I’m still at 255 lbs.
Eliminating all stressors for my life. Anything that annoys me now gets removed from my presence.
I feel I must do this after having been classifying as a Class 1 Obesity patient in my medical chart.
I reject this obesity idea.
This isn’t me.
King Farouk was obese; not I.
The real me is someone else, lurking under all that failure fat.
Taht, as they say in Arabic.
But I cannot deny the reality of what is obvious at present for all to see.
To most I appear as nothing more than a pathetic fat old fuck, the dime a dozen variety that comes to Florida to die.
That is their reality.
Can I drastically change my appearance by late August?
Well, to lose being a Class I obese loser, I must find a way to reduce my body mass index to less than 30. Barbaric, er, bariatric surgery is out; so I’m left with doing it the old fashioned way.
Based on my height of 6 feet 2.5 inches (189 cm), I need to get to 235 pounds (106.6 kilograms) — in other words, lose 20 lbs.
I don’t know about you, but when I’m facing the prospect of losing twenty pounds, after having already just trimmed 17, well, let’s put this way: I’m begining to have strange dreams where the past appears to me rearranged. And I find myself increasingly repulsed in a strange state of twilight consciousness by what I see around me, and long to be somewhere else and thin again.
I can’t stop thinking of escaping this retirement gulag filled with assholes who play golf and talk about their grandkids.
I don’t play golf.
I don’t have kids.
My entire family is either dead or completely estranged.
I’m the last of the line.
When I die, no one will be left who remembers what my family was really about, the glory days of chalets overlooking the Mediterranean, the 13-room flat by the Nile in Cairo, the experience of living a privileged life where being privileged was a given and taken for granted.
No one cares about any of it.
Why should they?
They are strangers to me, and I to them.
I looked at the moon crescent rising over my house at dawn today and it seemed to mock me.
It seemed to ask: why did you not write that magnificent novel you once imagined and named after me that first time you went to Dahab 20 years ago, where I was once called Sin by some and amar by others, which was the name your own Turkish-Egyptian grandmother called you by when you were a boy?
Why did you let it slip through your fingers, as you smoked opium by the Nabatean ruins?
I am drifting, like Lawrence on his camel crossing the Nefud desert.
Tourists today who go to Dahab — they usually pronounce it da-hab — think it means gold. It doesn’t. It comes from the poetic Bedouin phrase “Waqaat Thahaab” (وقت ذهب) — ie, the time that went away. You can interpret that any way you like.
Speaking of time, every day in early 2023 there is less of me, so far, but perversely the one I thought long dormant if not dead seems to be awakening.
Has my long exilic silence been an act of pseudo Joycean cunning, as I remained mutely trapped in the land of the kufar who despise my race and religion and think nothing of locking innocent Moslems up in places like Gitmo then throwing away the keys?
Was it that, or was it more that I had nothing or very little to say that anyone would want to hear let alone remember?
Fuck all that.
I need to get to 235.
That is all that matters, for now.
The rest of it will come around soon enough, when I am finally far far away from here.
In the meantime, I have more losing to do.
Until I’m back to looking like how I actually see myself, tah kul el araf, i.e., beneath all the shit:
Leaving Amerika 