Crud Meridian

It is Bell Let’s Talk Day. Corporate hellscape or not, I’ll talk.

Every night last year I would bike home from the Faculty of Music at Avenue and Bloor to Weston and Black Creek. Maybe you saw me. I have a black bike with a single pannier, and I look perpetually exhausted. Right around Davenport and Osler, every night, I have to decide not to die. It may just be the day catching up with me – some combination of heavy cardio and low blood sugar, or the fact that I haven’t seen the sun in 12 hours. These are mitigating circumstances. And I am biking home under a routinely starless sky, on quiet streets filled with hostile traffic. Not an environment of easy mind. But at Osler I have to decide not to die. To not Leave On My Terms. And I do this just about every night.

Does everyone have to do this? Does everyone have a moment in the quiet of the day where they consciously decide not to swallow all the pills in their cabinet? Surely some percentage of people are doing this reasonably regularly. They are doing the day’s calculus and realizing they might have started to add up more than just time spent and money earned and lost and that over the course of their time they have been presented with what could only be described as a generous share of opportunities for happiness, companionship, and fulfillment, and have continued to make a series of decisions baffling both to them and to others, that they have rejected this generosity in favour of loneliness, isolation, and poverty. While there is a sort of forensic trail that lends a scrupulous and defensible logic to each decision, it is no secret that the arc of the whole narrative bends towards self-sabotage. Like a creature of two minds, one designed to yearn and the other to ache, and neither to be content. You’re doing the math wrong. You’re staring at the result, I know, but if you were to show your work, I promise you’ve skipped a step. You don’t have all the data.

Some nights this is going to be harder than others because you are going to be rrrreeeling down Weston road at a speed that a bicycle is not designed for, on a six-lane road in sparse nighttime traffic, downhill, the only moment you really feel alive all day, and the barrier between You and Not Being You Anymore Forever is going to feel mighty thin. You’re going to have to decide not to die. You’re going to make this decision every day – keep being. The weight of each act To Be is going to bear down on the prior. String betting on your own mortality. You see a future of continuing to have to raise and you are starting to wonder about your cards. The very fact that you see it as a choice might be trouble.

“Jym” Fast-Digesting Carb Dextrose Supplement (JFDCDS) is a post-workout exercise supplement designed to replenish glycogen levels in muscle tissue. Both it and its creator, Jim Stoppani, Ph.D, purport to “optimize the uptake of creatine and carnitine by the muscle fibres,” although a large warning immediately following on the package suggests that the FDA has yet to look into Jym/Jim’s marvelous claims. While some cursory googling suggests that Jim Stoppani, Ph.D completed his doctorate in exercise physiology with a minor in biochemistry from the University of Connecticut, it is troubling that he is so skittish to don the title awarded to him by said university, opting instead for the post-script “Ph.D”, suggesting that he perhaps studied an idiot’s field, like music. If the pictures of him are to be believed, it is possible that his Doctorate was in Muscles, with a minor in being totally diesel. This is a man who wants me to put something he made into my body. I am receiving some conflicting messages. 

There is a precedent for suicide in my family. Of my four grandparents, three have left on their own terms. Two of those were physician assisted; my father’s mother opted out of a meagre severance package, dignity intact, and my grandfather followed when he realized how little this world had left to offer him without her. The third, though chronologically the first, was done without assistance of any kind – my other grandfather could not continue, so he didn’t. In the same way, perhaps, that I learned to eat and act by watching my parents, maybe I learned in watching my family that death is not something that happens, but rather something you choose. It is a verb and not a noun. My mother’s father killed himself in a barn with a shotgun when I was ten. My father’s parents left when I was twenty-four. At some point between those times I came to believe that suicide was simply how I was going to die, because that was how death worked.

