Kala'amātya reined his red horse to a halt and gazed back over his shoulder, counting those that trailed behind him.  Two dozen guards, porters and attendants formed the thin procession, the company forced to assume the shape of the narrow trail, none of them spared a heavy burden of provisions, gifts and accouterment.  A white palanquin formed the nucleus of the increasingly dispirited assembly, borne by stalwart men, their sodden grass cloaks no longer any use against the incessant rain.  Though he was yet to glimpse its secluded passengers, he was not troubled by the circumstance, his task set, his reward negotiated in advance.

The day had barely hauled free of the dismal, unfledged light of dawn, though noon had come and gone, kept cool and dripping by a hidden sun.  Rain had redoubled the weary porters’ burdens, the milky clay beneath their feet a greasy quagmire in which they slipped and stumbled, crying out and clasping one another against the prospect of a fall.  Kala'amātya had passed through the belly of Guangxi once before, though on that occasion he had been unencumbered by a small army of inagile companions.  The crowded, jewel-green mountains lost their heads in pewter clouds, looking as though they had been flung down from the sky and buried waist deep in the rock beneath.  Misted gorges echoed with the roar of hidden torrents that wound between the cliffs; he frowned as the palanquin was set down, and one of its bearers shouldered his way toward him, water spilling from the wide brim of his hat.

“Lord... the lady asks that we rest now.” the bearer informed him, panting as he bowed his head.  “She says she can go no further.”
“Tell her that she must.” he muttered, urging his mount onward.  Another backward glance informed him that the troupe had settled on the track, adopting the stationary palanquin as a warrant for the unscheduled respite.  The bearers crouched by the lip of the precipice, seeking the shelter of its eaves.  Porters set down their chests and bundles and took out packages of sticky, leaf-wrapped rice, cramming the grain into their mouths while glancing anxiously toward him.  He drew his staff of heavy ju wood from his horse’s harness and slid down from the saddle, striding back toward the delinquents.

A shudder rippled in the ground beneath him a moment before the advent of a deep, resounding crack that ripped through sodden earth and air.  His eyes turned instinctively toward the sky but no bolt had crashed down from the dismal heavens; instead, the puggy trail bowed, sagged, and began to disintegrate, crumbling as the rock below sloughed away from the hillside into a sucking, grinding cataclysm.  It drowned its victims’ cries as it bore them down the flank of the mountain, crushing them into the savage mass of trees and stone and earth that flowed like water into the mist, toward a unseen valley floor.  Kala'amātya grasped the overhanging branches of a stunted tree, anticipating the imminent failure of his own footing, but was spared; the ground beneath him had broken with the massive wedge that had slid away, their violent dissociation shaping a concave face of clay and freshly-scoured limestone.  No more screams drifted upward in the beating rain though he detected a low, keening whimper through the sound of it.  Turning his head to assure himself that he was not mistaken, he sought its source below the edge of the surviving trail.

The white palanquin had become wedged on a tangle of broken trees.  It lay on its side while a passenger begged for assistance from within.  Wiping the rain from his face, Kala'amātya walked out along the remaining track and swung down onto the shorn stone of the cliff face, sliding on his haunches toward the pinioned vehicle until he attained its supporting ledge.  A wrinkled matron’s face, flat-featured and high-browed, appeared from behind the chair’s spattered drapery; she exclaimed at his approach, praising the gods that had flung her entourage to their deaths for their judicious lenity while he lifted her from her frame and set her down onto the crumbling ledge beside him.  The chair's remaining occupant, having lost her grasp upon the uppermost door, dropped down through the wooden framing toward the opposing one, now yawning out over the drop.  Her bare feet had already passed through it into the empty air when his fist closed on the fabric of her robe and took her weight, slamming his arm against the cracking timber.  He dragged her back up through the drapes onto the ledge.

Delivering them to the safety of the stable ground proved less difficult than he had imagined.  The elderly matron, having no wish to join her ancestors, scrambled up onto the road with remarkable, almost pithecoid alacrity.  The younger passenger climbed before him, independent of his aid; despite the station implied by the cargo that had attended her, she wore a plain, stone-white kimono of humble cloth and plicated amplitude.  Her black hair hung in a tangle of broken combs beneath her hood.  She sank to her knees on the edge of the trail and looking down, he saw the features of the girl who had brought the lilies to his barrack hut.  The matron abandoned her own cursory toilet and scolded them.

“This is my mother’s sister.” Suki murmured.  “She has no sight.”  He took the cue from her formality and abjured mention of her name.

Shuffling toward him the older woman reached up with both hands and attempted a manual survey of his features, only to be thwarted by the great discrepancy in their statures.  She scowled more deeply at this discovery and groped downward, following his arm to his hand where a count of his cool fingers caused her to fling it down and stumble backward in disgust.

“It is you, the kyuketsuki, the oni... you have tricked us into this misfortune and now you mean to devour us!” she exclaimed.  The matron at once began to chant, crouching and devoting herself to pious defence against his peril.  His horse returned, blowing snorting breaths at the small party of survivors.  
“This creature has saved us both from falling." the girl advised.  "He means no harm.” 
“Because it has already satisfied itself in wickedness!”
“Stay here then, with the virtuous spirits of the wood.” she sighed.

Kala'amātya caught the loitering horse and beckoned to the pair; the old woman squinted obstinately as her niece explained his proposal, which she treated as an affront to the manners accrued in a lifetime of sheltered luxury, the pitch of her objections ascending as he lifted her into the saddle.  The girl shook her head against the prospect on her own behalf, her insistence intensifying as he approached her.  Catching her arm, he pushed his hand into the fold of her robe, setting it against her stomach; her gaze rose to his as he perceived the gravid proportions the fabric disguised, attained in the three months since their last encounter.  The old woman pressed her dry, penurious lips together as her ward climbed slowly into the saddle before her.

“Does it please you, to have begotten evil on this girl?” the crone snapped.  “No matter.  She is made of wickedness, and if the paint were scrubbed from her face you would find the mark of it there, where she has devoted herself to witchcraft, to compound her crimes.”
“You are mistaken.” he told her.  “I have no part in this.”
“Though they come from all around to eat the fruit, none will own that they have planted seed.  Thus it was in my day, and so it is in hers.  The palace guards have followed her to your house and back again, a dozen times!”
“Tokogawa himself has done the same.” Kala'amātya replied.  The rationale enraged her.
“Tokogawa does not lie with demons when he is betrothed to a family beyond reproach... he has not disgraced himself with a dozen nameless lovers in Kyoto!  Nor consorted with the tsukimono-suji, and consigned himself to hell.”  Recovering, the old woman sought the composure she cherished most, speaking with the cool, serrated assurance of her station.  “If you are not the sire of this accursed child, you are close enough to be so in the eyes of others, and that is the heart of all such matters.”

Kala'amātya did not reply, but murmured to their patient mount, leading them once more along the slippery track as it reached upward into dripping forest.



The evening padded in on tender feet, as still as the boles of the trees lining the path like the distorted figures of a lavender opium dream, the feeble sun setting behind them.  The old woman marked Kala'amātya's figure as a tall blur against the darkening ground.  

“Why did you travel to Honshu?” she demanded unexpectedly.
“It lies furthest distant from the kingdoms beyond Persia.” he admitted.
“Tokogawa tells the bushi that you were sent to serve him by the gods.”
“Tokogawa may be shogun, but in Edo, I bow only to sword smiths and oiran.”

The woman scoffed, then continued her interrogation over the shoulder of her ward.  

“What great evil have you committed that you may not stay where you were made?”
“Many, countless evils.  But I shun my brother and his wife... she is lost, he wanders with her, and I can not abide it.” he said, unable to think of any reason to conceal the nature of his misfortune.  
“You abandon your brother?  Where is your loyalty?”
He shook his head.
“I no longer ask this of myself.  You speak of duty, and that is fear of sanction, and my elders in their wisdom ensured I could honour nothing of that nature.”

The crone murmured again at his apostasy.

"In asking nothing of yourself you will be answered in kind, and please them well who wish no more for you.  What a wretched thing you are... even the mountain would not take you, and I do not wonder at it."

Nightfall found them at the winged gates of a temple.  The low buildings beyond, of dark wood on a darker stone, lay deserted, their yard inundated by the rain, nodding stands of arrow bamboo hemming water in which their reflection was shattered by the horse's hooves.  Beneath their eaves the dormitory halls held a deep rubiginous hue, the colour thickening the gloom.  Lightning flashed against their backs, gleaming white along the polished walls as Kala'amātya followed them into shelter, his cold skin crawling in the still, charged air.  He guessed that flood and landslides had kept the temple’s order from returning to their home and the rendezvous they had contracted with the shogun.

Peering fruitlessly into the darkness, the old woman flinched at the clapping of iron-shod hooves against the floorboards; ignoring her complaints, Kala'amātya removed his kit and saddle from the personable equine’s back and directed the animal toward the corner furthest from the door, where it nodded to sleep on three hooves.  Heat from its damp flanks soon warmed the chamber and the matron quit her grumbling dissent, sitting with the girl, who had slumped against the wall beside the door.  He arranged his blades and naginata on the boards and began to unlace his armour.  

“I did not know who I brought to this place.” he confessed to the girl as she watched him.
“What does it matter now?” she murmured.
“Thus speaks the great favourite of a great man.” declared the matron.  “Nor did you think of right and wrong before you were undone.”
“Tokogawa required that I take this chair into Cataya and leave it at this temple.  This I have done.”  The matron made no reply, kneeling by the wall, her white hair fraying from the side of her chignon and falling, unheeded, before her milky eyes.  “It is my thought that he has charged you with further instruction, honourable mother.” Kala'amātya added.  She maintained her obmutescence and he looked around at the sound of the girl’s breathing, her smooth face creasing with the effort of concealing the unwelcome rhythm that had obviously begun some time before.  Wind slammed the unfastened door against its frame; the horse squealed, and the girl turned toward him when he knelt beside her. 
“You will leave now!” the old woman exclaimed on perceiving her condition.
“You are blind.” he reminded her.
“You are a demon!” she retorted, stiffening as she raised her voice above the wind.  The girl reached down through her robe, withdrawing a hand that brought with it the sharp, dusty smell of amniotic fluid, stained a deep tea-brown.  She looked up at him.
“I know you can bring children forth..." she gasped.  "You aided Umi, and Fumiko’s sister... this child does not fare well...”  Again he lay his hand against her body, the infant's distress beating through its mother's flesh, a desperate petition.
“It does not.” he conceded.

Despite the dire interdicts of his own people, long association had drawn him into intimate familiarity with feminine ordeals, compelling him to deliver the diverse issue of bandit girls and seige-bound chatelaines into their uncertain tenures.  The cascade of signs and processes and the timbre of the girl’s exhausted screams were by no means unfamiliar, though he rued their implications along with her aunt’s unrelenting pessimism.  The infant would not emerge though the girl had striven on her haunches until her brown eyes rolled into her head and her sweat-slick arms slid through his hands as she slumped back in agony and despair.  He eased her legs from beneath her through the thickening pool of blood into which she had collapsed, bundling her discarded robe under her head and draping her with his own.  Her stomach was tight and coldly slippery beneath his hands, devoid of movement; the matron shuffled closer on her knees, repeated the inquiring gesture and sat back.

“Better that they both should perish.  Misfortune will follow them always.” she assured him, her dry voice weighted with puissant finality.  "Leave her to her fate."  She pressed a narrow scroll on him; the cylinder was still faintly warm, drawn from somewhere in her robe, and inscribed with the shogun’s seal.  He set the missive aside and returned to the half-insensate girl.

