The Last Two Weeks of Summer

Internal assessment: I’ve only had four sips of this coffee.

I could be more awake. I could be more alert.

I shove a few more Andy Capp’s Hot Fries into my mouth. I feel the heat from the spice. It’s not my favorite feeling, but I enjoy the underlying taste all the same.

How many calories is this?  I wonder

As I wonder this, I hear another crack shiver through the interior of my sliding glass door. Which means somebody has gotten through.

I swivel my chair around and come face to face with…

18-year-old Phil.

Picture him but without this shit-eating grin on his face.

“Calories?!” he yells. “Really???”

——

This was my philosophy 9 years ago:

As long as I wasn’t being “excessive,” the karmic balance should keep me doing okay. That meant I could do things like…eat three square meals a day, snack a bit, and do no exercise besides walking to my college classes. And that was fine for a while.

What I resented at age 18 was the tyrannical implications of the people who were already aware of how metabolisms work. The whole concept of having to be mindful about those three meals, and mindful about those snacks. Mindful about how sedentary I truly was.

Because I didn’t fully grasp that these were the years of plenty. These were the years of being a relatively healthy steer on the meat farm of college. Right then, at 18, I was ignorant, I was blissful.

And I was still pretty angry, come to think of it.