Week #3 on My Liquid Diet: A Nightmare (Literally)

Eat actual food? Try to draw? In my dreams!

This little lost Costa’s Hummingbird — a recent visitor to our Berkeley neighborhood (though its usual habitat is down in Southern California and Mexico) — is on a strict all-nectar diet (with a few bugs stuck in there, presumably to add texture) and must feed every 10-15 minutes. Hey, Buddy, I feel you! (Photo by Sara)

The deets:

• Beginning weight (July 14): 230 lbs.

• Weight at start of Week #2 (water-weight loss!): 222

• Weight at start of Week #3: 218.4

• Weight at start of Week #4 (current week): 215.3

Total weight loss so far: 14.7 lbs.

I’ve got 14 more weeks to go on just meal replacements, totaling 960 calories per day. Then 13 more weeks after that when I’ll transition back to eating actual food.

To reassure those of you who have kindly written to me with your concerns: Yes, I am under medical supervision. I’m safe.

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So this morning I awoke from a nightmare. I’d been dreaming that I had accidentally eaten real food and thus derailed my liquid diet — and I was distraught! How had I slipped?

This nightmare also incorporated another great anxiety of mine: Am I doing enough — or, come on, Josh, anything! — to fight for our democracy and our sweltering planet? (I mean, on top of obsessively watching MSNBC’s evening lineup and listening to political podcasts like “Pod Save America.”) In this dream I’d joined some activist organization — or actually, maybe it was two orgs? Yes, it was two! Because at one point in the dream I realized that by attending this meeting, I was blowing off an important obligation to another group, which was gathering at the same time. Anyhow, at the meeting I was attending, there were platters of sandwiches (sandwiches! Even typing the word makes me almost loopily ravenous), and I’d eaten one! And maybe (hey, this was in my subconscious, so I need to cut it some slack — especially considering how disorganized my conscious life is) there was an additional meal I’d eaten at some point in this nightmare.

You know that feeling of waking up and realizing — with great relief — that you really weren’t just standing naked at the bakery counter while ordering muffins? Or you weren’t just entering the lecture hall to take your final exam for Biology 101, even though you hadn’t studied for it or even cracked the textbook? (Oh, wait — that last one did happen to me! But I’ve dreamed about it periodically ever since.) Well, I had that same “Thank God!” moment this morning, as I realized that my commitment to this liquid diet remained intact.

No, not the final-exam nightmare again! (Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash.)

But even now, a few hours later, I can almost taste the dream-food I consumed. And I can still feel that ecstatic, transgressive guilt I awoke with: Ha! I did it! I ate!!!

Not gonna lie, my friends: I’ve been hungry. Sometimes hungry AF.

So instead of chowing down on real food, I’ve been “eating” (sampling) my dreams — in this case, the things I dream of doing, of becoming.

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Like, I’ve always wanted to draw. And I’ve never been any good at it. This goes back to elementary-school art class. I could see that there were some kids who could create beauty, whimsy, delight with their crayons and such. I, however, could not. All my drawings were frustratingly un-delightful: sad, scratched-out squiggles that just lay there on the piece of paper. So from early on, I accepted that drawing was not something I would ever do well, or enjoy.

And then my wife, Sara (who, like our son, draws beautifully), recently bought me a sketchpad and a box of colored pencils. And a couple of weeks ago I biked out to a bench near the Richmond, Calif., Marina and sat down to try to draw. Over the course of a year-and-a-half or so, in 2021 and ’22, as I battled a pretty deep depression, I’d regularly go out to this bench to read and to feel a sense of freedom and ease. I came to think of it as “my” bench — though if someone happened to be sitting there already, the next bench over was pretty good, too.

So there I was on my bench. I was nervous about trying to draw again, after so long — but I took the cellophane wrapper off the sketchpad, and opened the metal case of colored pencils … and I looked straight ahead of me, and there was this tree. I wasn’t quite ready to draw anything yet, so on the first page of the sketchbook I just wrote some notes to myself:

Then, after taking a deep breath to try to dissipate six decades of art anxiety, I made my first attempt at drawing in who knows how long:

It was exhilarating! I had the same old feelings of artistic insufficiency, but there was something so fulfilling (a word that contains the word “filling” and almost all of “full”! Take that, liquid diet!) in just the experience of concentrating, as hard as I could, on the visual world (which also seemed to bring in a heightened awareness of other sensations, like the fluffiness of the wind brushing my skin and the distant cacophonies of seabird calls).

Last week I went out again to “my” bench and took out my drawing materials. This time I focused on the section of the tree that was (roughly) just above the first one:

These attempts to draw feel very much like trying to begin speaking a foreign language (something else that I’m not very good at). I seem to be wired to do one thing: talk (or write) about myself. But maybe there’s something to be gained, and learned, from venturing out beyond what’s habitual and familiar. (I was about to write “beyond my comfort zone” — but really, I don’t have a comfort zone. All of my zones are populated by discomfort, maybe except for sleep and — yikes! — food.)

I went out to the bookstore the other day and picked up Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, which came out around the same time I was flunking biology at college and, as I recall, made quite a splash. I’m in the process of buying the few materials required to follow the lessons in that book, and I’m excited to see what I’ll learn. I’ve also — after looking on eagerly from the sidelines for the longest time — finally screwed up the courage to post those two early drawings in the stupendously great Substack of my friend (and genius artist/writer) Wendy MacNaughton, DrawTogether with WendyMac.

And next week, I plan to head back to “my” bench and draw some more of “my” tree. Will I get to the tippy-top before I finish my diet? And by then, will my body’s trunk be just as sturdy as the tree’s?

Well, a guy can dream, can’t he?