Aaron M. Fortkamp

I’ve decided I’m fat. I’m over 200 pounds. I’ve never been over 200 pounds before. I’ve had to buy all new pants.

I read an article the other day about how cutting added sugars from your diet can in a short amount of time greatly affect your health in significant ways. The only one I remember offhand was that it could make your skin much happier, which of course I need (see: eczema) but it also occurred to me that added sugars could be making me fat. And unhappy—I just remembered another one from the article, your general mood is supposed to be improved.

I have not been in a great mood, lately. 

So I looked at the granola I’ve been eating a lot of recently and there’s 11 grams of added sugars per serving, and as I eat about 4 servings at a pop (I rely on breakfast for most of my day’s fiber, usually, and also to keep me full until lunch, as the bulk of my workday comes before lunch and can sometimes be six full hours without access to food), that’s 44 grams of added sugars from breakfast alone. 36 grams is the AHA’s daily recommendation for a 2000 calorie diet. Going over that once in a while won’t kill you, which is good (see: Christmas), but everyday by the end breakfast?

I went to the store and glanced down the cereal aisle at all the brightly colored boxes completely sans expectation of being able to actually eliminate added sugars from this portion of my day—until I noticed the oatmeal, which they slice with steel and advertise it as such, for some reason. The particular metallic alloy being used to cut up my food before it arrives to me has never occurred to me before, much less concerned me. But oatmeal has 0 grams of added sugar. I’ve had those packets of instant oatmeal plenty of times, but I know they put sugar in those. Won’t sugarless oatmeal taste like utter crap? But I decided to give it a go, even if they are lying and they do actually cut it with aluminum.

I bought an electric tea kettle to try and help with expediting my new oatmeal-based morning routine, but, turns out, it greatly prefers being microwaved as per the specifications laid out in the directions, which is to say, at half the power and for twice the time one might reasonably expect it would take to cook oatmeal in the microwave (packaging says 3:00, stir, 3:00 more), and also it veritably demands to be watched throughout the entire process else it may boil over at any moment like a science fair volcano. But aside from prep time, the change hasn’t been a big deal. It still supports fruit. I don’t like it with almond milk, so my calcium intake is taking a hit, but bowels are moving fine, skin seems… marginally happier? Mood has not improved. 

I also probably take too much sugar in my coffee, which sugar I am literally adding myself, realtime, completely independent from whatever algorithm dictates the formula that will sell the most cereal. So far I’ve cut back from three ice cream tasting spoons, which was the only size of spoon I could find that would fit inside my sugar bowl, to two. Probably going from about a whole teaspoon to about 2/3 a teaspoon, with one teaspoon containing about 4 grams of sugar. So basically I’ve cut about 1 gram of sugar. Go me. 

Because of this attempt at moderation, every time I make coffee now I am reminded of the guy I overheard in the break room saying he couldn’t take cream in his coffee because of his heart, his doctor said it was bad for his heart, and so now I wonder about that too. Should I be cutting back my creamer as well? I don’t use half and half, usually, the powdered non-dairy stuff suits me just fine. Does that stuff negatively affect the heart, or was he specifically talking about the dairy-derived creamers? Are those even actually bad or was his doctor just calling him fat? Does it do more heart damage than the coffee alone? What is it in the creamer that he could have been talking about that’s specific to heart-health related? Saturated fats? Trans fats? As I slowly pour in my creamer from the bulk-sized container, which is the only affordable way to partake in creamer of any variety, I stare at the amount accumulating on the surface and I think, should I stop? How much is too much? Is it risking my longevity to be pouring this into my morning coffee, and if so, how much makes it a risk, and is that risk worth the better taste and satisfaction compared to the browner, sharper version of the beverage that lacks adequate support from the cream?

I don’t wash my fruit. I have made the conscious decision that if not washing my fruit kills me, I will have deserved it.

