So the diet seems to be going relatively well.  I’ve lost 13 pounds, cut my sugar consumption to a lifetime low and I’m even working out, sorta.  So my question is,

When I’m I gonna start feeling ‘great‘?

Not that I’m feeling particularly “bad” but as I’m sure you know every diet, workout program and gym promises that I’ll have hitherto untold amounts of energy, stamina and all around good vibes.  That I’ll be able to play ball with the guys, walk the dog through a spring meadow and have a night on the town all with a smile on my face because I feel so good.  Well, I’m waiting.

I’m not expecting miracles and in the interest of full disclosure I don’t have a dog or the desire to play ball with the guys.  I just want to feel up to it should the mood strike me.  As for nights on the town, I once went clubbing with a temperature of 102, so feeling “fair to middling” isn’t keeping me at home.  I also live in Los Angeles so I know that it’s possible to look great and still feel like crap.  We call that show business, kids.

There’s also the very real possibility that all those TV, diet and workout people are a bunch of liars that only want to sell me something and that the former “fat” girl who lost half her body weight at gym X still cries herself to sleep every night because being “fat” wasn’t really her problem to begin with.  All this leads to the startling revelation that felling “great” is more a matter of attitude than one of physical being.  Well that’s just great: not only do I have to eat vegetables on a regular basis, I now have to cultivate a positive outlook as well.  Now I know that my readership is made up of kind and caring people, but please don’t send me any ideas for achieving a positive life view.  This week alone I’ve encountered Scientologists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and a lovely (if smelly) pack of  Hare Krishnas.  If I didn’t listen to these “very happy” people face to face, I’m pretty sure an email ain’t gonna cut it either.  I’ll have to find it myself, and I start my quest this weekend in the Nevada desert in a place called Las Vegas.

Stay tuned.

Bob Speck lives and writes in Los Angeles.  He has no idea why.

Now that my diet is in full swing I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to start working out. Since I’m not ready for a gym and a personal trainer is beyond my budget, I thought I’d start out slow at home and work my way up to one of L.A.’s moderately priced sweat palaces. Considering that my activity level over the past few years can be described as glacial at best, I knew I was going to need some kind of help. During my lunch hour a few days ago, I headed off to the local book/music/video uber store to find that help…a workout DVD.

After finding the Fitness section between History and Documentaries, I was greeted with more than a few choices. There were at least 75 different possibilities and even after weeding out the pre and post natal titles the selection was still overwhelming. As I browsed the slim, black boxes I found it impossible to make a decision. It seemed that for every possible type of workout video I had a reason (or excuse) not to pick it up.  Yoga? Too mellow. Pilates? Too too. Kick boxing? I have breakables. Boot Camp? Problems with authority. The Bollywood Booty workout? Don’t get me started.  None of them spoke to me. Most of these DVDs seemed to be marketed to a female audience with skinny, perky blonds manically grinning on the covers. The few that featured men showed slope headed, screaming steroid cases in muscle flexing poses. Neither of these extremes are my scene.

While I may never find exactly the workout video that I’m looking for, it would be nice to come close. So seeing as Big, Gay Al’s Big, Gay Workout  (with Hi NRG dance music and hunky shirtless guys) probably will not be hitting the market anytime soon, I’m turning to you dear readers. Any recommendations for something to get my lumpy ass off the sofa and into a pair of size 34 jeans?

Bob Speck lives and writes in Los Angeles.  He has no idea why.

How like life is the endive, well shaped but ah…so bitter.

I’m eating vegetables. I’m not particularly proud of this fact but it’s the truth. I have eaten more vegetables since starting my diet last Monday than in the previous six months. And not the fun vegetables either, the green ones. No corn, no potatoes, no carrots and no peas. I can, however, eat kale, cabbage and kohlrabi to my hearts content. Kohlrabi? Great, now I have to “google” vegetables to find out just how much I’m going to hate eating them.  For the record Kohlrabi is a German turnip with the taste and texture of a broccoli stem. A broccoli stem? Yum! Give me more of that!

I take solace in knowing that my green, leafy aversion is typical of many brought up in my class (blue collar) and my country (the good ‘ol USA) and that many of us were trained to dislike vegetables almost from birth. If your ethnic background, like mine (German/Irish), was one whose default method of vegetable preparation was boiling until unrecognizable, chances are your veggie hating ways were pretty much set at a very young age. I was in my late teens before I discovered that some cultures actually found ways to make their veggies delicious. In defense of my flavor challenged ancestors I will admit that it’s hard to think of interesting ways to cook food while fighting with Mrs. O’Brian over the last spud in Ireland. People who grew up hungry really don’t care a whole lot about taste, as I was constantly reminded throughout my childhood:

There are children starving in Armenia who would kill for your creamed spinach.

My pleas to send the food to the Armenians and end the Great Creamed Spinach Famine of the mid 70’s fell on deaf ears.

I’m sure that I will eventually reap the benefits of eating a wider variety of veggies as soon as my body remembers how to process roughage. But I digress. Vegetables are our friends and almost any of them can be rendered eatable with enough garlic and olive oil.

Oh yeah. Anybody know how to cook a chayote?

Bob Speck lives and writes in Los Angeles.  He has no idea why.

…feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive…

I’m having withdrawals.  I feel like crap with a low grade fever, upset stomach and headache.  It’s been just over 72 hours since I’ve stopped doing the fine white crystals that are my drug of choice.  I’m not talking about crank, snow, horse, scag, tina, junk or even china white; these are all child’s play when stacked up against the evil monkey that was riding my back.  I’m talking about…sugar.

