I Don't Want To Be Fat

I apologize in advance for the selfie… and the body hair.  I’m completely prepared for the jokes.  Is that a still from the new Planet of the Apes movie?   David Hasselhoff called, he wants his BayWatch chest hair back.  I am as mortified as you are.  I don’t do a lot of selfies, and never with my shirt off.  I had to take about 42 pictures to even come close to rummaging up the courage to post that picture.  I won’t be that jerk-off that selfie showcases every minimal physical improvement littered with obnoxious hashtags like,  #tricep, #backday, #gymrat (AKA #douchebag).  For any guys that spend a considerable time at the gym, social media has become the outlet for soft core pornographic playgirl selfies to nurture their narcissism.  Not to say any of my photos qualify for playgirl, maybe Animal Planet (Alright fuckers leave me alone).  I’ve come a long way.  I would do a before and after but there is no way I’m showing my fleshy, hairy, dunlap (over the belt) fat in open forum.  You won’t be calling me brave today.

So here’s the story.  Last year I got fat.  I wasn’t watching what I ate.  Actually, I watched all of it.  Such a weird saying.  It’s not like the food snuck into my mouth.  Got up to 262 lbs.   I’m sure there are emotional and physiological reasons for my physical decline;  but in a nutshell I became a great big fat ass.  I started wearing the same four T-shirts that I thought would hide the hideousness of my gruesome exterior.  It probably just appeared that I believed laundry was optional.  I washed the shirts…for the most part.  It didn’t really matter, because I stayed indoors as much as possible.  I was working about 80 hours a week anyway.  My main vice was nicotine and candy.  Cherry Sours, Taffy, skittles, E-cigs, chewing tobacco, and ice cream.  Maybe cookies.  Maybe Chocolate.  My sweet tooth vacuumed all sorts of sugar laced, narcotic like goodness into my pie hole.  I fucking love pie.

January 2014, I started working out kinda.  1-2 a week I’d half-heartedly check the exercise box to justify the disgusting amounts of food I would later stuff into my garbage disposal of a mouth.  In May, I found a MeetUp for pick up soccer and started playing.  I was 5’11’ and 262 lbs playing soccer.  Smart people know this isn’t a great idea.  I got away with playing without injury until Thursday, July 24th 2014.  This was the day I partially blew my ACL.  My doctor quickly pointed out what happens when people run overweight.  She even compared me to a contestant on the BIGGEST LOSER.  Which is exactly how I felt.  Like a loser.

So that was it.  Another lesson brought on by extreme pain.  I got one of those free training sessions at the gym and learned I was an Endomorph body frame.  There are two other types of body frames, but fuck you guys.  The other two have an easier time losing weight.  Knowing I was an Endomorph changed how I looked at my diet completely.  Basically, when I eat carbs it turns into insulin (sugar) and stores it as fat.  If I don’t eat carbs my body goes into a state of Ketosis and I lose weight.  So I eat meat (mostly chicken and fish), vegetables, selected fruits, and drink protein shakes.   I also take CLA and Fish Oil.  I try to eat around 50 grams of carbs a day (Rice, fruit, sweet potatoes).  I work out about 5 days a week.  I do high reps to keep my heart rate up because, I can’t do any cardio because of my stupid fucking ACL injury.   Since my injury, I’ve lost over 40 lbs. and my bench max is 325 lbs.  I’d like to shake another 20 lbs or so but it will be slow going with my body frame and lifting regiment.

I have always struggled with weight.  I have a great knowledge of fitness, but for whatever reason have fallen off from time to time.  My end goal is to find a realistic diet and workout lifestyle that I can stick with for more than a year.  Life can suck and food is a great escape.  Lifestyle tends to justify a lot of it.  Great meals can be great entertainment. 78 Million people in the US are obese.  About 32% of folks in Indiana are obese.  I hope my little story reaches someone.  Look up Endomorph, that shit sucks.  If you’re the other body types your regiment is different.  I really didn’t do anything special but change my diet and workout.  If you’re sick of being referred to as, “big guy”, or the “heavy set dude” or whatever seeker sensitive synonym is used to describe your outrageous physical state.  Get some help.  Don’t be fat anymore.  Easier said than done, but not impossible.          

#stevencooley
#triceps

DayPression

The white noise in my head is the best way to describe it.  I can’t quite put together a collection of thoughts that are valuable.   I am struggling to leave the comfort of my bed with the sheets wrapped around my feet and body.  My bulldog snuggles close.  He even senses something isn’t quite right, or he is just happy he gets to lay in bed with someone.  Either way, I am down and out.  I am at the bottom again looking up for some sort of miraculous sign from a god, or entity to tell me life will somehow shape up.  Optimism is a luxury.  These moments have always passed.  They rarely last too long.  They tend to resemble a sprained ankle.  A nagging physiological pain that renders me useless for X amount of days and then gets better over time.   There is no emotional warranty.  Terms and conditions may vary.  Have I ever been diagnosed with depression?  No.  Have I been diagnosed with anything?  Of course.  I’m an American.  We are culturally obsessed with feelings.  Despair is patriotic. 

