Cloud-Seeding for Manna 1

DAY ONE

6:00 am

“You're a glutton for punishment.”

If only punishment sated my already-growling intestines.

Here I am again performing a two-day fast, and the mere thought of this undertaking makes the first hunger pang come in like a bowling ball dropped on a throw pillow.

We'll see how it goes. I'm five minutes in. A great start!

7:00 am

I shower. Let me preface this by stating that, though nary a morsel shall pass my lips, I will be partaking of coffee. I don't care what you say or think. It's my fast and I'll do what I wanna.

So: coffee. Coffee with coconut oil and some monk fruit, because hazelnut cream is wack as fuck. Bye bye, Coffeemate; hello, ketosis.

Caffeine is its own food group. You don't see it on the food pyramid because it's the base.

I did my first two-day fast a month ago along with a coworker. Word got out that I occasionally fasted on Tuesdays. He told me he did three-day fasts for religious purposes. I do mine out of a blend of masochism, health, and a bit of religion. We ended up doing a fast together, both of us succeeding.

8:00 am

Why do this?

My mitochondria and I are beefing. I am not on speaking terms with my sympathetic nervous system. I have been subjected to increasing agoraphobia these last few years. It has nothing to do with Covid; it's the result of having been trapped in an elevator eight years ago and an increased sense of dread when not being the one in charge—as in: not in charge of flying the plane, or operating the Ferris wheel. So I am offering up these two days as penance.

I am stringing my large and small intestines across the altar, the limestone floor leading to the Holiest of Holies bathed in blood and chyle and sadness. Once strapped down upon the altar as a human pentacle, nailed in place by the fixed stars, I rifle all intent up into God's firmament, cloud-seeding for manna.

When the Israelites fled Egypt to wander in the desert for forty years, they subsisted on manna from heaven.

9:00 am

This won't be so hard. All I have to do is go through the motions of a typical Tuesday. One step at a time. Step. Breathe. Step. Breathe. Substitute regular time slots allocated to eating with productive things, like reading, writing, and language learning. YouTube, if I must. If I must.

10:00 am

We are where are thoughts are. Where we direct our attention to a large extent determines our state of mind. Alas, I regret having made this decision. I try to remain positive. It's too early to grow despondent. What a weak bitch I already am. Already—

11:00 am

When you take away a large chunk of Maslow’s Hierarchy, there’s a rescrambling of circuitry that undercuts many facets of our reward system. A long day of work not topped off with an onion ring tower raises the question, What is it all for?

12:00 pm

Lunchtime. Or what it used to be. I run into groups of people at a strip mall, these millennials huddled in semicircles under parasols, feasting on Reubens, Hawaiian barbecue, gyros, burritos, and pizza. For all their civility, they look like packs of savanna hyenas gathered at the bloody ribcages of felled antelope, their jaws slobbering with cartilage and enzymes.

Life is meaningless without finger foods. Try typing this up after having had three oxygen sliders. Your thumbs aren't greasy, but they shake enough to where you misspell everything.

1:00 pm

I don’t so much crave certain food items so much as wish for the satiety that comes along with having eaten. Such is progress!

I have more patience with people and don’t experience the pangs of being hangry as I did the first time I conducted this experiment. Ready below to see what happened when I first documented a fast.

If you read the above post, you will notice that I was spinning round and round uncontrollably on a carousel of interpersonal rage and endless urges of burying my face in other people’s carne asada nachos. I railed against society’s gluttony all while envying every bit of it. Again, progress.

2:00 pm

It's the halfway point of Day One—which means we're one-quarter through. These time-crunching tendencies are the bane of my hypervigilance. If I never regarded clocks like this, I would never have to do this, and I'd be adrift in a cornucopia of fruit, with chocolate-coated palace concubines feeding me grapes and gummy eunuchs beer-funneling me Sprite Zero as I remain sunken in my throne of sourdough.

3:00

A little clarity has set in. Enough brain fog to deviate flights has largely lifted. The only way out is through. I figure I'll listen to some music. I open Spotify. Everyone sings about love. Too much damn love. There are too many love songs in the world. Where are the ditties to Doritos, the paeans to pancakes, the operatic arias to Louisiana Rub boneless wings? I turn Spotify off. I should be communing with God anyway. The first pellet of manna has fallen at my feet. I plug it into my mouth and trip balls on grace.