"Suki, if you do not labour now, I must use my knife to bring it forth, and that fails more often than it succeeds.” he advised, kneeling by her shoulder and ensuring that she understood.  At her word he drew her back onto her haunches, taking her weight with both arms and legs as she set her back against him and closed her hands upon his wrists, her chaperone expressing in vehement terms the abdication of her familial commitments.

C O N T I N U E D   N E X T   W E E K
© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

I've finally stuck a pin in the horrible block that's stopped me droning on about perfume, so on Monday I'll be posting my review of Norne (Slumberhouse).  I'm quite happy with the piece so far.  Hope you like it.

Some sounded a bit enraged by the MAC Maleficent collection, regarding it as a missed opportunity to indulge in some badarse packaging design but, to be honest, MAC and badarse design aren't really joined at the hip. Their promotions are aesthetically hit and miss at best.  I don't personally give two flying effs for the whole Disney/Jolie thing myself (people, it's a crap misogynistic narrative, let it go) and I didn't pick up True Love's Kiss with any fangirling nostalgia in mind.  What did prompt me was a lack of Amplified reds in my collection and well, what's a girl to do?  Wave a fucking wand, bitch.  *D'ijmar-kaboom-de-la-shazbutt*  Lipstick -> doorstep.  Works, but you have to do it naked at 3.33pm.  That's what I was told.

Accusations of yawn and dupe-ability have been levelled at this shade but that's a pretty lazy response.  Because how many true, clean reds are out there really?  I haven't run into that many.  They're almost always leaning brown or orange or pink, or they're frosty or stupidly glossy or whatever.  True Love's Kiss is none of the above.

Please respect my copyright on these pictures, ya'll.  I put quite a bit of effort into them.

 Codex Seraphinianus.

Don't ask me : )

This was taken from the opposite side of the harbour from us and about 3 clicks south, but it was the same in Port, believe me.  I apologise for two youtube posts in a row but this is kewl.  And I apologise on behalf of thinking NZers everywhere for the ejaculations of Captain Obvious, our narrator.  

I thought our stupidly huge front windows were going to give me a very exfoliating facial.  No damage, tho.  Some snow today.

Food.  Delicious, isn't it?  I used to love sucking down a big-arse block of chocolate or enormous wedge of Black Forest cake or three as much as the next blue-ribbon eater.  But I've stopped loving how it made me feel, look and live.  There are other things and better ways; I'll devote the final part of this endless monologue to my quest to eat like an adult, for general health and weight reduction.

In regard to compulsive behaviour, I dislike the 12 Step programme thing because it contains that maddening sop to the junkie's love of conditional surrender- the acceptance that there is a greater power than you.  But when it comes to food and health, there is a greater power- the only one that really matters- biology.  Our biology determines what we can and can't eat without harming ourselves.  What we eat becomes who we are.  If you can maintain a healthy body and mood eating whatever, pat your phenotype on the back; I'm addressing this more to the people who can't.  If you're not maintaining your health, you might want to consider your inputs.

Paleo for Skeptics & Grunge Eating.  I've personally turned my weight and general health around with real foods.  By that I mean eating stuff that occurs in nature and requires minimal manipulation, influenced by my own assessment of our evolutionary and technological development alongside my personal reaction to various substances.  I emphasise the personal.  My father's family enjoys a vexed relationship with alcohol, so I largely abstain; wine makes me feel shitty anyway.  Bulk white starch and me don't get along, and my arse doesn't thank me for more than half a glass of dairy in any given day.  I know that sounds hopelessly faddish and I deeply regret the association, but the proof is in the (lack of) pudding; when I put the brakes on these substances everything gets better, and that benefit is amplified by cutting back to a biologically reasonable amount of food per se.  If it's a choice between being thought a food nazi and spending half my life in discomfort and clinical peril, colour me a fussy twat.

Scaling back grains and dairy and concentrating on a lo-fi intake = Paleo these days, but I don't think a median Paleolithic diet was what many people seem to want it to be.  And I really don't think it meant dancing around wearing haunches of beef.  Certainly, extreme human niches might have required survival measures which would have included a focus on large prey and the resources they provided, but anyone who's handled livestock knows a ram can break your legs and horses and steers can kill you in an instant if you're careless at the wrong time.  In general, where there were a plethora of other options, tiny communities of ancient people couldn't afford the attrition involved in pitting themselves against large wild prey every day, and I'll be damned if they actually did.  Successful survival rolls the dice when the reward is greatest; migrations, spawning and seasonal changes would have yielded the best return for the toll on their hunters.  So count me out of the paleo = mondo meat equation.  It's hands down pants-thinking.

Mammoth Hunter tryhards can beat the undergrowth and shout chunga at this counterpoint all they like.  I grew up feral in an extremely isolated part of Northern Australia beside a culture (Yolngu) still attached to its subtle array of precolonial neolithic methodologies, and had the privilege of observing first hand what eating from the land entails.  Megafauna have largely disappeared from that continent and I witnessed first hand how superfluous large animals are to a resourceful population, even in a relatively parsimonious environment with a six month dry season.  On a walk to collect materials for carving and painting, Yolngu women will eat and collect in an opportunistic manner anything they know to be edible, according to time constraints, seasonal availability and religious directives.  Their pattern of consumption is low-fuss and 'nonheroic' in the sense that they're not spearing complacent pachyderms, but that's not what many students of history or paleo superfans want to imagine for their own ancestors.

Let's dial that meaty, masculinized crap back.  It's women who form the backbone of most, if not all, pre-agricultural and pre-industrial food economies.  We knew where the good stuff was, we took it home and we processed it for the benefit of all.  If someone dropped an aurochs on a lucky day, awesome; if no one died in the process, even better, but no one will convince me that the majority of food provision wasn't womens' collection of reliable, unglamorous staples.  Masts, nuts, eggs, greens, shellfish, fungi, fruit, insects, wild grains, small game, birds and roots, with intermittent gluts of ungulate and fish meat.  All of it is available now and that is probably what we should be eating, according to time constraints, seasonal availability, religious and or environmental directives.  That's not hippiness, weirdness or rocket science.  I think of it as grunge eating in that it is anti-fancy, egalitarian and concerned with the integrity of its components.

Pro-grain and pro-dairy interests may be able to point to the human herd ability to digest both substances and I agree that rates of mutation and expediency can easily account for the fact that most humans now rely on cereals; my partner can munch on wholegrain stuff all day without ill-effect.  But there are still many of us who test the rule.  If refined grain and dairy aren't your friends, shit can get real in short order; weight gain, inflammation and cascades of systemic disorders to name a few contraindications.  Why do we persist with it?  We are brainy omnivores and that is our golden spear; the ability to switch from one food stream to another according to circumstance is relatively rare in nature, confers huge advantage and we're mad to ignore our trump card in favour of mindless consumption.  

Obligatory Paranoid Conspiracy Reference  As an adjunct to all this biological exhortation, there is a political significance to grain.  It's a 10 000 year old macro-commodity and central authorities love that shit, using it as a hammer to control their domestic situations and to assault and/or bolster other economies according to their fluctuating interests.  Did you vote for that?  I didn't.  Ponder this next time you're loading up on sandwich sliced.

Moderation > Elimination  That's not to say you need to scrub everything yummy or accustomed from your kitchen shelves.  The current fundamentalist craze for avoiding anything ever smeared in a half-literate press release is frustratingly idiotic and plays directly into the hands of interests hostile to autonomy.  I don't advocate or practice total abstinence from either grains or dairy myself, but reducing them to a small element of my diet instead of bulk inputs has been revelatory and immensely beneficial.  Paying attention to your own reaction to what you're eating is what all this boils down to.  Paleolithically, we either paid attention to what we were eating or it killed us, for any number of reasons.  We need to reclaim that care and focus.  Your body has a language; reconnect to this dialogue.  The little corkscrew twist of hunger and the wordless fist-shaped surcease of satiety.  The golden rolling wave of pleasure that means you're about to drop into the free fall of orgasm.  The whiny little nag of transient discomfort at the start of every workout, the deeper pain of injury.  Relearn your individual dialect; listen and react instead of munching over the top of it and drowning it out with convenience and force of habit.

Our species has faced a multitude of niches and adaptational bottlenecks and it's survived them all with the help of lipids and adipose and diversity.  Some of us need a lot of food to get by and that hot-burning slenderness is an advantage here and there.  I personally inherited a body that can do well on very little.  Both historically speaking and in any reasonable circumstance that's a spectacular genetic jackpot that has survived our natural selection death match for the best part of a million years.  It chugs along on a minimum of basic natural foodstuffs without requiring the 'cheap energy' of bulk grain starch and modern sugars.  It does this by depositing fat in an exemplary manner, using its insulating properties to achieve optimal caloric efficiency and accessing that stored energy effectively.  I've tested the latter assertion in losing weight slowly, in a steady, non-injurious manner by setting the controls to expend; my body obliged me and that is a healthy response.  If your body lays down a good fat pad and doesn't kill you in the process, discard the idea that you're somehow disadvantaged.  Then accept that your good fortune isn't a ticket to abuse that largesse.

We eat too much  How little you need, even while exercising quite hard 30 mins a day, is a bit of a shock.  And how little you feel like eating after acculturating yourself to the reality of your needs is even more of a surprise after a lifetime of Western surfeiting.  What I did- Our dinner plates were fashionably huge.  I switched to bread plates for my main meals, which are generous saucers.  It's a great template and it's virtually impossible to overeat while your gut gets used to smaller portions.  And once it does, you don't want more.  I eat a modest breakfast (details to come) and a single main meal at lunchtime, with snacks according to my caloric needs. 

Reacquaint yourself with satiety- the Japanese Confucian version hara hachi bu is very useful in that it encourages long-term satisfaction over the kind of precipitate gluttony that has become so acceptable.   Embrace the idea of moderate, short-term hunger as a return to reality and an essential element in resurrecting your relationship with your body and its requirements.  I generally don't eat more in one sitting than can cover the surface of my outstretched hand.  That's been a convenient and effective guide.

Here's a quick true story about food volumes.  My father's family suffers a lot of fatness, faulty digestive valves, acid regurgitation, bloating, irritable bowel and alimentary cancers.  Many of them cannot get through a day without heavy antacids and proton-pump inhibiting drugs.  My uncle died of bowel cancer and my dad of oesophageal cancer in their early fifties.  My nephew had a stomach valve reconstruction procedure at 16.  I suffered some of these things myself.  These symptom clusters were declared idiopathic and even unrelated by most if not all of the clinicians I've consulted and no nutritional advice was ever given.  I shit you not.  So I left the medical establishment to their disinterested myopia, took the empirical route and after cutting down on bread and pasta, eating my main meal at lunch and, I believe crucially, reducing my portions, I don't experience any of these symptoms any more.  None.  Zippidy.  No runs, no gut aches, no heartburn.  Losing weight reduces liver fattiness and improves its ability to aid digestion and that will have factored into that process, but I lay this at the feet of eating less.  Your mouth is not a clown car.  We are not entitled to stuff our faces all day long with whatever takes our fancy.  It is killing us with both excess and deprivation, defiling our planet and depriving our fellow creatures of their due.

Think about why we eat too much  Commerical food interests have almost succeeded in completely divorcing us from any notion of appreciation and moderation around food.  They've recognised the physical, emotional and spiritual wasteland that many of us are mired in and stepped in to plug that hole with lucrative garbage provisions.  They want us to ease our pain with this equation- buy/eat/buy/eat/never questionbuy/eat and have spent billions to condition us accordingly.  Big Food doesn't want you to associate a chicken meal with the death of another animal, or a bag of fries with a monstrous monoculture soaked in pesticides and for very good reason; they want you to stop thinking and keep eating.  But food is intrinsically intimate, should affect us personally and it has a price no matter what.  All that is correctly regarded as subversive by our industrial overlords.  When we get back to knowing that core truth, logic and appropriate emotional responses toward our requirements are reinstated.  Sucking down a bucket of anonymised meat when you're feeling worthless becomes something you might think twice about.  Uh oh.  Recognise your personal and situational issues as the greedy trolls they undoubtedly are, eating your happiness and contentment; don't feed them deep-fried Mars Bars.  When you're ready to deal, get help.  Not KFC.