I have been schooled to take my feelings with a grain of salt.  In fact, the term of resonance is, “fuck my feelings.”  They lie to us, or at least to me.  The more I listen to the monsters and demons in my head the more perplexed and diluted I become.  The dismissal of your conscious emotional state is the exact over-exaggeration that you succumb to.  It would be like ignoring the check engine light of your car, claiming bullshit!  What does this car know about its engine?  Feelings are a response to something more substantial.  So, of course you have to listen to how you feel sometimes.  Here is where it gets tricky.  What about the ever misleading term, “follow your heart”?  Follow it where?  There are plenty of studies siting the unhappiness of current occupation and the rise of suicide.  Suicide.  Scary word.  If you have experienced this in any capacity you understand that it’s the most confusing, and backwards grief one can ever experience.  To us artistic types, suicide is quite romantic.  Cowardly to the religious, but putting a stop to whatever madness plagues your waking hours seems like a noble retreat from breathing.  It isn’t a retreat, it’s retirement.  That part is hard to grasp.  Maybe there is a fairy tale belief that you will be hovering around while your friends and family try to comprehend the whys and hows.  That is unlikely.  You’ll probably just be fucking dead.  No more racing thoughts, no more disenchantment, and maybe not the peace that we always associate with death.  It is likely just a cold nothing.  From dust to dust.  The Bible might of gotten that one right.

I like movies about anti-heroes and rags to riches cinematic sonnets.  Pursuit of Happiness, Ray, Social Network, The Middle Men are a couple that give me goosebumps.  I relate to these anomalies and find myself daydreaming my existence into the same circumstances or bigger.  It’s the obsession of the movie metaphor that gets my wheels turning at an unhealthy pace.  As much as I adore day dreaming, I am pretty sure it opens the portal for the other psychological self-banter.  Pity.  Self-pity.  There is my dilemma.  To dream or not to dream?   My overall experience and personal ailments place me in a low statistical category to make anything of myself, but I have.  Maybe that should be good enough.  Maybe I should be content to be the person I am today and appreciate the things I have.  Those notions seem preposterous to me.  They seem like a cop out.   The compromises I made in the name of “doing the right thing” make me nauseous.  It has nothing to do with people in my life.  I dearly, dearly love everyone that is so kind to give me the time of day.  God knows I don’t always deserve it.  The pressure is on.  It is on earlier for our children and youth.  Do you tell them to follow their heart or do the right thing?  Throwing cliches at people, and calling it advice, is by far the most irresponsible dialogue we could ever have with a loved one.  All and all, everyone mentally masturbates a little different.  I hope we all find the gold at the end of the rainbow after traveling the road less traveled.  Know what I mean?  If first you DON’T succeed - Try, Try, Try, Try, try again.  I will leave you with this thought.  Pablo Picasso tells us, Art is a lie that makes us realize truth…  and he was the epitome of mental health.

My Homo-Erotic Relationship with Jesus

I was still learning my ABCs and watching cartoons on a black and white TV when I experienced the most abusive relationship I would ever have.   I wasn’t sure who this man was that needed me to accept him, but I knew my parents were profoundly proud when he entered me.  Entered into my heart of course.  What did you think I meant?  In the beginning, the rules were simple.  I couldn’t put anything before him, steal, lie, hurt people, and had to obey my parents.  Sounded reasonable.  What if I fall short?  I’m 5, and sometimes my brother and I didn’t get along.  ETERNAL DAMNATION!   I was thinking I’d get a time out or a spanking, but being burned alive was the cost of crossing him.  Here’s the kicker, if you get on bended knee and tell him you’re sorry, he’ll will forgive you.  So I’ve been on bended knee hoping to feel his hand on my head to receive comfort and relief for a long time.

I was to have a personal relationship with this man.  He knew my every thought and knew my heart.  Just in case I forgot, I was to eat his body and drink his blood.  We gleefully danced while singing about his physicality and personality all the time.  I bowed before this man to give him everything. I was told he was angry but just, loving yet jealous, and merciful (today it’s called bi-polar).  This was just the beginning.

Grade school flew by and I began to have a better understanding of my situation.  Apparently this guy wasn’t here, but he could come back at any moment.  My every moment was like a kidnapping movie where the victim quickly uses a cell phone or finds a knife (to cut the ropes) before the assailant returns.  The message to me was becoming more intense.  It was made abundantly clear that he should be the only man in my life.   No one should come before him.  I kinda understood, but I just shed my awkwardness and started to get some attention from the fairer sex.  And that is when things started getting complicated. 