I began this year by taking stock not only of my diet but also of my big fat ass and coming to the conclusion that it was time for a change.  While the plan my partner and I chose is doctor recommended and not all that restrictive, it (oddly enough) doesn’t allow anything glazed, frosted or otherwise delicious.  Just a lot of lean meats, vegetables, whole grains and crap like that.  Not that I didn’t look for the Powdered Donut Diet, but no luck.  I harbor no illusions of being a gym god or having a movie star body; my goals run toward being able to tie my shoes without pulling a muscle or channel surf without getting winded.

Unlike my literary and musical heroes I have not been subject to convulsions, panic attacks or visitations from giant hallucinatory talking cockroaches, but gosh darn it I’m more than a little cranky.  And while coming down off heroin is fodder for ground breaking novels and seminal rock albums, coming down off glazed donuts and “slice and bake” cookies ain’t gonna produce much in the way of artistic output, save a few lackluster odes to Krispy Kreme and one very whiney blog entry.  Living in West Hollywood I’m sure that there’s a near by 12 step meeting for sugar addicts, but unlike N.A. and Al-a-non my guess is the snack table sucks.  It’s just not fair that some junkie who’s been stealing his grandmother’s Social Security checks gets to have a cranberry-orange muffin and I don’t.  Not to mention that they’re already thin.  Where’s the justice?

Where?

Bob Speck lives and writes in Los Angeles.  He has no idea why.

As I’ve written in the past, I’m a Christmas person.  So I surprised myself a little a few days ago when my partner Jeffrey asked,

What about Christmas do you like so much?

and I couldn’t really come up with an answer.  This isn’t an unusual question when you consider that I don’t particularly believe that the series of events the holiday is meant to commemorate actually took place, or if they did, it was not in the way I was taught in a Sunday school classroom at Fox Hill Central United Methodist Church.  It was while I was trying to find an answer to this question that I had something of an epiphany, a secular epiphany but an epiphany nonetheless: my love of all things Christmas has very little to do with the New Testament and a great deal to do with A Christmas Carol.  It’s not the Gospel writers (whoever they may be) and the story they tell that fills me with joy this time of year, but Charles Dickens and the story he tells— a story of ghostly figures, overworked clerks, lame children, the unwashed masses and the possibility of redemption for cold hearted, unrepentant misers.

I seem to be clinging to this highly romanticized version of Christmases long past more than ever this year.  In all truth I have no affinity for things Victorian or any era prior to the advent of indoor plumbing and antibiotics.  However the elements that make up a traditional Yule seem all the more dear to me as I attempt to celebrate the holidays Los Angeles style.  As many of you know I relocated to L.A. this past May and this is my first Christmas season away from the Northeast. Contrary to the belief I held as a New York chauvinist, L.A. does indeed “do Christmas.”  But like much else I’ve found here, the rules of the rest of America simply do not apply.  A certain amount of the strangeness that is an L.A. Christmas has to do with the local landscape and fauna.  Palm trees wrapped in string lights and festooned with stars are lovely but loose a little something when they line the more rundown parts of Santa Monica Blvd.  And while L.A.’s official tree is a high concept light installation downtown, the bright red tree of light bulbs atop the Capitol Records Building is the closest thing L.A. has to a symbol of the season.  Of course, the stores are decorated (some beautifully) and that helps.  One of the things I’ve always loved about Christmas in big cities is its ability to transform mundane store fronts and office towers into things of wonder.

And then there’s Santa.

Unlike New York where the “real” Santa can be found on the eighth floor of a department store on the corner of 34th Street and 7th Avenue, there doesn’t seem to be any one place to locate Kris Kringle here in the Southland.  He could be any number of places and in any number of guises.  For sheer authenticity, my vote goes to the Santa at The Grove (an outdoor shopping complex near The Farmer’s Market); he certainly looks the part— big, real beard, and he’s got the jolly thing down to a t.  For sheer shamelessness, it’s The Beverly Center’s Hunky Santa and his Candy Cane Dancers who replace “Classic Santa” in the evening hours at the upscale mall.  Hunky Santa is indeed hunky.  He’s young and buff and oh yeah… shirtless.

Go on honey, tell the semi-clothed bodybuilder what you want for Christmas.

And what can one say about the Candy Cane Dancers?  Surely they will prove a welcome distraction for mall weary boyfriends and husbands who’d rather be at home watching the Lakers lose.  It must be a nice change of pace for the “dancers” as well, as relatively few holiday shoppers will shove a 20 in their underpants and ask them to “Make ‘em shake for daddy.”

But for sheer only-in-L.A. strange, nothing tops the “Scientology Santa” at L. Ron Hubbard’s Winter Wonderland on Hollywood Blvd.  This Santa lords over a beautiful re-creation of his famed Artic village and workshop worthy of any film in a usually vacant lot adjacent to one of the church’s Hollywood office buildings.  To their credit, there wasn’t an e-meter in sight, and everyone seemed to be having a great time.  Although I think one of the tourists behind me had a bad case of body thetans.  Either that or he was wearing CK One.

I have no doubt that my trials over Christmas, like Scrooge’s, will cause me to love the holiday even more.  Until then, I’ll play my Christmas music, light my tree, eat too many cookies, drink a good deal more than I should and read Mr. Dickens’ “ghostly little book” again and again.  And so to answer my beloved Jeffrey’s question,

What about Christmas do you like so much?

I turn to Boz and his Christmas Carol:

There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say… Christmas among the rest.  But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round… as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.  And therefore, … though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!

Peace

Bob Speck lives and writes in Los Angeles.  He has no idea why.