If I'm feeling hungry at the end of the day, I go back mentally over everything I've eaten from breakfast onward, remembering the size and taste and appreciating what it's done for me.  Visualising everything I've consumed plugs me back into an authentic consumption and satisfaction loop, retraining myself out of the idle/boredom/mindless munching program of yore.  If I've eaten enough, I'll stop there.  If not, I'll have something else.  Or maybe I'll go to bed a little bit hungry.  It's not the end of the fucking world.

Calories out must exceed calories in on a regular basis  Not very sexy, is it?  This equation may not give you wood but it will shift your fat deposits and I know this because it shifted mine.  That doesn't entail starvation; it just means using everything you're putting in your mouth and encouraging your body to tap into onboard reserves.  And while you're building muscle mass you're you're gaming your metabolism and building a future full of satisfying consumption without fear of undue lard encroachment.  What I did- during the first four months of my weight loss I stuck to a sub-1000 calorie regime.  Some will tell you that's too little and for many that may be true, but I gain easily and hold onto it like a mofo so the sledgehammer approach was required.  I experienced no ill effects, had plenty of energy and still lost mass at a slow/reasonable rate.

Not all calories should be considered equal, and there's a lot of bullshit-flavoured confusion surrounding what we're supposed to be eating.  After years of reading on the subject and battling through wildly conflicting science (as it is reported, not necessarily conducted), it seems to me that good nutrition boils down to natural, least-processed food. 

Beauty is Truth.  And Health  I once saw an interesting item on comparative international grocery shopping; what different nationalities typically bought in the course of a week.  The one that stood out to me was the Turkish shop; it was a stunning still life of glowing colour and luscious forms and textures that engaged both my stomach and my brain.  It occurred to me recently that there's probably a very good reason for that- our aesthetic preferences are often rooted far more deeply than we know in our biology.  A beautiful face is a symmetrical face because symmetry indicates health, both acquired and inherent.  Beautiful food is the food we were born to consume.  Below is a selection of images culled from our own library in support of my aesthetic-based rationale.  I don't think the fact that very little here would have been completely unfamiliar to our early ancestors is much of a coincidence.

Ha ha ha, no- don't eat the baby.  Or tell anyone I suggested it.  But seriously; I believe we should think of beauty both as guide and reward.  Look into vegetables.  And nuts.  And fruit.  And also seafood and shellfish.  Remember those?  Your body is screaming for them so just get married already.  Replace bulk bread with root vegetables; they are starchy but in a better way, full of fibre, won't crash your pancreas through a shopfront and give great satisfaction.  Stop peeling everything.  Eat the skins, unless you suspect your food supply is heavily sprayed etc.  If you ate a big gob of rice and pasta with things like curries and Italian sauces, replace them with a side of stirfried veges.  It's still good, I promise.  Those big bags of frozen mixed veges are fantastic value and really convenient.  As for nuts; I eat 350 grams of unsalted almonds a week, munching on a handful whenever I feel like it.  There is nothing better for sustained energy and dealing with hunger.  

Trust your eye.  By consuming natural, beautiful food, we enjoy the physical, intellectual and emotional dividends of its consumption.  I know I have.  If all this looks distant and expensive, we feel your pain.  But we are pretty poor by western standards, quite possibly less well off than you.  Most of the stuff pictured above was or could be grown in our very mediocre garden, cribbed from neighbours or purchased at our crappy local supermarket.  If we can get our hands on this sort of food, so can you, probably.  Invest in yourself. 

Refined starch is the devil's work.  I know; this is what every neurotic bandwagoning food-phobic nut job screeches about and I've tried to sound so logical and reasonable.  But come on now- it's just true.  White grain starch and the industrial sugars that so often accompany it are endocrine crack, pitching us into peak/trough blood sugar craziness, addictive associations and mood alteration.  You won't know what I'm talking about until you level out on real food.  You feel the way you've been eating.  R and I were pasta and bread fiends (admittedly wholemeal for the last few years) but it was Sunday morning white croissants that tipped us off to a curious phenomenon.  We turned into fight-picking, wall-eyed psychos an hour after ingesting them, every time, like fucking clockwork.  It was observable, quantifiable, repeatable, and that's enough Koch's Postulate for me.

So hmm... decisions, decisions.  The baguette is undeniably delicious.  But it does not occur in nature.  Yes, that is a tragedy, but then again I do not possess the digestive physiology of a granivore.  I won't die right now if I eat one, but what doesn't kill us immediately doesn't always make us stronger and in fact can fuck us up in a huge way if we regularly submit to our la la la impulses.  So... how lucky do you feel, punk?  What I did-  I cut down to the equivalent of one piece of bread a day or a few crackers or half a cup of couscous etc.  Wholegrain where humanly possible.  A muffin on saturday.  No biscuits, no cakes unless there is an actual party to go with that party food.  I replaced the starches that used to make up the bulk of my meals with an array of vegetables.  I don't miss refined starch feasts at all; bye-bye bloating, the runs, mid-afternoon coma; hello satiety and sane, consistent energy levels.

As a compassionate caveat to this tragic injunction, let me put you onto dark chocolate instead.  It's recently emerged that, like many foods that contain the indigestible roughage we're evolved to deal with, dark chocolate encourages symbiotic bacteria in our gut both to produce anti-inflammatory compounds and to muscle out intestinal bad guys like Clostridia and E. coli, the ones that trigger systemic inflammation, stroke and heart disease etc.  This same indispensable fibre roughage occurs in wholemeal grain products, so no wonder I'm feeling better.  See?  We are all scientists.  Observe yourself carefully and objectively and apply your own findings.

Theory into Practise  Here's a few things that have worked for me.  
Replace soft drinks and commercial juices with water and flavoured/fruit tea.  I like vanilla black tea, chai and a range of tisanes.  Go with coffee if you're one of those people.  I won't lie- I don't drink much water.
Buy organic.  Not just because it's ethical/beneficial- it's fucking expensive.  You'll only buy what you need and won't be able to stand wasting it.
Like sandwiches?  Me too.  Ditch the bread and wrap your fillings in silver beet leaves.  Oddly tasty.  Go with wholegrain crackers, too.  They're less calorific than bread.
Eat full fat, not 'diet food'.  I have, the whole time; butter, full fat organic milk, cheese, eggs, steak fat, you name it.  Lost heaps of weight, no cravings, no nightmare sugar roller coaster.  Satisfaction is important.  Natural fat is fine.
If you are seriously craving something, eat the damn thing. If you really needed it, you'll feel better for it.  If you were just jonesing, that will become apparent too.
Your shopping trolley/cart should be full of colour and texture and not the kind that rolls off a printing press.  Aim to keep packaged foods to twenty percent of its volume  You won't always get there, but do try.  Also keep in mind that...
Tinned and dried food can be great food.  Pulses, fish, fancy mushrooms; all the shit that can be so expensive fresh awaits you in another form.  Choose the least processed versions and watch the salt content.
Cook as much of your own food as possible.  Inconvenient?  Not as inconvenient as diabetes and stroke.
Climb out of the industrial sugar train wreck.  Buy plain versions of the things you enjoy like yoghurt and flavour it at home with honey, fruit and home made conserves etc rather than eating commercial ice creams, puddings and other evil treats.  Waaay less sugar and preservative shit.  Once you've walked away from hypersugar, you'll wonder how you ever tolerated such insane levels of sweetness.
If your partner/flatmates etc. need more starch than you, serve yourself last and add less starch to your own portion instead of mixing everything up and then dishing out.  Control is key.  Plan ahead.
Stick to one medium potato per meaty meal.  Spuds are cool, but you don't need three or five plus a steak.

Portion sizes and example meal above  Breakfast is wholegrain toast, hummus, a persimmon, figs, prunes, unsalted almonds and whole milk tea.  Lunch is lamb curry with a small amount of brown rice mixed in with stir fried mix vegetables to replace the bulk rice I'd otherwise have.  Note hand relative to portion.  I'd have 2-3 crackers with maybe cheese and relish and a few pickled mussels for dinner, if any.

Just stop buying gross fake food altogether.  It's that easy.  As I said before, make your vices work for you.  Lazy?  You know you can't be be bothered to go and get it if you didn't pick it up on supermarket day, so it's a win-win.  If you don't have it in the house, you can't stuff it in your mouth.  

Don't pretend you don't know what gross food is, but if you insist, here's some handy guidelines.  If...  You can't pronounce its ingredients.  Can't assign it to a known food group.  Don't know where it comes from.  It needs lurid/excessive packaging to attract your attention.  It doesn't grow in the ground, swim or walk on the legs it was born with.  You couldn't produce/reproduce it at home.  Your great grandmother wouldn't recognize it...  Spit, don't swallow.  Don't buy it, don't consider it food.  When you stop thinking of junk as food, you'll stop thinking of it as a treat.  Look at the stuff as though you're seeing it for the first time; tip a bag of frozen battered nasty yellow-grey onto the sink and ask yourself if that looks like something you should be putting in your mouth.  Unwrap that greasy, wilted burger and stare hard at it before you suck it down.  Beauty is truth.  Ugly can and will hurt you.

Let go once in a while and eat a big gutfull of something disgusting that you used to enjoy.  Really stuff yourself.  See how far you get.  When I overindulge these days I feel like someone kicked the living shit out of me, because I'm now a precious healthful petal who physically cannot tolerate the kind of alimentary abuse I used to deal myself.  Well fuck me.  That was the goal and I'm there.  Okay, so if you want the whole truth, I still love my bag of sour cream chips and I do mean the whole thing.  I do it once a month and skip a meal and it's no biggie.  The more you eat right, the less you want to eat wrong and the more you see the evil stuff for what it is; corrupted, corrupting.  Being well-fed and energised replaces and far exceeds the pleasure we got from pigging out on shit food.  I never thought that would happen but trust me, it does.

I know it's been a long slog, but I hope for those who've made it through this series that my experiences are something you can relate to your own situation.  If you want to lose weight and regain your health, please believe that this is within your grasp.  Don't be a stubborn, self-destructive dipshit like me.  I wasted a lot of years telling myself I didn't need to/didn't want to/couldn't anyway and then thought I would have to fly to the fucking moon to get it done, when it turns out all I needed to do was engage brain and get off my arse.  Being smaller hasn't solved all my problems, but it's made all the other stuff that should be happening easier.  It's given me back to me.

Value yourself, believe in yourself, invest in yourself.  We are all we'll ever really have.

R's been bleaching these Haematopus bones he found at work and brought them home today to photograph.
We've decided to post our alternate shots; I'll go first.  Because it's my blog.

This particular slightly graphic fuckery is NIK ColourEfex Pro Burnt Sienna, backed off with a bit of PhoSho Selective Colour twiddling afterwards.  OMG now you know my secret   0_0   That's pretty much my answer to everything- punch the black, bitch.  I'm too technically declined to go much harder on the whites etc. and must confess to not giving a shit about them anyway.  If like me you're a crap photographer and rely on post-production to make your work presentable, Selective Colour is a post-production Mjölnir and sometimes it's the only thing I use.  
I do love our scratchy Rimu table; it's a beautiful foil for everything that sits still long enough to be photographed.

