crying, I watched a few web videos.  In too much pain to sleep or read, I had no recourse to take my mind off the pandemonium in my belly.  Seriously, it felt like someone had set off a Molotov cocktail in my innards.

What’s done is done.  It’s time to move on.

POSTMORTEM

WAS IT HEALTHY?

Probably it was.  I had a lot of thinking and card-playing time.  I don’t watch a lot of mindless shit, but it did feel like I had a touch more time on my hands.  I did not, for instance, spend four hours on a Saturday watching Wire clips on YouTube.  That’s eaten up a few weekends in the past.

Also, I do feel like my own conclusions about my relationship to television were pretty spot-on.  I don’t know what I would have developed that without some serious examination that I wouldn’t have done without this.

WOULD I EVER DO THIS AGAIN?

Nah.

DID I FEEL BETTER?

I was actually really sick twice during this time.  The two things are probably not related, but I spent much of this month miserable.  Otherwise it didn’t have much effect on my physical health.

DID I FEEL BETTER MORALLY?

Maybe I should change these questions.  This one doesn’t even make any sense.  No, I felt no better morally.

DID I CHEAT?

Yes, amply covered above.

DID I LOSE ANY WEIGHT?

I don’t know; the roommate who owned the scale moved out.  She took the cat and the scale and I was only able to replace the former.  If I did, it was from being sick, not from not watching TV.

WHAT’S NEXT?

The terrors of…No Alcohol.

In conjunction with that, I want to offer a link to another blog I’ve been contributing to that’s concerned entirely with alcohol:

http://letsgetataste.blogspot.com/

Note to parents and other people of that age group / sensibility: this blog is much dirtier than mine.

I keep taking these long hiatuses.  Someone should aggregate some data about how many blogs fold in the first two months.  I feel like most blogs I see from friends have an exponential post decrease after the initial excitement.

Anyway, this is a long way of apologizing for taking two weeks to post.  I’ve had a lot on my mind.

WHAT I’VE BEEN DOING

I have a very stressful and demanding job and am also, mostly for fun, a part-time student.  I usually work nights and when I’m not doing that I tend to read things.  All of this adds up to me not exactly having a lot of time to devote to television in the first place.  So on the one hand, in terms of actual hours spent, I’ve barely missed it.

With most of my time accounted for, it’s not like I have these huge chunks of time to fill.  But with what little together time we do have, Marta and I have begun playing cards.  Specifically, an epic game of gin rummy.  I think this is bad for our relationship.  If you’ve ever played an epic game of gin rummy, you know that there each player goes on streaks, which is to say long periods of time in which they are constantly victorious.  Eventually, of course, the balance swings to the opposite pole and the other player beings a streak.  And so on and so on.  The game, after all, is 95% luck.

These streaks have been taking a toll on our relationship.  Marta and I tend to be pretty competitive with one another (on our first date, one of us (I think her) challenged the other (I think me) to a footrace)*, so of course when Marta is winning hand after hand I get pretty frustrated and spiteful and start punching pillows.  And when I win ten hands in a row, Marta usually throws the deck against the wall.  What’s weird about it, though, is that we also don’t particularly like to see the other frustrated, which makes any winning streaks bittersweet.  When you’ve been losing for a while and then you start to win, it feels fantastic, but as you continue to mercilessly beat your partner, you start to wish you’d start losing again.  Then you do, and you desperately want to win.  It’s kind of fucked up.  Maybe we should stop playing.

I’m inspired, though, by my grandparents.  My father tells me that they had a game that lasted the entirety of their 50+ year marriage.  So it’s nice to continue the tradition, albeit with less alcoholism.

*She won, but she continues to believe I let her win.  Which of course I did…or did I?

WHAT I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT

Mostly the weird effect that television has on me, and presumably on a lot of people.  I noticed that while I don’t watch a lot of television, I do use it in a strange way: as a kind of reward system for getting through the stresses of the day.  Much in the same way I drink beer and other people smoke.  You start by doing this thing at roughly the same time every day, because what defines this thing is that it’s not what you’ve been doing the rest of the time.  So I would sit there and maybe watch one episode of something on DVD, before I went to bed.  Which is totally innocuous the way one beer is, but the strange thing is that you start to look forward to and routinize that one beer or episode or whatever.

 And when you start looking for these little rewards, you realize they’re everywhere.  You reward yourself with coffee in the morning and food in the afternoon and then wine and then jerking off and then even weird little shit like a shower is a reward.  And taken separately these aren’t really a big deal.  Even if you do all that stuff in a day it’s not a big deal.  The problem comes from when you can no longer diversify your rewards, when you have to reward yourself with the same thing all the time.  When it’s beer in the morning or jerking off six times a day or even watching eight hours of television.  None of these things really hurt you when you mix and match, but group them all together and you have a real problem.  You’re fat or addicted or just sitting narcotized in front of the TV.

Of course, what’s weird about this is that you can’t pinpoint exactly why it is that doing one of these should be a problem but doing all of them is okay.  It makes me think that our lives are structured in such a way as to make us suffer for the promise of these little daily rewards.

