There are 1,920 calories (kcal) in a single 100g, yellow bag of mini eggs. This is precisely the right amount to end my whole world. This is agonising. Let's roll back against the winds of time, let the Earth spin backwards on its axis for a moment, and take ourselves back in time 3
1/
2 weeks. The sky is a brighter shade of whatever ambivalent colour we can conclude this is: greyish, murky, misty blorange, sprinkled with toxic glitter, stagnant like the depressing glitz in carbonated water. My arms and heels are equally tired from taking a long train, carrying all my essential possessions in a suitcase, from the comfort of my green, warm and friend-filled quad in Balliol all the way to my timelost little hicktown of Southwick where no one knows who George Eliot is. My room in Oxford is gutted and bare, and my room in Brighton is by contrast full of the forgotten trappings of youth, and memories of schoolyards and friends who like I did the trapping, forgot about me. It is only when I am nearly at Southwick (catching a connecting train from Southampton to Hove, somewhere on that stretch...) that I begin to realise that my own thoughts on the train have been identical to Neville's hateful inner monologue in
The Waves, in a similar scene, and it brings my mood somewhere deep underground to know that I am so easily captured by another's words, unintentionally. I put down
Lunar Park, which I have just begun reading, into the bag with
The Great Gatsby, which I have just finished on the same journey, and prepare myself for the trudge up Southwick Street, past Southwick Square, back to monotony.
And I am hauled sometime that evening by arms not my own, not even present in a physical sense (the arms of fate, predestination, determinism, inevitability, hopelessness, and inertia, and other words which evoke my preoccupations) upon a cold, white, metallic square and stare down to the glowing, red, digital display of numbers. I am not going to say exactly what the scales weighed me as, but it was grotesque. A stone over my last weight count, 8 weeks prior, which itself was pushing the boundaries of what was considered thin or "normal" weight. My mother says to me, later, that I look like I've put on weight. This is disheartening. This is why I'm single, this is why sometimes I'm sad for no reason, this is why people don't take to me without my effort, this is why things always go wrong. Some terrible, unlucky number. So, I vow to lose (at least) a stone before I go back to Oxford. My other objectives are to finish
Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, to start and finish
Atomised (
Les Particules elementaires) by Michel Houellebecq and
À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. (I would later, get distracted by another title,
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, and decide to temporarily delay my reading of
À rebours.) The results of the weight loss vow were almost instantaneous within a week: something like 8 pounds in a week, just by changing from Coke to Coke Zero and cutting out inessential snacks and seconds. The only gym I can afford is a free one, though, and the only free one is ironically back in Oxford, but problematically below the Pantry and opposite the bar.
However, weight has become stuck at Xst 6lbs, which is still many pounds too many and I cannot see the weight loss in the mirror so I worry I am grotesquely fat still. I worry this, despite knowing all the symptoms of body image dysmorphia, etc. etc. but am comfoted by knowing that my critical awareness when it comes to myself has never been impaired before, so I have come to trust my eyes in this instance. I am not fat, per se, I am not stupid enough to quite contend that - but I miss the skinny me of 14, or the brief time when I was 17 before my A Levels that going to the gym had made me slightly toned. I blame Balliol bar, the sedentiary life of an English student and my discovery of English breakfasts, courtesy of Pantry.
I've woken up and had an ultra-lite breakfast. Ultra. Plum tomatoes on toast, if you must know. Then, skipped lunch, and had dinner - kievs, roast potatoes. Fairly carby, but way under my 2000 calory daily allowance. I'm ill, too, so energy exertion is limited. I treat myself to a bag of mini eggs (curse the season) while I sit back to watch an indie film about kids on prescription drugs (
The Chumscrubber) which feels like it's black and cynical enough to garner a few chuckles out of me, and then turn around the bag (now reduced to two or three eggs of vile colours, due to my rapid snacking) and read that each egg contains 65 whole calories. What's more, an entire bag is 1920 calories. What. The. Fuck. Why do they even sell these, when they know a single person is likely to gorge and eat them all? My entire day of practically starving myself (I am a very hungry boy) is ruined for nought, and I have now essentially eaten double my daily allowance.
I am going to get fatter and fatter and it feels like there's nothing I can do. I wanted now to describe in achingly ill-constructed metaphors the problems of my life hatching from chocolate eggs, and the contents of my mind falling like napalms from my head into the bag of Cadburys, and myself strung on the cross and rising days later as an Easter Bunny, but I can't be bothered at all. I have exhausted myself mentally, and this is in itself a worry. I will put it down to flu, or whatever this ailment is, but I cannot be certain.
I am not going to Revenge tonight, much like I didn't go last week, because it is no fun. And because I am not thin enough to have fun in a club like that. And because no matter who I am that night, in what mode of mind or state of soul, nothing ever goes my way. (He says, vaguely contemplating an impromptu reading of a Morrissey ballad.)
I am staring at the yellow bag, full of the evil chocolate eggs, and my eyes are hungry for revenge on some nameless entity which has made me this way.
(He relents.)
Please, please, please, let me get what I want, this time.
Finishing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, I realise I have never had my heart broken and lifted and broken again quite so many times in one day, all in one novel. I suppose this is probably due to seeing myself in the lead, Art Bechstein, to some extent. And to the other character, Arthur Lecomte. It irritates me wholeheartedly that now, the Hollywood adaptation by Rawson Marshall Thurber of Dodgeball fame complete excises Arthur from the film, compresses his character traits into a supporting character who is brought into the foreground and entirely adds a new love interest, as if to create an excuse to cast the much-overused Sienna Miller. In taking the Cleveland character and making him a bisexual biker kid instead of the devil-may-care straight guy, they destroy the film's message about sexless friendship. In removing Arthur, they make EVERYthing that happens in the novel entirely implausible and impossible. In removing the words of the author for those of the arrogant screenwriter, you alienate the fans of the book. Naturally, what would be (as with the adaptation of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys), movie gold has been transformed into a dreck forgettable film that from release day onwards cries out for a remake. I will see it, to watch the train wreck.
Also this month in America, is the movie adaptation of The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis. Due to a combination of backwards American social mores, and (ironically, given Ellis' undeserved controversies) institutionalised Hollywood misogyny, the film we are given is now one about Amber Heard's breasts and soulless debauchery. Thanks to producer mishandling, the film has strayed far from the original premise of the adaptation, while remaining somehow quite similar to the source material. After taking away the director who worked on the script and satirical vision for three years - who had something more like The Rules of Attraction, presumably intended - and replacing him with an Australian director known for boring movies, who has never seen 1980s Los Angeles, they have destroyed this movie beyond recognition. Both movies, while fundamentally very opposed (Ellis' nihilism vs. Chabon's sentimentality), have similarities: pretty American youths fucking around and experimenting in 1980s, and the mutual miscasting of the admittedly delectable Jon Foster. Nevertheless, an Ellis adaptation remains a must-see for me.