Great local band.  These two tracks are off a nice little album from a few years back, Passive Me Aggressive You which I turn up quite loudly now and then.  I'm not in love with either video, especially the one below (NZ art school fails are just... epic) but at least they're not taking their fucking clothes off or working a pole.

Not that I would mind seeing most of them work a pole.  *Goes back to sucking the blood of captive youths*

Between the austere rigors of his training at the Yagyu martial school and the nocturnal divertissements of Edo’s floating world, Kala'amātya moved as though wrapped in the folds of a dream, devoting himself to the pursuit of precision and extremity in the two environs and discovering that they were obliquely confederate.  He eschewed the sparring staff, finding the struggle to evade the incisive attentions of the katana more profoundly instructive.  His master at the Yagyu school smiled often, gratified by the speed with which his lessons were assimilated, though he would not speak with his strange pupil outside its walls despite the convenience of their respective dwellings.  At night, sorrow stalked him, worsened by the spectral longing he still felt for those most complicit in effecting it, its black face buried not by chashitsu beauties but with the aid of the Yoshiwara's most recondite savants.

When no one would face him outside the compulsion of battle, he was sent to the valley of Sekigahara to assist in implementing his patron’s martial will.  Back in the capital his accomplishments, bleached black and white in reportage, lodged like frozen stones inside the hearts of those that might have rejoiced in any other hero.  On his return, Kala'amātya reviewed his instinctive distaste for armour, bound his long hair into the queue of his newly-awarded station and redoubled his reputation for saturnine eccentricity by commissioning a pair of long odachi in place of the suite of smaller swords that were expected of him.  His choice was deemed an unseemly departure, though this disapprobation remained a private thing.


It was on an evening late in summer that Ieyasu Tokogawa resolved to embark upon an inspection of the barracks grouped around his palace.  The prunus trees cast wide circles of deeper shade beneath the horned moon as he strolled through the grounds, accompanied by a pair of silent guards.  With his pale coif, liver marked brow and plain grey robe he commanded little attention; the sound of the neatly-tended gravel beneath his feet was all the fanfare that his mood required.

The sight of the rectangular barracks had always pleased him.  The shutters glowed from within the largest structure and the shogun abandoned his guards to listen for a while to the talk that issued from within the crowded mess.  Its samurai debated a single and apparently implacable concern; Tokogawa announced himself before the sliding door and stepped inside, blinking in the lamplight as the men pressed their foreheads to the floor.

“What is this?” he demanded, taking a seat at the head of the narrow room, easing himself down onto the matting slowly.  “Do not whisper behind your sleeves, like women.”

The eldest warrior inclined his head respectfully, eyes on the ground as he replied.

“We are made cowards by portent.”  
“What portents are these?  What was my victory at Osaka, if you do not call it providence?”
“What troubles us wore the mon of our great lord into that battle, while holding secrets in its heart, like a thief, using honour as a shield against honest gazes.” the general admitted.  The samurai awaited his response in silence.
“Of whom do you speak?”
“The nameless one.” the elder replied, grim-faced.  Tokogawa’s scowl deepened with his umbrage at the pusillanimous nature of the allusion.  He squinted hard at their self-appointed representative, who had begun to regret his own outspoken impulse.
“You know that I have made this barbarian a general.  Remember, how the road to Kyoto was lined with skulls from end to end... so many of them were taken by him alone that the captains could make no count of them.  He came to me, his armour painted with the blood of my enemies, as though he had burst forth from the lakes of hell, his face and hands, all wet with this most precious colour.  He kills, not for pleasure, not for the thought of land or great advancement, but for Tokogawa.  In all of this, he paused only to clean his swords, and receive my orders.”  The white-robed men listened without speaking.  He continued, his gaze moving slowly over their faces.  “It is said that a warrior must have ninjo, kindness... this is the feeling of our ancestors, and I cannot question their wisdom.  But it is my thought that sympathy should rest with old women and monks, where it can do no harm.  You fear this creature because he does not share your weakness.  He is a stone, blind and deaf to mercy.  This is what I would have on the side of Tokogawa.”
“Great father, it is well known that yōkai have such cunning in war.  We have heard that it will accept no payment for its service.  Our wives and daughters are corrupted, shamed and dishonoured by their weakness, in their curiosity... the monster spends more hours in idleness with them than with the sword.  The creature debauches women of your own house!  If these are not the ways of a devil, they are the acts of a ronin.  We beg you to consider these things without anger.” the man insisted, belying the servility of his posture with his petition’s vehemence.  “We ask only that you do not speak of our part in this to the nameless one.  Its wrath may take a form that bests our swords, leaving us with nothing with which to defend your house.”

Tokogawa stood slowly.  A speckled moth circled the lantern, ruining its wings against the paper.

“Better one demon general than a thousand cowards in my service.  Men of honour have no insults for those they have not the heart to face.”

Marching stiffly along the narrow, dogwood-shaded way toward the quarter that housed his controversial prodigy, the old man muttered his impatience at his aging legs; no light shone from within the hut and he frowned about it in the shadow of the overhanging trees, marking its resident upon a stone bench beneath them.  In his hand was a cake of smooth white limestone; he lifted it from the blade of the odachi and sheathed the frightening weapon in deference to his guest.  A small idol of blackened bronze stood beside the door of the hut, long arms ending in clenched fists that lay by its sides; its face was not clearly apparent to the shogun as he stooped to peer at its features and he abandoned the attempt and snapped at the guards who lingered on the path.  The creature’s black hair hung in a long braid past his shoulders, merging with the gloom behind a face as pale as the whetstone.  He offered his visitor a ladle full of water from the stone bowl seated beside him, and the old man accepted.

“I will not trouble you with idle talk.” Tokogawa began.
“Candor does not offend me.” Kala'amātya replied.
“You accept no payment for your service.  I ask why this is so.”
“I have few needs, and no desires beyond my private means.  In future, I may avail myself of what is owed to me.” he said.  “But not today.”  The shogun frowned.  "If you are troubled by granting a fair reward in respect to the tasks I have performed, dismiss me, and I will name my price.  This matter is entirely in your own hands.”
“Were I to dismiss you, would you seek to serve another lord?”
“I would seek it at first light.”

The prospect of ordering his men against such a foe wrinkled the shogun’s pied brow.  The creature’s patently inhuman features enraged him, but he maintained his composure, concealing his frustration.

“I do not wish to see you take another’s colours... I have come with a request.  A task must be undertaken, and I am trusting it to you.  Should you succeed, I will grant you a prosperous han, and you shall be a daimyo.  In this place, you shall surely find shelter from that which troubles you... we are protected from the evil of other lands by the divine wind.”

The shogun’s personal guard lingered for a short while after the man himself had departed, ensuring that they had not been overheard.  When they were gone, Kala'amātya stood and slid a hand into his robe, finding a secreted knife as something disturbed the flowering cornus beside his dwelling and moved along its walls toward him.  Through the lace-thin branches came a girl in a trailing coat and furisode cut from dappled, rose-stained red, bound at her breast with a broad black obi.  From her sleeve she drew a stem of lilies, their petals whiter than a winter sky, and handed it to him with a slow nod of her head, its formality melting into a wry smile.  Her long coat whispered on the stones as she sat down in the darkness at his invitation, shadow shifting on her face.  Their heads were filled with the flowers' honey-dripping scent. 

“A year passed in Kyoto and no word to me.  I believed myself out of favour.” he told her.

She smiled again, bringing her sleeve to her chin.

“Good works have occupied me.”
“I trust there have been young men grateful for your virtuous endeavours.” 
“They have been very attentive.  More so than you were.” she replied, dark eyes creeping past him along the path.  “But there were spies in every garden and so I came home, only to find there are even more spies here.”
“What of the foxes in Kyoto?”
“They are most cunning... they have heard there is a strange yōkai in Edo, and...”
“Ponder what use might be made of such a demon?” he suggested knowingly.  “The foxes of all lands are of one mind.”
“I am now but a month distant from becoming one myself.”
“Then they did instruct you well.  Let us drink to that.”  

They saluted the moon that swam in their little grey bowls, and drank to the fulfillment of her long-held, though clandestine, ambition.  The girl found she no longer regretted the silence of her companion's features, whether affronted or amused, and found contentment in his equanimity.

“Are you still to be married in the spring?” he inquired.  
“I do not look too far ahead.  How is grandfather?”
“As ever.  He has just gone from here.”
“Yes, I know.  I fear that I must speak with him before long, though I am not so eager.”  She leant toward him, and drew one of the lilies to her face, breathing their perfume.  He nodded out along the path.
“Let no one see you come to me or leave this way.  The bushi talk of me as though I eat their dogs.”  She leant on her hand and rose from the bench, smoothing down her robe.  “Are you well, Suki?” he asked.
“Well enough.” she smiled.

She turned, and bowed her head, stepping back between the supple branches.

C O N T I N U E D   N E X T   W E E K
© céili o'keefe   do not reproduce

This is an unformed, freeform set of observations.  They might not even be related.  Sorry about that.

I was reading Vogue for the first time in a couple of years the other day, sitting in a café and flipping through those lissom pages.  The cover was slickly reflective and the strong overhead light merged with the content into an almost physical impression. 

It struck me that our lives are like thick lucite boxes, finite (because we are hapless apes) and translucent (because of our hapless ape commonality).  The pages were filled with accumulative exhortations, but material wealth fills up the box around us as it grows; all those lipsticks and Cartier and holidays and silk dresses and mercenary, ruthlessly conditional associations... you can keep dragging more and more in with you, but you’re just stuffing your own finite spatial allocation with the things that are fatal to its appreciation.  That which we accumulate begins to displace and then crush us.

I've often wondered how the very rich can tolerate themselves.  I imagine they emit lengthy squeaks as they slide against those shiny walls, navigating their own glassy, ever-narrowing spaces.  Everyone assumes that wealth confers certainty, but I don't think it does; Vogue was full of hungry people gnawing on golden bones and polished notions, longing for a taste of something good and unequivocal, visibly wondering where such a thing might be purchased.

We are such hapless apes.  I put down the magazine and took an unimpeded breath and that was free of charge.
                                                                                             
                                                                                       *

Greed and desire interest me more as I get older.  They're not the same thing, but when and why does one become the other?  Until now I have taken them for granted, accepted them blandly as randomized and infinite rather than something I have personally attracted and commanded.  As you become familiar with your own existential limitations you feel the force of their passage in much more detail.

I've always prided myself on living modestly, on never having pursued the material excess that's always seemed so horrifically pointless, but lately I suspect that this presumption of moderation is a lie.  In reality I am insatiably desirous and endlessly greedy, not for things, but for others.  I squeeze between the bones of other people and lick the insides of their skins and assay and examine and experiment and extort and interrogate them.  That's how I've always been.  I've never stopped to wonder if that's alright.

What if we give as much as we get- does that settle the tab?  At what point are we asking too much of others?  When does your love and desire for someone become greed?  Or is that just passion, that most ancient and unfashionable of all inexplicable impulses?

I keep running into these things in the unlit room full of shifting furniture that is the next unborn book.

I dunno.  Maybe I'm just... an overzealous judge of other peoples' shit.  Maybe rich peeps are just super-passionate about Birkins and Mercedes.  Do they lick them when no one's watching? 

Poulomi Basu for The New York Times

As I said in my Die Antwoord post some time ago, much of the inhabited southern hemisphere is pretty fucked up once you step away from the designated resort areas.  Port Chalmers is no different to the rest of post-industrial New Zealand.  We've slid down a slow arc spanning regionalist colonial enthusiasm to the end of meaningful investment in employment and social development as instituted by New Right policy in the early nineties.  As a direct result of that purely unselfish philosophical largesse, the last time I glanced at census statistics we were smack in the midst of the poorest electorate in the country.  