4:00 pm

There's a black hole growing where my stomach once was. The molecular mistake will have a chain reaction that will mow down the universe of desire, puckering in on itself to where only presence matters. What use have I for pretzel bits when there is all of heaven IV'd into my arm?

5:00 pm

The inventors of fasting called it fasting so as to dupe the faster into thinking it goes by quickly. They should have just leveled with us by calling it slowing. Each ten-second increment dilates to take up the room usually relegated to minutes. Minutes in turn bookend holy wars and hours comprise dynasties. Time is a joke only if you know you're its punchline. Be present, Grasshopper, and ovoid Eternity will crack open its shell to spill forth that delightful yolk of serenity.

I'll employ the usual sports metaphors to keep going. Keep your eye on the prize, Pain is weakness leaving your body, The more you do the less your opponent does. Embracing the suck doesn't make it suck less.

But God doesn't peruse my junk mail. My burnt offering goes unheard, never mind heralded.

Nietzsche is known to have quipped, Without music, life would be a mistake. Good point, Freddy—but without food, life is an abomination.

I've tried all my life to force myself into believing in a figurehead called God. If a two-day fast ain't gonna make it happen, what will all the nondualism I've been consuming via the Vedantist Hindus and the Kabbalists, then I should just go ahead and supplicate unto the entire universe. Something deep-seated within me won't allow me to look toward a father figure. It's surely Oedipal.

6:00 pm

I meditate for fifteen minutes. I pretended I'm an Old Testament prophet sidled up to the River Chebar, curled in a ball, offering all twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet—ten toenails+ten fingernails+one penis tip+one tongue=twenty-two. I wish to cry in supplication, but my dry body hasn't the nutrients to manufacture tears.

The meditation flew by. That's the spirit! Be present and the future can't get you! I allow my body's molecules to take up all the space they need, and my breathing to be gluttonous with the atmosphere. What can a kale salad do for me when all the earth is my cake?

7:00 pm

It's easier to process present pain when you project into the future. It's the ability to extrapolate into two days hence, when this will all be a distant memory and my waistline will be the talk of the town.

That headache from earlier has diminished, lowering to a slow burn that ends up being the birth of a halo.

Allelujah, Autophagy! In this internecine war between Calories and Ketones, the mortar-shelled battlefield that is my body reverberates with the promise of sprouting roses atop the shallow graves of fallen Epicurian cravings, and where once mental bandwidth was misspent on perusing menus and scouring for food trucks, there is now the clumsy dancing on the air like a baby deer on ice.

8:00 pm

Hallucinations have started. I saw a panther out of the left corner of my eyes. Since I lack the mental horsepower to read or converse sensibly with my wife and daughter, I start rewatching Game of Thrones. Even Tyrion Lannister gets to swill wine.

9:00 pm

I am able to read twenty pages of The Zohar, Vol. 3. Lech Lecha. None of the wisdom inherent in its pages helps to curtail the murderous hunger.

I feel the substance of my physical self grow tired, its integrity something it's no longer invested in.

10:00 pm

Time for bed. Thank God! To brush or not to brush teeth? It's not like I ate anything. I brush teeth. Good night.

THE TAKEAWAY:

When the desire-fulfillment equation is undermined, the mind clamors for something to latch onto for meaning. Once gratification of any sort is not to be found, the person must go within to establish contentment with whatever ingredients it can find, no longer of the external world. This forces the mind to transmute the present into an ovoid vehicle of contentment that is self-sufficient instead of reliant upon sensory input, and even, more extremely, nutrition.

This experience may well give rise to a promise, a spark, that may light up the tinder of worldly dissatisfaction into a great conflagration. The body becomes the athanor of alchemical practice, cooking away desire and asphyxiating the ever-so-nagging flame that consumes our attention by forcing us to preoccupy ourselves with the search for culinary delight that isn't just done out of the honest need for sustenance.

The icing on top of the cake is that when we do return to recreational foraging, the delights have lost none of their allure. Instead, appreciation for every bite sets in, and enjoyment tempered by moderation becomes the new sustainable paradigm.

COME BACK TOMORROW FOR DAY TWO!

Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK.

Crushed Trachea Blues is a fun, literary murder mystery featuring suicide by jiu-jitsu, an AI Charles Manson, and lots of tacos. It is available in ebook and paperback.