Dr. Stoppani received his doctorate in exercise physiology with a minor in biochemistry from the University of Connecticut. Following graduation, he served as a postdoctoral research fellow in the prestigious John B. Pierce Laboratory and Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale University School of Medicine, where he investigated the effects of exercise and diet on gene regulation in muscle tissue. In 2002, Dr. Stoppani was awarded the Gatorade Beginning Investigator in Exercise Science Award by the American Physiological Society for his groundbreaking research.

Food couriering is a job of immense psychic brutality. It is physically exhausting, lonely, and sisyphean. When you courier, and you will, you will spend your days in a liminal metropolitan nowhere, moving in constant jagged lines and vectors from point to point to point to point. From shockingly emptied restaurants who see you as horseman number one signalling the end of their industry, to the soaring nimbular sky homes of an alien financial class. You’ll never be quite welcome in any one place. 

I had a plan. I would use pills, as many as I could possibly take. I was too afraid to look up what to use, so I assumed “a lot” would be enough. I wouldn’t do it at home for the sake of my roommates. There was an alley north of me. I didn’t know whether I’d keep my wallet on me or not. I didn’t know if I was going to leave a note.

It’s 5 in the morning. I’m on the edge of Lake Scugog. A single streetlight throws the world out onto the ice. I can see my job lighting up on the other side. It’s Christmas Eve and today I will stock produce for 8 hours of minimum wage and go home to eat chinese food and watch Scrooged with my father, though we’ll never finish the movie. I do not know that this is the last Christmas, and one of the last times, when I will see all of my family in the same room. The ice is pale and shocking and seems to go on forever and I wonder which direction I should go. I am no longer in the world for a second.

Inside all of us is a door, and above that door glows the familiar crimson EXIT telling us that if you take this door then you will not be able to get back into the movie. Finish your popcorn before you make a decision.

It is around 9 pm. It’s a weeknight. I’m standing on the edge of Lake Ontario and my breath and blood pound in my ears. I cannot go any farther. The lake is not frozen the same way. This ice would take me. I’d go through like paper, thrashing and waterlogged and cold-shocked. My body is lying to a Foodora dispatcher about a family emergency so I can cancel my shift.  I have to go somewhere else I know I have to go somewhere else I have to stop being here. I have to get away from the lake, and I have to get off of my bike. The lake is right there and there is no one on this part of Queens Quay this late at night and it’s cold and no one could fish me out. I have to get away from this lake.

I call my mother and tell her that I’ve been having a hard time with my couriering, that late in the shift my mood seems to swing and I get glassy eyed and desperate. She takes me to a mall somewhere in Durham, where someone directs us towards Dr. Stoppani’s Miraculous Cure-All Elixir and when I drink some of it about half-way through the shift I think less about veering into the other lane. Some problems are solvable with better regulation of blood sugar. All solutions are valid when the options are so stark. We do whatever we can to keep those we love in the world. If we are obligated to anything, it is this.

Some people will never glance at the quiet red glow in the corner of the theatre. The movie can get worse and worse, but they paid their two bits and By God they’re sticking around until the credits. During my undergrad I tell a friend that I have been eyeing the exit for so long that I have missed several scenes of the movie. We walk home along Bloor and he explains the plot I have missed and why I should stick around to see the twist in the third act, and I do.

Dr. Stoppani is the creator of the Platinum 360 Diet as found in the book, LL Cool J’s Platinum 360 Diet and Lifestyle (Rodale, 2010) and creator of the diet program found in the book “Mario Lopez’s Knockout Fitness” (Rodale, 2008). Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

I want to finish the movie these days. I see the glow of the sign, but I know that when my gaze wanders it is time to adjust my seat, to run to the washroom, to get more popcorn. That the movie is still compelling, but my back is getting sore and I need to care.

If you, reading this, are worried about me, writing this, then please feel at-ease. I have no plans to miss the credits. I only wish to express that if you too have thought about skipping the last act to beat the traffic, know that you are not alone, and that if you need someone to help you catch up to the plot then I and many others would be happy to fill you in on who has double crossed who, who was living under a false name, and who is infinitely worthy of a place in the theatre, replete with popcorn and soda, pointing and laughing.