That data might have been gathered before the demographic change that imported a bunch of post-grad yummy mummies and on-road offroaders, but we're still ghetto, baby.  The Lovely R and I don't mind that Port is po and more than a wee bit rough around the edges; so are we.  We thought we'd present some of choicer fragments of tangible degradation and urban abstracts in the form of a photoessay entitled Surface Failure.  
This is part one; hope you enjoy it.

BELOW  more chemicular mystery.  Port Chalmers is a noted feral outpost and from this welter of unconsidered couplings arises a cohort of randomised juveniles.  The Lovely R reminds me that every human mote consigned to this unsightly localised superabundance results in increased job security for his good self, but still.  I tend not to like people shorter than me.  They shriek, tag shit and sometimes empty paint (?) tins onto the footpath, the little gobshites.

BELOW LEFT  splendid green tin.                                            BELOW RIGHT  random pit sawn timber.

BELOW  two aspects of a hypnotically blue shed on Island Terrace.  This turquoise emulsion is peeling from the timber, failing slowly like an affection both determined and unrequited.  I see this striking colour dotted here and there around the town and always in this historic state, so it must have been on half price special for a short time circa 1954. We will feature it again because it is undeniably awesome and the Lovely R has recorded some particularly hot details.

We still <3 Bob's immortal awkwardness.

What's that you say, dear readers?  You're... you're desperately soliciting anecdotes from an annoying old person?  To help smooth the edges of an incoming monday?  Well, I've twice seen this song turn a deteriorating party around and if you've ever been to a darksided occasion that's really sliding southwards, you'll know that's no small thing.  The first time was in a derelict two-story place by the Avon in Christchurch where so many people were catatonic that it looked like the dead outnumbered the living, but as soon as the band in the backyard worked through their repertoire to this single, everyone was magically roused and poured out through the window slash door like someone had started a fire in the toilet.  Deliberately this time.  I don't think I've ever seen so many crazy smiles, sloppy dancing fails and spontaneous projectile vomiting in a six by six metre square area, and probably never will again.

The second time was at a birthday in a practice hall on Bedford Row; there'd been a scuffle or two, the birthday boy was operatic-fighting with his ex and things weren't going well.  My boo had been hustled into playing VU covers (something he detested), was already twitching and scowling thunderously as a result and by the time the first plastic cup of Stone's Green Ginger Wine had flown past his head, he'd had a fucking nough.  Aborting Venus in Furs, he scragged the lead guitar and snarled just like heaven, no fucking intro (bassists, lol) and off they went, lurching into a dreadfully mistimed and heavily ad-libbed version.  That was an heroic degree of magnanimity on his part since he was a staunch Banshees man, but the punters were appeased, the liquid critique was stopped in its tracks and the last time I saw the birthday boy he was getting what looked like a pretty thorough pants exam by a lovely and enthusiastic stranger.

This is the power of a truly great dumb song.  Do you still love it too?

“The closest I've come to a bouncy castle, before this is... I'm not telling you now." Susan complained, lifting her head from William's arm and narrowing her stare at his smile.  "It was a jungle gym...."  His expression devolved into lazy-eyed confoundment.  "A jungle gym, you know... those things kids play on in parks.  I ended up with bruises on my bum and a cider hangover.  If it’s going to be outdoors, it has to be something padded... or a golf course with that nice soft grass." 
“Golf courses?  Are you sure there’s no werewolf in your family?” he laughed, folding his arms behind his head against the silver floor.  “You don’t want to believe I was a bouncy castle virgin because it disturbs your cozy vision of my omni... slut... tifer... my omnislutiferousness.” 
“That’s not a word.”  
“English isn’t my first language.” he sighed, his hand wandering to her breast.  They lay together in the midst of the structure to which she had referred, unclothed but for the length of blue ikat he had worn into the garden, Susan's own garments draped from several of the inflatable turrets surrounding them.  The midnight sky was lightly veiled by a haze swept up from the city, though the foremost stars retained their trenchant brilliance.  She arranged lines of idle association between them, able to devise no novel constellations and touching fingers to her face in an inquiry into her own sense of pleasant dislocation.  It was furnished by consumption of the dawamesk William had concocted in the kitchen and perfect secrecy from various fruits, pistachios and a dose of the hashish he obtained from nameless associates.  

"I am completely shitfaced but I can't stop eating this stuff." she confessed as she leant over to suck one of the three remaining sweetmeats from the pallor of his stomach; rolling back, she reached out for the telephone lying in obscurity at the base of the wall and began reading through his numbers.  “There’s three... four Pandoras in here.  Who knows four Pandoras?  Who’s Crazy Pandora?  And Phaedra?  I love that name.”
“Crazy Pandora's in Spain now, I think... Phaedra’s a sixty year old witch with gold bridgework and is more of a sabre-toothed tiger than a cougar, but I still would.”
“Who's Javier B?"
"Oh... just this guy..."  
“Exactly how gay are you, William, because I don't fancy walking in one day and finding someone's shiny bollocks in mid bloody air."  His disturbing laughter echoed through the trees around them as his head fell slackly sideways.
“I don’t know..." he sighed.
"Yes you do..."
"Oh cloudcheeks, please don't flimsy-scale me..."  
She frowned, then laughed.
"I'm Kinsey scaling you."
"Whatever... it's just a little black line, and my scale needs more directions, poupée... dimensions..." he explained.  His hand rose again and wandered over her face, tracing the shape of her brows.  "It's not really a thing for me.  I don't look at men and think, wow, that guy’s hotness is putting me off girls forever, and vice versa... that's crazy.  And wasteful.  I just can't get political about something as dumb and strange as sex.”  Susan smiled at his sincerity.  “If I get a choice, I suppose I do swim toward estrogen island rather than gonad inlet, but there are a few pillow-princess inches on my person that would find it hard to dire au revoir owner/operator blowjobs.” he laughed.  “But je ne sais pas... if you’ve got your hand down my pants, all I'm really thinking is wow, you read my mind."
“Wow, you put some thought into that.”
“Genius is located on the slut chromosome.  It’s science.”
“Nothing to do with how much time you spend with a bong thinking about sex, then.”  
“Ever tried girls?”
“No..." Susan sighed.  "I always think of lesbians as experts.  I’m too lazy.”
“You’re sure?  Phaedra loves a brunette with an accent and I don’t mind taking time out of my busy schedule to make sure you’re doing it right.”
“Thanks, but no.”
"Don't be backward about coming forward with nasty scenarios, cloudcheeks... your wish is my I thought you'd never ask." he smiled. 
"I don't really have a secret thing..."  Susan rolled her tongue behind the denial, fueling his suspicion.
"Well, you can cross semibestiality right off the to-do list."

She slapped his arm.

"Alright... I do sort of have a thing... about men.  Watching guys going at it.”  
"Mon dieu... so it was a lie about the bollocks in the air... in fact, nothing would please you more..." William declared, taking up his phone.  “Anything for you, baby.  Bear or twink?”
"No!  I don’t mean now...”
“Mmm Javier... está muy bueno.  I never have, but he’s got a great personality, and a monster dick.  I'm just assuming you're a size queen...” he grinned with the phone to his ear.  “Javier?  Sup?  I’ve got this freak here and she’s begging me to go gay for pay.  Throwing Cs right at me while I’m talking to you.”  William fended her gently with his arm.  “I’ll deal you in for half if you can get here in twenty minutes.  Yeah yeah yeah...”  He looked back at her dubiously.  “Well, she says she just wants to watch, but I can't guarantee she won't strap on and come at you...”  Susan seized and threw the telephone from the edge of the castle, rolling him over and spanking his rear while he lay with his face pressed to the vinyl, incapacitated with laughter.  “Your face...” he gasped as she perceived the ruse to which she had fallen victim.
“You are so fucking immature!”
"I know... je suis désolé.”
"Oh no..." she cried, pushing him over onto his back and discovering the remaining dawamesk flattened by his stomach to the floor of the castle; he caught her leg and dumped her onto her back though she thwarted the kiss he attempted by covering his mouth with both hands, shrieking as he pushed his tongue between her fingers.  A pocket of sap smacked in the fire he had set in the midst of the magnolias, at which she started violently, then lapsed onto the vinyl with relief.  “Every time I hear a noise I think it’s your brother about to take my head off with a shotgun.” 
“Why?  Has he said something?” he asked, settling alongside her with his ear to her navel, drawing the blue cloth over their legs.
“He doesn’t have to... he just looks at me, and I know he knows that I know.  Not that I actually know anything about him... and I think I prefer it that way..."  
“There's a lot I don't know either." William admitted.  "I was at one end of the world and he was at the other a lot of the time... some of what I've heard is just third-hand backwash bullshit..."  He remembered the dawamesk and peeled it off himself, sucking the sweetness from his fingers.  "I could tell you the things I believe.”



A crane-feather moon formed the eye of a dark iron sky as Kala'amātya's feet were lowered onto black sand, beyond the reach of the hissing wash.  The small, sun-browned men who had carried him over the breakers scanned the low dunes anxiously, their compatriots stumbling through the shallows with an oak trunk longer than any of them were tall.  The Pusan pirates dumped the coffer onto the sand and waded back out to the small, fat-bellied ship that threatened to founder on the sloping shore with every slowly rolling wave.  He dragged his belongings up the beach into the sea grass, his clothing whipped by the breeze as the boat’s bow lantern swung in the darkness, a perfunctory farewell.  From the vessel the barren blue coast had seemed reassuringly desolate, the autumnal wind hissing across it in a foretaste of winter.  He hauled the chest behind him, heading along a cleft in the sandy hills.

At the top of the dune a searing yellow light flared from all points without warning; he put out an arm to shield his eyes and beyond the glare glimpsed a multitude of faces, brandishing their fierce conical lanterns to maintain their bewildering effect.  Neither his Mandarin nor far more partial Gangwon dialect placated them; weary, he offered no resistance, going down onto his knees and permitting them to bind his long arms to a cane and drive him before them while a portion of their number struggled with his trunk upon their shoulders.  

He watched the ground change, the night-sky sand gaining a mantle of needles fallen from the black pines as they followed the bank of a meandering, sea-bound river, frogs chirping amid the water hyacinth.  The party made its way into a village full of the whispered sounds of dusk, where simple thatch and cedar domiciles awaited them; the yoke was cut from his shoulders and he was ushered inside the most consequential building, a bare room walled by white paper laid over lattice, pale grass matting scuffing softly beneath his bare feet.  The men around him resembled the tribesmen of his own homeland with their short stature and tea-skinned faces.  He could make nothing of the admonition dealt to his captors by their master nor the address directed at himself, its clipped syllables aligned by percussive delivery into a demand, but he felt the man’s stare and in his apathy waited too long to lower his own toward the floor.  The daimyo rose and commanded his retainers to seize the prisoner’s head, standing between them to peer down into Kala'amātya's eyes, moving to one side to admit more light from the lantern that was brought to bear.

It seemed he was not to be disposed of that night, shut up instead inside a grain store and placed under a heavy guard in the charge of a barefoot monk.  The small man chanted in his robes of crocus gold outside the barricaded door, Kala'amātya sitting in the darkness of the empty granary and listening to its soporific cadence until the mist-draped dawn soaked through the cracks in the boards.