I think about how I used to smoke, and how I’d heard one person, probably in a movie or on TV, who was firmly in the pro-smoking camp, say defiantly that so what if each cigarette took a few minutes off his life, they were the shitty minutes anyway, the ones at the end getting lopped off like a lizard’s tail, the implication being that just existing as an old person sucks too much to have any real value. I used to say I agreed because I really wanted to agree, I wanted not to think about it too much and therefore to agree. But I can’t stop myself from thinking. I’ve come to realize in the years since that your frame of reference for what life is, and therefore for what gives it value, goes through many phases. Right now I’m in what I think of as the parenting phase. While I will always be a parent, this phase will eventually come to an end. There will come a time when my parental duty does not dominate my life decisions. When seeing my son happy and thriving will not be the sole measure of my life’s value, because I won’t be seeing him happy and thriving, I won’t have as much of an effect on him, he’ll have gone, moved out, I’ll be lucky when he answers my calls. What am I supposed to do then, jump off a building? No, friend, but thanks for the suggestion, that will not be necessary because that will be a new phase, some kind of post-parenting phase for which I have no frame of reference yet, and there will be new priorities, new obsessions, for whose sake I will regularly fume at my current and former selves for not effectively predicting.

The phase before this current one I think of as grad school, including a brief marriage which feels not like its own phase so much as the coda to that particular arrangement. The one before that was overly existential and obsessed with love and sex and happiness and how those thing overlapped. Mostly this was during undergrad, and my first few years beyond, spent pondering what actually mattered in an adult life, such as whether a single adult life actually mattered, or if an adult life could matter if one were single. The phase before that was high school, and then it was puberty, and then childhood, the first phase of which I can say I was an active participant. At the time, kids are very aware of being in the kid phase, in that clearly adults exist on some other plane, and although they are factually aware of the inevitability of becoming adults themselves one day, kids have one phase from which to make any meaning, it is their entire frame of reference, everything else is strange and other and often seemingly in direct opposition, it is the state in which I always assume Jonathan Taylor Thomas was doomed to live out his entire life, having achieved perfection at 12 with no more room to evolve.

All of these phases I’ve gone through so far may as well have been completely different people. Do you realize, at 14, how much you’re going to appreciate your knees at 43? I’ve always taken the stairs because my first basketball coach ever said to always take the stairs because you’ll be thankful for your knees at 40, and he was absolutely correct, but I didn’t follow that advice for all these years for the sake of myself, the self who I am right currently now, I did it out of respect for that coach and his son my best friend, with whom I always took the stairs two at a time. Skipping steps, like rubber bands on our wrists, became an emblem of our friendship. And then later I did it to honor the memory of that coach and my best friend. But my appreciation for this advice these days is in all honestly almost entirely knee-based. I remember that sense of loyalty and the pleasure of devotion, I know factually what I felt when I became a voracious advocate of stair-taking, but I don’t exactly feel it anymore, so much as I feel its shadow.

Do I owe it to my self as an old man, who for all I know may or may not be completely miserable just due to the fact of his existence, do I owe it to him to obey vague secondhand implications of poor heart health practices, and succumb to drinking shitty coffee? Or none, I don’t really need it, it’s more a habit now than anything, a thing to do in the morning, a chore, a task that must needs be completed and therefore I must perform the steps preceding, the making of the coffee, the making of breakfast and the getting dressed and the getting out of bed. Mainly that last one. If I don’t get out of bed now I won’t have enough time to make coffee. That’s what gets me out of bed, the days I don’t have Alex. I don’t have to have the coffee, it doesn’t noticeably affect my wakefulness or my mood. I’ve been taking coffee in the mornings for so long now I do get a headache if I skip the caffeine, but I could get around that, or just tolerate it until it stops after a few weeks.

Or: do I owe it to my current self more, this brief pleasure of a sweet creamy hot treat in the cupholder beside me as I drive 45 minutes to a job I never meant to have, to perform work that in its own way contributes to an economic and political system tantamount to oligarchy that I thoroughly despise? How long can you delay gratification and still feel gratified? If I do come to my last days, will I even remember all the times I skipped the creamer and be thankful? Gratitude is, after all, what all happiness is based upon. If I won’t even be gratified, if I won’t even be happy then for depriving myself now, then what’s the point?

Of course, at the opposite extreme, how much can you indulge without producing an active hatred for yourself later on? Gratitude may get lost in the shuffle of time, but it’s always easy to latch onto a specific hatred if it allows the sensation of shifting the blame (even if that blame is for your former self).

It’s all about finding a balance, isn’t it. Probably. Right?

