I’ll Start Tomorrow
There’s a specific order of operations happening right now: I push the belly sideways with one hand, reach the keyboard with the other, and the double-fried paprika chips disappear into my face on some kind of autopilot. This is the desk life. You sit down at it and the day just sort of happens around you.
Moving means unplugging a phone or fetching fresh tissues for whatever stress-release situation I’ve gotten myself into. When the calendar says sport, I read that as a suggestion I can respectfully decline. The bike stays locked because I’m always running late for something I’m doing from a chair.
The eating is structured around efficiency, because there’s always one more thing to finish. Pizza, burgers, the delivery app—I’ve been so dependent on food delivery these past two months that I’ve racked up enough loyalty points to have fed a small nation and everyone who ever told me this was a bad habit. Fast food that arrives in thirty minutes is the most honest product the modern world has ever produced.
The moments where I hold it together—take the bike, order the goat cheese salad (which genuinely is good, I’ll admit that), drink water—tend to end around 3:30 in the morning, when I find myself at a Burger King, drunk, screaming for Bacon Cheese Nuggets and Country Potatoes with the dignity of a child who’s been told no. Hot wings on top of that. For recovery.
None of this is my fault. That much should be obvious. The blame goes to television—specifically to Doug Heffernan of Queens, whose entire comedic existence rests on making vegetables look like something only deeply insecure people eat. Colonel Sanders appears in my dreams, chasing me through a field of oversized corn, and the nightmare gets worse if I stop eating his product. I am a passive victim of the calorie economy and I would appreciate everyone getting off my case about it.
That said: Burger King rotates its menu constantly and the food has always tasted identical. Like smoked vagrants. Every single time. The calorie frisbees from call-a-pizza operations, drowned in grease, cheese stacked to a height that probably costs some poor guy his fertility—I’ve accepted those as a structural feature of my diet. The Asian noodle stalls I keep ordering from, though. I’ve given them enough chances. Before I buy those again, I’ll march into a war zone in nothing but an elephant-print thong.
Fashion people stay thin somehow. I’ve observed this and have a theory: they subsist partly on marriage proposals from fifty-something men in provincial towns who’ve been following their blog since 2007. Special diet. Not easily replicated.
So what changes? I’m not about to become a different person—no quitting accounts, no cycling across America in search of authentic selfhood. But I’m noticing things. Slower reactions. Tiredness that arrives before it’s earned. Sitting down to eat something and not even enjoying it, which is the real humiliation here. The laziness was supposed to feel good. That was the whole deal.
A bike ride occasionally. A park bench, a book, some actual sunlight. Sex, with a person, more than once a year. Small corrections, not a new life. The internet doesn’t sleep, yes, but I could at least eat something green before it keeps me up again.
Tomorrow, though. I still have McDonald’s vouchers.