Having amassed his fierce, ornate company, the daimyo was assisted into his palanquin, his prisoner compelled to march, shoeless and shirtless, behind the swaying chair.  Kala'amātya recalled little of that day, save for stares from peasants toiling over the rice harvest, the basket placed upon his head lest some impulsive ronin rob the daimyo of his chance to present the curious monster to his own master, and the impression of elegance and order that blended indistinguishably with his general memory of Edo.  The spacious ways of beaten grey earth, like powdery repoussé under his naked feet, the hypnotic geomancy of its fitted timbers, storefronts mouthed with sliding panels, white script swooping across their inky noren under flaring roofs that seemed to relish their freedom from the ground; every novel element absorbed him.  The lack of mounted wayfarers made for unbroken streams of human traffic though the procession that contained him commanded precedence, rendering the final leg of their journey a particularly conspicuous affair.  Through the weave of his makeshift hood he glimpsed portions of the sprawling fortress into which they were admitted, via a paranoid array of gates and guarded stations, its turrets standing aloof on sloping, moated footings of titan bluestone.  Its towering stories wore temple eaves over walls of eggshell white from which windows stared like small blind eyes, dolphin figures cast in gold squirming atop the gables in the midday sun like fettered chimera.  Another storage chamber awaited him while the daimyo made the declarations of fealty that were the object of his journey; rats squabbled about his feet as he waited in the darkness, the nature of his fate, for once, as mysterious to himself as to those that partook of courtly ritual overhead.  


Lamplight, and a startlingly occidental face greeted him upon his emancipation.  The latter introduced himself, after some prompting from his unsmiling escorts, as a Dutchman, and made an uncertain offer of his services as a translator, switching to French when it became apparent that he was not understood.  Kala'amātya said little in reply as they were led up narrow flights of stairs, along a corridor lined in precious woods stained oxblood red and into a hall of audience where fire-plumed jungle fowl, ivory-faced women and the twisted forms of forest trees stood in lacquered relief upon the walls.  Like characters from tales suggested by the images, men sat in robes of sober blue and black and white, hair bound in knots upon their heads.  They murmured their concern at the creature pushed onto his knees before their overlord, the figure occupying the midst of the scene to which all other forms were ornament.

The blonde Dutchman cleared his throat and whispered to Kala'amātya, though no one else could have understood his conclusions.

“The great man you see before you... he is Ieyasu Tokogawa... shogun, their sovereign... though he is but a warlord... little better than a pirate.  Remain as you are, hold your tongue, save when addressed by Tokogawa.  Nothing but the direst grief will come of disobedience.”  His voice was hoarse and broken, befitting his balding velvet and filthy, partial linen and a person seemingly purveyed from some distant shipwreck, the stink of unfamiliar liquor soaking his skin and lank tow hair.  Kala'amātya kept his head low as he replied.

“Why do they summon you to speak for me?”
“The weapons in your chest... some of them are alike to those of my countrymen...”  He trailed off, lifting an eye as a question was directed to him by their lofty host.  “Tokogawa asks what manner of beast you may be... it is thought you may be nio, on account of your golden eyes.  This is fortunate..."
“How so?”
“Nio are the guardians of their heathen tabernacles... look to me, and show your assent...”

A ripple of controversy played over the courtiers’ faces.  The shogun scowled, and put another query to the translator, keenly intent upon an answer.  The Dutchman winced, and raised a hand to the side of his face.

“A misstep, perhaps... Tokogawa asks how it is that you are nio when it is obvious to all that you know nothing of your mother tongue.”
“What else might I be?” Kala'amātya hissed.
“I... I cannot think... perhaps, perhaps you are...”  The shogun reiterated his demand.  Beside them the samurai began to mutter in disgust as the interpreter trembled uncontrollably, performing gestures of appeasement and grinning like a frightened dog as he began a halting dissertation.  Men fumbled beneath their pleated robes as he spoke, seeking amulets and protective talismans.
“What have you told them?” Kala'amātya demanded.
“All I can say is that you are some form of demon... I have done you a kindness... when they put you to death, they will not dare torment you.”

The shogun rose.  He was a small, stout man in the latter portion of his years; deeply-scored creases marked a countenance remarkable only for the ineffable cynicism they conferred, a startling counterpoint to its broad, stolid planes and relating closely to the figures on the walls.  One hand lay concealed in the breast of his robe while the Dutchman summoned enough composure to relate his observations.

“Though it seems we can learn little of your... your nature... it is apparent that you are a warrior... thus I will grant you the choice of hara kiri, in preference to the axe.  If you are a demon, the evil luck that you have brought upon my house will be extinguished as your remains are... are burnt and... burnt and scattered.  If you are some blameless spirit, you may... reclaim your honour, in death.  Accept this weapon...”  The samurai beside Kala'amātya climbed from his knees and handed him a short, curving sword in a plain sheath of sharkskin, stepping back to mark the prisoner he had armed.  “This man...  He will be your second.  He will take your head, when you have made the necessary wound.”  The Dutchman made a short sign with his trembling hands, grasping an imagined blade and directing it into his own stomach.  Kala'amātya looked down at the weapon he had been allocated, momentarily contemplative.

Though it took him but a second to draw it from its housing, the samurai anticipated the gesture and his katana flashed as it sliced down over their heads; Kala'amātya caught the blade, its razor edge slicing his palm and skidding sideways over the glassy bone beneath.  He tightened his grip and prised his opponent’s arm toward the ceiling before plunging his own weapon into the startled warrior’s chest, forcing his body into the wall behind him as he cut down through his ribcage.  The blade in his fist pared flesh like nothing he had ever held.  As he released its victim, he flipped the knife in his sound hand and stared down at its fluent silver arc, enthralled by its perfection and heedless of the furore he had inspired.  The gutted man slid slowly to the floor with one leg folded beneath him, the other pushing up the matting with its heel, his blood as black and oily as the gleaming wood in the darkness of the chamber, spattering over his lips with the heaving of his lungs.

The shogun seemed to conclude his study of the stranger, disregarding his outraged retainers.  In the far corner of the room the Dutchman crouched, sobbing in a fit of alcoholic incontinence; the regent looked to him and began to speak once more, attenuating his statement in recognition of the interpreter’s disintegrating faculties.

“Though... though I am shogun...” the man began, halting and tremulous.  “The moon... it, the moon does not ask my leave to rise at night.  Your blood does not run red, and thus you are... not a man, but who are we to judge that which the Kami place before us?  You, you kill this man... that is regrettable... but if something is lost while the exceptional reveal their worth... we should not mourn their passing... overmuch.”

Kala'amātya placed the blade on the tatami at the shogun’s feet, and stood back, admiring his logic.  He glanced sideways at his intermediary.

“You may tell this clever gnome that it would please me to serve him.  Inform him that I am temperate, frugal, discreet, resourceful and expensive.  Tell him that, as a man of experience, he will understand that my price is set not by my own hand, but by the others who will seek my services, should he decline my offer.”

The body of the dead samurai shivered fitfully against the foot of the wall.  The Dutchman punctuated his translation with numerous apologies.  The shogun nodded, indicating with a single syllable that the interview was over, and Kala'amātya accepted a robe from the bushi appointed to accompany him outside.  The same moon that had painted the hateful ocean waves shone down upon the pebbled paths that led to his new quarters.  He barely recognized his own shadow as it fell across them.

C O N T I N U E D   N E X T   W E E K
© céili o'keefe   do not reproduce

Lustrous falls of sliver-thin oyster shell, strung onto monofilament.  They sway and twitch and tinkle with the slightest breeze.  I buy them at Trade Aid in Dunedin.

We have two; in summer one lives in a rear lounge window and the other migrates around the house in search of a home but mostly lies strewn over anything tall enough, catching the light and providing moments of randomised transient beauty.  This one was reclining over a Japanese table screen in the bedroom when the sunset hit it and for once I could be bothered to roll off the bed and grab the camera.  I intend to make it into a chandelier of some sort using split bamboo but just... never get round to it.  You know how it is.

Some people have flying dreams, but I used to dream that I was smaller.  That I was as I had been at 18; limber and blooming and voluptuous.  At 40 and peak fatness, that me always seemed lost and distant even though its fundamentals, as well as the potential for so much more, resided under my own skin.  It resides in all of us.

Youth is wasted on the young.  It is easy to despair for all we've relinquished if we don't remember everything we've become and accomplished in the meantime.  At eighteen I was sullen and self-execrating and unappreciative of the many gifts I had been blessed with.  Then I met someone who, ironically through neglect, had never been subjected to any indoctrination in respect to the physical.  No one had bothered to shame him or corrupt his self-image.  He had the tremendous fortune of a healthy and beautiful body, rejoiced in its abilities, enjoyed the pleasure it gave, both to himself and to others, and neither wished for more nor accorded to his lovely flesh more attributes or significance than it actually possessed.  Media messages urging self-loathing and obsessive comparison were something to which he was completely indifferent; he was amused by and gently reproachful of my own negative self-image and confounded by its stubborn resistance to logic.  In short, he lived happily in his own skin.  

I had allowed this wonderful truth to become obscured by the psychic garbage we gather in the course of adulthood, even though it is the most valuable lesson I've observed in regard to lasting peace with our corporeal aspect.  But one day I woke up in the tail end of influenza and remembered just how much his unassuming example had meant to me, even in the midst of a giant fucking avalanche of overwhelming realisations.  Maybe you've had the same transcendent sort of moment.  Or maybe you're smart and don't need to be pounded into emotional atoms before reconstruction can be attempted.     

What's it like to be too big?  There are good things about it.  It's lovely and warm, for a start, something I'm only just learning heading into my first winter without my plumpy wetsuit.  A fat arse is a comfy seat; I now incur coccyx discomfort when I slouch too long on my reduced caboose.  You can eat all you like.  If you're also tall, you present an intimidating silhouette, ensuring things like less sexual harassment, an important consideration for those of us who have suffered assaults or abuse.  There's a very good reason why so many survivors retreat into fatness.  But don't let me snow you; it's no bed of roses.  Nothing fits properly.  Joggers seem like another species.  You snore and get achy and too hot in bed.  You feel heavy and slow and older than you are, ill at ease, often depressive.  You wonder how your partner/s remain faithful.  Looking at photographs of yourself is especially galling.  You don't really enjoy going out anymore.  Being too fat is like being buried alive in many respects, our topography submerged by something we hardly recognise.

But we are still there, waiting.  I decided that was worth digging for.

What's it like to be thin?  I'll ask my partner.  The Lovely R is 5'10" and about 68kg, slender with very low to non-existent body fat.  While I've always had a weakness for skinny pasty guys, he laments his slightness.  "People assume you're lucky.  They project onto you some magical ability to do things they can't.  Relative to other people, of both sexes, you feel small and that affects your confidence.  If you're thin, you become acutely aware early on in life of your physical limitations and that extends into adulthood even when you gain more physical competence.  The clichéd view of thinness is miserable, pinched Dickensian meanness instead of jolly fatness and you worry that people think of you that way."  It's cold, isn't it?  "Yes!"  Do you feel particularly sexy in your enviable slenderness?  "As a guy, you look at yourself and see spindly.  I consider myself fit and competent, intellectually, but I don't feel that way sometimes.  The perception is self-limiting."  Hmm, just like fatness.  R is an ex-runner, very active in his work and pretty darn fit.  At 53, he does push ups and can rock skinny pants; no gut, no love handles.  Even I objectify him.  

Despite everything we're told, being thin won't attract universal acclaim and won't solve everything that's fucked about your life.  But that's not what I'm selling you.  Being a healthy weight will allow you to rediscover what matters to you and concentrate on effectuating whatever that may be.  Are you happy with that as a goal?  I am.

Pointy-End Realness.   Diets fail because they are impossible to maintain and are just ripples from a mainstream that is itself completely out of whack.  In attempting to observe them, I knew subconsciously that I was setting myself up for failure, every freaking time; I misrepresented my habits, wormed around the limitations and basically bullshitted my way to defeat, complaining all the while about my slow metabolism and the unfairness of it all.  That wasn't just down to me; dieting was crap and I resented its obvious shortcomings but couldn't be bothered to work it out holistically for myself.