The creamer makes a little mountain, a volcanic island on the cup’s surface center, and you can watch the erosion eat away at the beaches, great tumbling chunks like icebergs breaking off a glacier, leading eventually to the mountain itself crumbling and sinking into the sea.

It’s been really, really hard lately to abstain in deference to the future. I don’t have any hope. I shudder to think of the world my son’s children will face. My best case scenario now is that they’ll move to a more evolved country, although where that might be is impossible to say, seems every country out there is more or less capable of Brexiting itself out of contention at any time. People are going hard at Biden and Kamala now, at the Democrat party as a whole, as though they had any choice in running the campaign that they ran, given who they are and who they are beholden to, they couldn’t have run the progressive, inspiring campaign that may have won people over because they are not at their cores progressive or inspiring people. They could’ve just as easily become Republicans, the both of them, it was only a question of compromise, of which values you choose to ignore. 

I’m trying more to deal with a sensation of entropy in the system, of the inevitable chaos that this was always bound to bring about, and how I was only given this time, this life, to choose whether or not to produce a child who would be in the same sinking boat except 37 years down the line. It feels impossible to fight back. What in the hell can be done to reverse course? That’s, that’s not even the right analogy, this is more like Snowpiercer isn’t it, the world is beyond saving, the only thing to be done is crash the train and hope we’re among the survivors left to rebuild.

The people he’s picking for his cabinet positions. Speaking of compromise. Every one of them long ago sold their souls. They have no beliefs left. They don’t stand for anything. This country doesn’t stand a chance. I don’t know why I pay attention anymore. I try not to. I don’t see the point of staying informed on how bad things are getting. Other people don’t. Those of us privileged enough to ignore it can ignore it. Honestly I could probably go my entire life without personally feeling the effects of all this. My son would not be able to, even if he chose to, which, if he’s like me… smh.

When my son is here, I can pretend. For a while. I can say to myself in the morning, I need to get out of bed because my son needs me to. I have to get to work on time because he needs me to. He’s still young enough now that I can pretend I can protect him. He thinks I can, at least. He depends on me now, but I cannot protect him from his own development, as he becomes more and more aware of this world and his place in it. He will only hunger to understand more, and the more he learns—I can’t prevent him from learning—the more he will realize how fucked this country, this planet, and the human race in general really are—and how much could have easily been prevented. 

If I pour in too much creamer, I’m afraid it means I’m giving in, giving up, because a giant part of me tells me every day that’s exactly what I should do. But it terrifies me. Maybe one day it won’t but it still does now, here, while I’m in this phase, my parenting phase, while so much of my day to day anxiety is spent on my son and how he feels, in this phase I exist within an empathetic chokehold I can’t escape, just thinking about him feeling this was one day and wanting to give up is… is too much.

If I don’t pour in enough, I’m worried about getting through the next hour, I’m worried I’ll lose momentum and my keel will hit the reef and there I’ll stay, not really upset about it, not really anything, poised at the stern, looking out at the destination I’d been anticipating for so long and not super caring if the boat ever comes loose again—after all, this is as good a place to be as any. To an outside observer this may look the same as giving up, but it’s more like a forgetting. Not a subconscious decision to stop caring, but it’d be as though all experiential ambition had dried up, evaporated in the sun, vanished like it never even existed. When my son makes me laugh. When he does something amazing, says something nonsensical and perfect, surprises me with affection, there’s a me that can get something out of that. Distant most of the time, but he exists. It’s like he peeks in from another dimension, appreciates the moment for what it is, and then goes away again, and I can look at him while he experiences the moment and once he’s gone remember his coming and what it felt like to see him feel that. I don’t get to keep it for myself. Not exactly. I get a memory of a memory. But my god do I depend on those secondhand memories to keep me going in the present, and if that guy stops showing up, if I’m not doing enough sensorially or experientially to attract his attention, if I can’t keep him interested enough to stick around in a dimension nearby so he can make his fleeting appearances—then I’m lost. My son will laugh, and I’ll feel nothing. 

If I pour in the exact right amount? Is that even a thing? Would I know it if I did? 

The problem with depression is that there often is no right way to do something, only ways to do it less wrong. Which way is less wrong, which way do I err? It’s a daily decision. I have to determine my priorities on that particular day, and hope for the best.

Definitely trying to cut out the sugar, though. I really don’t want to be fat.