CONCLUSION.

I’ll stop.  The lesson here is that you start thinking about weird shit when you don’t watch TV.

FAILURE

I failed already.  I got up, I made breakfast, I sat down at my computer…and I watched a video of Larry King doing stand-up on the Tonight Show.  I wish I could tell you that I hadn’t.  I also wish I could tell you that I failed watching something cooler than Larry King doing stand-up on the Tonight Show.*

This wasn’t me giving in, however.  It’s not like I was overwhelmed after one day of not absorbing televisual entertainment and had to submit to my basest urges.  Instead, it was just that I forgot that I was doing this in the first place.  When the clip was ending, I remembered that I shouldn’t have been watching it.

So here’s the thing with no televisual entertainment…it’s a lot different from vegetarianism.  I’m not sitting here craving television the way I was meat.  A lack of televisual entertainment has no effect on your most basic bodily urges.  I don’t want to fill my belly with TV.  It doesn’t make me cranky not to have it.

*Though he wasn’t that bad!  He told all these jokes from the ‘50s about how marriage is terrible.

UNCONSCIOUS ABSORPTION

But what I have noticed, as illustrated by the Larry King example above, is how casually and unconsciously we absorb televisual entertainment.  Throughout the first week of this, I was constantly clicking on embedded videos in articles or links that people sent me.  I must have started twenty videos before remembering and hurriedly pushing the pause button (in one case the video didn’t stop when I hit pause and I actually just shut my laptop.  That’s how dedicated I am).  I’ve never put a piece of meat in my mouth without thinking about it.  But televisual media is so ingrained in my diet that my subconscious found the idea that I was cutting it out totally alien.

People have been less understanding about this, too.  When they send me a link and I tell them I can’t watch it, they just get confused.  When I told people I was a vegetarian, they just accepted it and didn’t offer me any more meat.  But people keep trying to argue with me.  ‘Come on!  Just watch it!’ they’ll say.  ‘It’s funny.’  No one respects my choice.

It’s lonely.

I’m writing this in a state of complete exhaustion which is more about the fact that I know that I will be completely exhausted for the next week or so than that I actually am now.  Though I did get up at five-thirty again for more co-op today, so that hasn’t been pleasant.  Every time I go there, they have me do something related to rutabagas.  It’s always, ‘unload these rutabagas from a truck’ or ‘dump this bag of rutabagas into a crate.’  I’ve never even eaten a rutabaga.  Do I look like the kind of person who spends a lot of time with them?

Anyway.  Let’s get on to this month’s denial, which is No Televisual Entertainment.

THE CONCEPT.

I’m not trying to be all soapboxy about this and complain about how Americans watch too much TV and we should all be authoring novels instead.  People are always talking about how the average American watches six hours of TV a day, which is way too much, but it’s also this statistic that is so unbelievable I think it’s fabricated.  Do you get home from work at 6 and then watch continuously without even making dinner until 12?  That doesn’t sound right.

Even though, as stated, I’m not trying to be all soapboxy, I do think we watch too much TV without even knowing it.  As TV has increased by leaps and bounds in quality over the past decade (I’m looking at you, The Wire), it’s not as big a deal (it was worse in the 80s when people watched six hours of Perfect Strangers or whatever) to be a TV connoisseur.  Whereas before people would just look at you the way  they do in England when you tell them you’re really into tea, now people nod and agree that TV is great. 

God, I am really losing the thread here.  Let’s bring this back.

Okay, so, yes: too much TV = bad.

THE PARAMETERS.

No Televisual Entertainment means no TV, no movies, no video games, no watching TV or any kind of video on the internet.  It does not, as some people have suggested, mean no reading on the internet (come on).  I’m also not going to put my eyes out if I happen to enter a bar or friend’s apartment where TV is on.  I’ll just avoid watching it (or take my glasses off, which renders me blind).

Also, I can listen to stuff.  My listening to stuff is not affected.   

HOW MUCH DO I DO THIS THING THAT I AM NOW DENYING MYSELF?

I’ve always thought of myself as one of those doesn’t-watch-a-lot-of-TV guys (but not in a dickish way).  I don’t have cable.  I own a TV but it’s not hooked up to actual television.  Plus I don’t have a lot of free time.

That said, Marta did get me a Wii for Christmas, and I’ve been playing Goldeneye on it a lot, plus Wii Resort.  So I’ll need to take a break from trying to beat this one Mii named Lucia who is unbeatable at Table Tennis.  That was taking up way too much of my time anyway.

HOW HARD DO I EXPECT THIS TO BE?

Not really that hard.  I mean…if I can’t do this I’ll feel really sad and pathetic.  If it’s even a little hard I’ll feel really sad and pathetic.  It’s not going to be hard…right?

WHAT ARE THE HEALTH BENEFITS?

All mental and none physical*.  I’m expecting to come out of this better-read, wittier, and with my mind more like a steel-trap than ever before.  I suspect my personality will dynamically change.

*It’s not like I’m going to use all my former TV watching time to go to the gym.

CONCLUSIONS.

Join me on this journey.  Things are about to get so exciting.