Ditching the whiny teenage subterfuge is essential, but I'm not judging anyone because it took me 41 fucking years.  Accept that the old-skool band-aid dieting approach is pointless and deal with the fact that you'll be shifting your behaviour on a permanent and fundamental basis.  Get counseling, get philosophical, seize your intellect and your angst and start thinking of them as tools to reshape your outlook.  Press your vices into service.  Vain?  I'm massively vain and used it to prod myself out of fatness.  OCD?  Use that compulsive need to direct your choices.  Controlling?  Ditto.  Control something that's begging for regulation.  Too reclusive?  Use your ninja skills to avoid the pitfalls of social munchies and nosey, judgy observers.

This will take a year or more, so get comfortable with that.  Long term problems tend not to have short term solutions, another of life's annoying quirks. The central concept is simple.  There is no magic formula, no VIP area, no queue jumping; it's the same for everyone.  You can rescue yourself or you can run off for liposuction and bariatric fuckery like every other feckless arseclown.  Here we go.

Shitty eating habits?  Take 3 to 6 months to reform them before even getting into weight loss.  You won't break those greasy chains in a fortnight, so forget that and all the juice fasting crap.  Purge the obvious junk.  Learn to identify, enjoy and require real food for yourself.  Go wholemeal; accustom yourself to the benefits.  Switch to rice bran and olive oils and butter (in the latest disinterested metastudies, animal fat has been exonerated.)  You'll feel better and probably start losing chunk just by doing this much, getting the ball rolling in the best possible way.  Taking a long term approach is comprehensively rewarding.  Rebuilding your habits wholesale scorches your personal landscape of all those janky quirks you've collected- the boredom eating, overindulging, double burgering, depression binging, sweetness jonesing... there are so few places left for your sneaky crap to hide unconfronted that you'll abolish it almost incidentally.  What I did-  An existential crisis had already walked me naked through my own mirrored hall of internalized shame so I was there, baby.  And we'd been cleaning up our diet for years.  I just needed to get into portion control etc.  I'll talk about the dietary nitty gritty in the final part of this rambling epic, which will be entirely devoted to food.

Get your partner/friend/whoever on board.  Your squeeze, your bitch, homies, family, the dog, whatever.  Talk it out with an associate no matter who they are because it will obviously impact them too and you might even find someone who wants to come along for the ride.  Reassure your partner that you're not about to run off with that hot guy/girl/both in the bookshop as soon as you can fit your new shit into something sexy.  Tell someone what you're intending for the accountability.  Shame is a powerful motivator, and so are compliments.  I needed both because I am a shallow, thirsty bitch.  The fat cycle is one of transgression, guilt and self-reproach, remediated with another round of the same.  The healthy cycle is one of positive choice, achievement and reinforced determination to succeed, leading to further improvements.  Choose the latter and let others support you if you think that's what you need.  If you don't wish to share with the peeps in your immediate live circle, go online and blag away to your heart's content on weight-loss and health forums.  What I did- I regale the poor R with relentless reports from the fatty battlefront and tirelessly solicit compliments.  I also acknowledged verbally, to a select few, that I had gotten too lardy and intended to do something about it.

Forget the scales.  Weight and mass are not the same thing so blow that bollocks out of your mental airlock.  Weighing oneself is too easy.  It can become obsessive (think of the people you know who live and die by that reading) and incredibly discouraging, especially given the fact that many people don't know enough about biology to interpret the figures.  So just get rid of them- it's more temptation than our onboard perversity mechanisms can resist and I've never owned a set myself.  A much more informative source of data is your measurements; waist, chest, hips, arms, legs etc.  What I did - I knew mine quite well because I make a lot of my own clothes, but I do suggest buying a dressmaker's tape and recording your original details for posterity and tracking your reduction.  I've lost nearly 30cm off my hips, which is a whole school ruler and if I can do that, so can you.  Clothing size is another reliable reporter of your progress; find something non-stretchy and use it as a reference. 

Kill your Television.  We haven't owned one for several years now and jesus christ, what a difference that has made.  Live your life instead of watching shows about living life.  Visual media is thickly suffused with ambient toxicity; you're not thin enough, rich enough, cool enough, consuming enough, going on enough holidays.  Hate yourself and buy something to help you feel better.  Spectate other people's traumas like bored dogs fogging up a car window.  If you don't think your viewing habits are harming you by keeping you immobile and pitching evil notions at your head like spitballs, I challenge you to switch off for a week and taste the difference.  When I stopped having to fend off that stream of audiovisual bilge, I was able to let go of my need to resist these messages and acknowledge my own personal desire for change.  Television keeps you seated and passive and reeling from its subconscious assaults.  So kill it.  Give it away.  Make active decisions about your viewing (i.e. movies etc) and limit it to the shit you actually want to watch, not hours of sludgy whatever.  It's amazing how quickly you lose your tolerance for and begin to actively detest the sight and the sound of that nagging, flickering aperture.  What I did- At one stage we owned three tvs.  Now we have none and we've never been happier.  I lost a bunch of weight and even started a blog.      

If you haven't found what you were looking for in the biscuit tin yet, chances are it's not there.  The extent to which modern humans have come to rely on 'convenience' food-like substances as a substitute for basically everything that should be good and rewarding in their lives is frankly terrifying and explains a lot about our present somatic situation.  See overeating for exactly what it is; boredom, frustration, auto-sabotage, mental laziness.  Exercise will help turn this pointless snuffling in another, more constructive direction and that is delineated below.  What I did - Food had become so central to my reward and pleasure expectations that I'd forgotten how great everything else could be.  About looking hot and enjoying clothes and adornment again.  About exerting my perfectly functional body in pursuit of recreation and relaxation, and how important that was in alleviating the worst aspects of depression.  About experiencing the full gamut of physical and emotional wonders that is gorgeous raunchy sex unimpaired by notions of self-doubt and despair.
Which leads me to my next point...

Have Breakfast, dammit, & shift your main meal to Lunchtime.  I'm not a natural breakfast or morning person, but induce myself to eat a nice one because it makes everything easier.  Energy levels, thought processes and the motivation to exercise.  R and I eat our main meal at lunch because he works a split shift, comes home and I can cook for him.  It allows our bodies to wind down at night and prepare for quality sleep instead of trying to deal with a huge load of unlooked-for calories.  Is it really any wonder that we can't sleep and suffer nocturnal discomfort when we pig out at 7pm?  Everything's been better since we moved to this regime.  You can do it; commit to it and prepare in advance and it's not as difficult as it sounds, especially once the benefits start kicking in.  Like almost everything else I'm recommending here, it becomes its own reward in very short order.  

Stop getting drunk and stoned and falling face first into 3am double cheese deep pan evil.  Grow up.  You're not 18 (unless you are, then ignore me and go hard) and no one loves a fat old stoner with dead pepperoni stuck to their nasolabial fold.  Bad habits stop being cute when we do.  I am as regretful about that as you are.  What I did-  We don't drink and only do  *_*  occasionally, so it wasn't a big problem. 

Stop going out for meals and buying lunch for a while.  Restaurants, cafés and bought lunches are crucibles of bad habits, refined crap, huge portions and multiple-choice temptation.  You'll get judgement for attempting to moderate your intake while everyone else is stuffing their face so just give them a miss for six months while you're building a better routine; it's easier.  If you have to attend for work, etc, eat something healthy before you leave and have entrées as a main, that sort of thing.  Use the mind-boggling amounts of money you save to invest in better home-cook ingredients.  If you can't cook, spend it on classes.  Make your own lunch if you work somewhere else.  What I did- Took my own advice.  To this day I can't figure out how to keep a lid on shit when we go out.  Luckily we can't afford to do it often; problem solved.

We have to exercise, that's not negotiable.  But I don't want to exercise : (   Go to a hardware store and buy a fucking can of harden-up, as we say down here.  We can trade exercise away for convenience and another hour on the delicious couch, but like all satanic contracts, the expiry date on that shit equals premature death.  Literally.  So choose life.  Choose not needing a fucking mobility scooter at 35.  Choose outrunning the tsunami.  Choose blowing off those doughy teenagers up four flights of stairs when the lift's broken at the mall.  Choose bodily awesomeness.

If you can't deal with taking on physical activity, I don't know if this will work for you so think that over carefully.  

Lose some weight before you start crashing around in earnest, allowing yourself to avoid injury and to develop the desire to climb out of fat-derived inertia.  That will come.  You will start feeling restless in a nonsexy way.  What I did - Once I'd lost about half of the bulk I'd earmarked for destruction, I started building up to 30-45 mins of hard walking every day, on the flat and now with hills thrown in.  I chose that because it's free, doesn't require equipment, can be done at almost any time and it accommodates my antisociability, thus blasting all the traditional excuses out of the water.  I don't run anywhere unless there's something visibly radioactive bearing down on me or they're giving away free Aaron Taylor-Johnsons on the other side of town, so there will be no jogging.  Swimming's also great, especially for those dealing with weight-bearing injuries.  Awesome things about the obesity epidemic; you can get great togs in larger sizes now and hey, it's not like you're going to be the only chunky monkey at the pool.

If you're going to walk, choose a 5 kilometre circuit (Google maps or similar can help you plot one nearby).  Just walk around it at your normal sedentary pace at first for a couple of weeks.  While you're doing this, learn good form (there's plenty on the internet about it) and start to apply it as you gradually increase the intensity of your walking.  Remember to respond to tightness and pain by easing up and staying mindful, and find the shoes you need.  Starting-out niggles are not the same as injuries nor reason to quit; walk them out and they'll go away.  Do listen to serious, persisting or worsening discomfort, however; ignoring that shit will invite worse.  I got blisters, small sciatic-type bitching and tired arches for the first two weeks, but that's gone now.  In fact, so is my incipient sciatica.  As far as footwear goes, I just wear chucks because I'm a barefoot/nonorthopedic type who spends most days unshod and superstitiously thinks sports shoes are coffins for feet, but go with whatever works for you.

Once you've got yourself sorted, start ramping up your speed into walking too quickly to talk comfortably and keep it up the whole way.  That's not crazy power walking, if you know what I mean; I'm talking about striding along as fast as you can, maintaining good upright posture and avoiding over-extension.  Think Born Slippy beats per minute.  The. Whole. Way.  It might not seem as hardcore as running, but you're doing it for a longer period and if there are climbs involved it soon becomes clear why it burns as many calories as jogging at the same speed.  It strips fat and remodels your legs with gratifying rapidity.  I will say that walking in form @ 10 kph and the focus required to maintain it can look pretty fucking psychotic, so if you're conscious of your dignity, do it early or late so no one sees your freaky marching except the other freaky marchers, lol.

When you're feeling like a plonker and just want to give up and go home, remember this: every step you take is putting another metre between you and all the bad shit waiting to get you when you were fat and lazy.  You're walking away from diabetes, disability and cancer at ten kilometres an hour.  Keep going.  I tell myself that every day and it hasn't let me down.

If any of this sounds daunting, please don't be discouraged; I am the last person on earth who thought they would be getting restless and wanting to go for a hard walk.  I am fucking lazy and always writing and sitting.  The payoff for exercising regularly is real, even for sedentary inverts; you feel great, can do so much more and even your grey matter benefits.  I mentally compose and revise while I'm trudging along and am amazed by the ideas and resolutions that volunteer themselves in the process.  Give it a chance.  Four consistent weeks is all it takes.

I plan to throw in some other form of exercise soon, maybe Pilates or some other eye-roll-inducing shit like that.  How much activity is required?  If you're not physically tired in a good way at the end of the day (and I don't mean aching and exhausted, because that's fucked up, obviously), you're probably not doing enough exercise.  

