A little over a year ago, I started doing keto with a waistline of 46 inches.

By late January I had dropped it to 41″. Then progress slowed without ever quite stalling.

Mid-May: 39″.

Yesterday, an honest carefully measured 37″.

My goal in the beginning was 35″, but I’m not obsessed about those last two inches anymore. What I do care about is building up certain muscles (the abdominis transversus in particular), about continuing to eat low-carb but caring less about fat and more about protein, and most of all about having more energy in certain forms.

More motivation. More libido. Cultivating a state, as Mr. DeLauer put it in a video I watched today, where “effort feels good“.

That’s going to involve getting back on my meds too. The first few months of being off them (for financial and psychological reasons) were pretty painless, but the last couple–not so much, and it’s getting worse as time goes by.

Down in the poor skinny hole I’ve dug for myself, I am developing reasons for wanting more energy. Or more precisely, I want to move myself in certain directions that require the projection of greater psychic and libidinal effort (and having that effort feel good)

.,.

There are people in this world, near and far, who disapprove of me.

I have made a kind of sub-career of telling those people, in many elegant and erudite ways, to go fuck themselves. Paradoxically, this practice has sometimes drawn approval to me. I’ve been praised for my integrity, specifically, and for me memorably.

Fair enough. As far as it goes. It might be true that I am a little more integrated than most.

In this time of low energy though, I have reflected upon the disapproval of the majority, and taken their (often implied) criticisms seriously, instead of simply lashing back at them for being wrong in the head–which they still are, mostly–but maybe not entirely.

I think that in spite of the blessings of my real and imagined practices of integrity, I have been … how do I put it? Lazy? No, not quite. A-motivated, might be closer. Lacking in ‘moxie’, as one well-meaning critic once tried to suggest.

Yes. I can be fairly criticized, for being relatively low-moxie. I have, routinely, failed to take the initiative, to grasp destiny in both hands like the horns of a proverbial bull.

What I want you to understand today is that this failure is not entirely attributable to a lack of character over here on my side of the world, as some theatrically disappointed people would have it.

It has a scientific biological basis. It is rooted in the major medical condition that fell on me like a deeply mixed blessing, even before I left the womb.

I didn’t even start becoming a man until my mid-twenties.

It took at least ten years after that for my Maleness to become an accepted and acceptably real fact, to me and to the people closest to me.

In the decades between 16 and 36, it suffered a lot of neglect, from people who really should have paid more attention, cared more; and a fair amount of active damaging abuse (particularly from fathers, and would-be fathers, which may explain a lot to you about my attitudes toward paternalism, and authority, and those who would ‘rule’).

All during that time, almost every bit of the progress I made toward manhood I made solely and painstakingly on my own. Without help. Almost. I went to the doctor and admitted my shame. I kept the subsequent appointments, and paid for them. I crawled up out of the gutter of a long-delayed puberty, and I scratched up the cliff of trying, against the odds, to be a real man (sometimes to even know what one was).

All the while the casually interested crowd looked on, wondering what the hell was wrong with me and once in a while daring to mutter the question in coded language to my very face.

I can credit some of the women I was sexually linked to with helping in some small ways.

I can credit the career counselor who told me, at a risk to his own position: “Kid–somebody told you you were shit, and you believed them“. Thank you for telling me the truth you saw, you meddling jewish socialworking fuck. You were right, and it helped more than you will ever know.

But mostly, I got as far as I did toward becoming a man at all, and then my own man, all on my fucking lonesome.

The broken biology did not stop me. But it did slow me down, and it will always make it harder, every day until the end of my life.

I will keep on keeping on. (‘The only thing I knew how to do. Like a bird that flew.’)

I will keep on telling you to go fuck yourself, when you deserve it, which is regrettably often, and maybe now you will have a little more insight into why I say it, when I say it.

Maybe. In the meantime, just know that when you find yourself thinking sometimes that I’m a whiny little bitch, you’re not entirely, physiologically, wrong about that, either–congratulations on your perspicacity.

This is in large part why I am focused with such singular intention right now on having more energy.

Biohacking, diet magic, the new weight bench, getting back on the meds at any cost–all a part of this grasping, after having more. Not more fame, or money, or social credibility, and for godssake above all not more power, in the way very civilized people use the word.

Just more soul fuel–that’s all–and directing the jets of that newly amplified engine toward the right path, the road not ever taken, but taken now at last.

I only have the dimmest notion of where, if anywhere, it leads.

***

But if you invest in staying close to me
if you keep your faith in me alive
for whatever bent reasons of your own–

then we will find out together.