Her skin was smooth and eyes wide as we touched.  The emotional aftermath was painful and disconcerting.  I would quickly return to him on bended knee to confess my unfaithfulness.  It was demanded I never touch myself or lose my sacred virginity.  We are the bride and he is the groom.  Upon marriage would be the only time he’d allow my human desires be fulfilled.  Marriage was a model that embodied the union of the Church and Christ.  So if I never got married I could count on that church marriage deal.  The foreplay would be over and someday, somehow I would get to consummate this thing.   Isn’t that kinda…anyway…

Homosexuality started to Will & Grace it’s way into our culture, and 10 verses (that mostly only talk about male homosexuality [if at all]) started blasting from the Soap Box.  I co-signed the rhetoric to avoid any volcanic pitfalls that might spontaneously engulf my soul.   Again, my experiences differed significantly from the poorly represented man I was bowing to.  The complete avoidance of the human experience is impossible.  All of it can’t be bad?  Can it?  I started to veer from the strict teaching of human emotional sacrifice and constant obedience to the inconsistency of skewed man’s interpretation of truth.  I got free in a new way.  Free to be sexual, and develop by own set of moral boundaries.  Free to receive the touch of a woman, and listen to a more broad understanding of right and wrong.  Free to intertwine naked skin with consensual understandings of the morning’s light and act like a person not drudging through theology.  I couldn’t help but reflect at the relationship I had with that man and the manipulation of my emotions, thoughts, ideas, spirituality, and my body.  The complete castration of my sexuality began before I could tell you how many letters were in the alphabet.  Hedged on a promise from a ghost, I was manipulated into the most homo-erotic actions I have ever known to occur.  It’s not that they are against homosexuality.  They are against all sexuality, unless you are receiving it while prostrate from the man on high who will save you from the fire.  From where I sit;  Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.  Will you be gay for Jesus?  If you are gay,  Jesus isn’t interested.  He’s only converting the straight. 

BR Shooting - Response worse than the Violence?

As a Broad Ripple resident I was horrified to learn about the violent shooting that took place Friday, July 4th at 2am.  No one wants to live somewhere they fear their safety is in jeopardy.  I viewed multiple media outlets on the news and social media.  For some reason I started to get a little uneasy and wasn't sure why.  As I drove home from a UFC fight (July 5th) with my 15 year old nephew and his buddy at 12:30 AM; I started to reflect on the situation and it hit me like a ton of bricks.  Will the response be worse?  Broad Ripple Avenue was flooded with police cars overlooking the sparse streets and vacant clubs.  Obviously, the heavy police presence was an appropriate response to deter crime after this incident.  But how will the community respond?  What about the neighborhoods and businesses?  What about the people?  How will we respond?  These questions have created a burden within me that is more terrifying than this random shooting.  My nephew is a 15 year old black teenager that lives with my wife, myself, and ten year old son.  He's brilliantly inquisitive and captivated, and loves to ride his bike around his uncle's proclaimed safe neighborhood.  He loves music, video games, dance, video games, art, sports, chatting on his iPhone, and every once in a while is a little rebellious.   Even in moments of obstinance he finds his smile.  He is just a kid trying to find his way.  Race issues are constantly discussed in our home.  It is necessary to understand your culture, what is going on, and why.  It is our job to arm him with the facts.

So when I read about the Broad Ripple Neighborhood Association citing that "outsiders" were the culprits I get a little scared.  What do you consider an outsider?  A black person?  A non-white?  When News Feed responses (of the News Media Posts) generalize certain clothing styles, hairdos, tire/rim sizes, and shades of skin as "thugs", I am petrified at how you would like my nephew to present himself as he rides his bike.  When we as a community (predominantly Caucasian) feed into the fear instead of working towards educational, social, and professional solutions I start to wonder about what to tell my nephew about why.  Why do we get looks in public?  Why can't I wear my hair a certain way?  Why can't I go out past dark?  Why? 

I don't condone this violence.  I won't begin to understand why you need to bring a gun to go dancing or meet girls.  I used to fight with my fists and that served me just fine.  There are reasons.  There are explanations.  The music didn't do it.  Can't blame it on the alcohol.  Maybe it was gang related.  I don't know.  How are we going to respond as a community to ensure our fear doesn't turn into misguided, ignorant, complacent, generalizing, racism?   I said it.  Far be it from me to have an answer today, but hopefully this produces a glimpse of clarity and reduces your fear to sympathetic concern for the community as a whole.  If I'm living in Indianapolis, I'm living in Broad Ripple.  I fear that these types of incidents change our perceptions in drastic ways.  So when you see a young, black teenager blazing down Broad Ripple Avenue on his bike I hope you don't see a thug, or an outsider, or a gangsta.  I hope you see a kid whose uncle just kicked him off Xbox, and needed to feel the air in his face on his way to BRICS to grab a scoop and muster up the courage to launch his beautiful smile at a pretty girl.


S. Cooley