The Plateau is made of Lies.  Everyone talks about getting to this terrible stage in your reduction where you just can't lose any more, no matter how hard you try.  But that's bullshit.  What's really happening is that your bathroom scale-haunting habits are coming back to bite you, even after all that hard work.  Muscle weighs so much more than fat that most people can't get their heads around it and start wailing and gnashing when the needle won't keep dropping at the same rate.  You also retain a lot of water when you're too fat and that easy initial loss of weight as it departs is impossible to replicate later on.  Which is why it's important to emphasise mass and composition, not kilos.  Another shitty thing that happens is the easing up of heroic dietary measures once you get to a size that alleviates most of the negatives you were living with before.  Come on now, we all do that.  I've been doing it.  Balance that with calling yourself out and getting back to the grindstone.  But the infamous plateau is also an artefact of perception.  Just because you're no longer burning through dress sizes like a bat out of hell doesn't mean you're not achieving meaningful change.  I'm getting down to my true shape now, a size, while by no means thin, that is nevertheless truly dictated by my frame and not the excess it's been carrying.   My body is deciding what to hang onto, sometimes still giving up surprising amounts in places I'd not previously considered.  My musculature is shapeshifting and has a way to go yet to reach a balanced expression.

The plateau is where loss begins to taper off as the most meaningful measure of your effectuation and gain starts to kick in.  The gaining of control; of muscle, fitness, grace, shapeliness, wellbeing, ability.  All those things are coming toward you and as the terrain levels out, you can see them clearly.

It is difficult to adequately describe the joy of discovering you're still there underneath everything that had obscured you.  That all those little remembered things have survived.  Where once I lamented the sight of my featureless legs, I now grin like an idiot at calves that are strong and tapered and written with increasing definition.  My hands have rediscovered their tendons and veins, the latter meandering over their framework like inky deltas instead of lying buried and mysterious.  I have clavicles.  And breasts like no one's business, so emphasised by the retreat of my former bulk that my partner forgets what he's doing and gazes with a foolish SpongeBob smile.  Perhaps the most surprising revelation was my face, its true shape returned one morning as I slapped on moisturiser and saw a long-lost oval looking back at me instead of round + party-crashing chins.  This is the me I had almost given up for dead.

The plateau is the place where all that was lost is returned to you, and that is a beautiful thing.   

Picture credits (from top to bottom) Mermaid Waterhouse, 1900.  Monna Vanna. Rosetti, 1866.  Isis & Osiris, tomb frieze detail.  A temple relief at Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh.  Towely, Southpark.  Artemis.  La Dame à la licorne (sight). circa 1500. 

Next week- Part 3: Cake or Death- Paelo for skeptics, elimination, moderation & glorious, actual food.

A rider urged his bay horse up over the sloping ground toward the head of the hill that lay glowing in the opening act of a summer sunset, its cruel, pale stone and parched dust rising in their faces and obscuring his view of its crowning ruins.  He leant over the neck of his mount and spat, slowing the animal as he caught sight of the guards presiding over the approach.  Two Qashqai girls sat on tall white camels, like carnivorous flowers in the heavy, flared skirts of bright Ottoman print arranged across the animals’ flanks so that they adorned both beast and rider.  The senior nursed a musket inlaid with garlands of ivory and silver, the other a red-bound hunting bow; in their violent finery they sat eating almonds from their chanteh and considering the stranger with their hard black stares.  Though he wore the qaba of a Turkish soldier, his waistcoat of brilliant green silk figured with spun gold matched the value of his horse, which they assessed with congenital shrewdness, and betrayed him as a foreigner of means, his brace of side arms narrowing their estimation further toward his station as a mercenary officer.  

“Shab bekheir... Farsi balad nistam.” he confessed, though he despaired at expending the extent of his fluency to no avail.  "Edward Lamb kojast?  Inja?  I am Gideon Auberjonois... I come to speak with Kala'amātya.” he added.  The girl to the west lifted her head in a short gesture of demand and spoke proud but broken French to him, responding to his accent.

“You say, to me... I take, to him.” she insisted.
“I think no.  This I will say only to him.”  He waited patiently while the two girls conferred, the horse blowing hard against the hillside.  
“No we don’t say for you, and you go.” the foremost instructed.
“Ladies...” Gideon sighed.  “Today, I have ride from near Bushehr, an lamed my two best horses.”  He smiled.  “But, ah, not this one.”  Bringing his crop down, he spurred his mount into a sudden burst of impetus that carried them between the dromedaries, leaving the girls in a cloud of salty dust.  His horse laboured over the tall slope and faltered before a rain-scoured cut, giving one of the guards far more opportunity than she needed; the shot from her musket sent them head-first onto the ground while her companion nocked an arrow and aimed at the rider’s shoulder, catching him instead in the stout flesh of his arm.  The girls were surprised, but not astonished, to see their second victim slide from the trembling body of their first and continue onward as though they had missed him entirely, urging their own mounts after him.

Edward’s black tents stood beneath the humbled ruins of a Sassanian redoubt, pitched low like hands shading a narrow stare and commanding a raptor’s view of the garmsirat plains laid out in banded, studded gold and smoking purple by the sun as it communed with the horizon.  Grooms in striped chapans and lambswool hats tended a long string of steppe and Arab horses, sloshing water into a trough from bulging skins while camels carped and brayed, waiting their turn.  Beside the hearth stones slave girls from the Thar and Taklimankan, wrapped in thunder blue and ashen black, puffed at embers with their bellows and rolled fragrant dough from their soffrai, glancing up at the stranger as he ducked beneath the largest tent, grasping the wound on his arm.  

Its owner sat alone amid the shadows in the sombre homespun of his custom, against a wall of torba bags and mafrash, stacked parterres of deep woad and earthen red grounds, lamb-white stars and amulet details.  On the rug beneath them both sat a brass bowl full of half-blown roses floating in spring water.  

“Kala'amātya, you are well?” Gideon enquired.  Edward dismissed with a glance the two sentry girls who glowered at the edge of the tent behind the intruder, and they withdrew.
“Shiraz puts flesh on your bones.” he replied laconically.
“The fesenjan, avec le canard... I am a slave to it.  But ah, I come here with news... your chienne noir, she has been found.”  Gideon watched all suggestion of movement desert Edward’s flesh.  In the darkness of the tent his gaze was less welcome than ever, as bitterly acute as its bright acid hue.  With a low word he brought his grooms to the edge of the enclosure.
“Fetch Si’athle.” he told them, looking back to his guest.  “Ou?  Allez.” he demanded impatiently.  Gideon continued his tale, shrugging one shoulder as his blood began to ooze around the shaft of the arrow into the sleeve of his coat.
“Some Amalaeh an some Lurs have said so... the women come to the sea, away from the fighting, but they complain to the fishermen... at their well, there is a jinniyah who kills children when they come for water... an that this jinniyah, on her breast she has the black mark of the Shaytan.”  Edward was on his feet before Gideon had finished speaking, and the latter was forced to follow him back beneath the eaves into the evening where three grooms struggled with a huge spotted mare, dashing away from the haunches that swung toward them with evil intent, the whites of its round eyes glowing.  It squealed and threw back its dark head as Edward pulled the saddle from its back and dumped it onto the dirt, swinging up without it.   

“Where?” he demanded, glaring down at Gideon and wrapping a dark scarf about his head.
“Ride to the sea, turn to the east an cross the river... there is an old caravanserai, with a camp to the north.”

Edward summoned a Baluch woman, turning her tattooed face to his informant.

“Feed him.” he instructed.  The horse lurched in a flaring circle, striking stones from the fire and sending sparks streaming across the camp; at his behest the animal flew into a gallop, clattering away down the barren hillside and out onto the darkening plain.  

Horse and rider were confronted by the width of a tidal river halfway through the second night of their expedition; at its far bank the tireless mare made a spring that carried them both from the water, her dark tail whipping her legs as she leapt up the rise and cantered on toward the low shape of a karvansara.  Its colonnade of mud-brick portals stood like parched, cracked mouths in its lonely disuse, deprived of caravans and baggage trains by war and fickle trade.  In its desolation it was home only to swallows and jackals, and the scabrous little vipers that had crawled in to overwinter in its stones.  Edward slid down from the horse and left it to crop the tufts of summer-blasted grass.  

A dying medlar had keeled over at the corner of the colonnade; he broke a limb from its silver frame and took it with him, around to the north of the shelter.  In the darkness of the distance he could see the dull, flickering points of ochre that were the hearths of the nomad complainants and hear the bells of their black goats.  On the ground before him a spring spilt from a broken ring of stones toward the footings of the shelter; a creature glared at him from its far side and lapped at it with her hands in the mud while her filthy skirts were soaked to a darker shade.  She lifted her head as if it had snapped free from a tether, water trickling from her chin and from the black thatch of her hair.

“You cannot see me.” she muttered, rising from her knees.
“I have always seen you.  Sis’thle nya'n si el’yeh.”
“I will not.  I will not go.  Say it in a thousand tongues, one thousand times.  I cannot hear you.”  He followed the edge of the little pool toward her.  Rana scrambled backward and climbed up over the tall step of the karvansara into one of the arches, out of reach.  
“Sis’thle nya'n si el’yeh.” he told her again.
“I cannot h...”
“When you first spoke against Helaine, what did I tell you?” he demanded.  She retreated further beneath the overhanging arch.
“I cannot hear you.”
“I told you plainly... if harm should come to her through you, there would be nowhere for you to hide from me.  This is that place.  Sis’thle nya'n si el’yeh, Rana.  Your sisters await you.”

Rana stalked between the pillars bounding the courtyard with her arms wrapped about her head to keep his voice from it.  The ruined, shattered copper silk of her wide skirts fell away against her legs, shed in a trail of wind-blown fragments in the dust.  Edward stepped down from the stone and tracked her across the enclosure, the distance between them dissolving until he might have stepped on the back of her dress.

“Go into the sea.” he said again.  She turned and struck him with a fist.  In return he lifted the dead branch in his hand and brought it down across her back, driving her toward the ground where she stayed her fall with both hands.  He bent and caught her arm and dragged her to her feet, away from the ruin toward the edge of the plain, where the wind scudding in from the desert faltered and stumbled over tumbled stone and pouring tongues of sand.

A three quarter moon was drawing free of the placental darkness of the ocean like a newborn god, laying burning stripes of silver over the black water as though it were the fundamental act of some new creation.  Rana felt the cold sand flee and ooze up beneath her feet and clutched at her skirts, resisting her tormentor, who drew her on toward the white-trimmed breakers, head-high as they collapsed onto the beach.  To the east and west the giant, fleshless frames of vanquished whales lay heaped by storms in formless ruin, bleached salt white.  Glowing diatoms rolled inside the waves, answering the waxing moon.

“Sis’thle nya'n si el’yeh.”  His voice was soft and low, his hatred dimmed by the sight of the ocean, a thing from which he had always turned as others turned from the blind eye of the sun.  While sheets of water swept in around her feet, Rana stared in silence at his invitation, at its extinguishing symmetry.  “You will not get by me.” he promised.   She let go of her ragged skirts and they were washed around her legs toward the patient sea while she spoke over the sound of the waves.  

“When I am gone, Kala'amātya, you will be left with nothing but your hateful self.  To think I spare you that by standing here.”


                                                                                      *


William waited on the porch for his brother to return from the mailbox.

“Rana's living in the plantation.” he told him.  “I just saw her.”  He watched Edward kick the pile of disused boots away from the front door, meeting his gamboge stare with the greatest reluctance when it was turned on him.

“Let me know how you deal with it.” the latter replied, stepping inside. 

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