C-inco Burrito

I need more self-reflection in my life. I am a silly man. I tend to be too aloof and lack focus. I work so hard to eliminate my issues surrounding food, that sometimes I lose my inner fire. Growth occurs where need exists. I can sometimes become overly self-satisfied, which is odd for a man whose baseline setting is to be self-loathing. What an amazing juxtaposition. Do I hate myself or look down on other people today? Or both? I feel that I am using my discovery to eliminate neurosis. Maybe this is a flawed strategy.

Have you ever been listening to music, or seen something on tv that sparks a memory? Emotion begins to flood in. A deep feeling that makes you uncomfortable disturbs your calm. Do you allow it in? Do you dwell in the sadness? Do you let the emotion live and breathe? Or, do you search for something to choke that emotion away? Change the channel, hit “thumbs down” on your Pandora? Or do you sit and soak in the moment? Let the sadness overcome you, and sit and live in that place for a while? I have been struggling to find why I lack self-control. I have been working to isolate the emotions and self-destructive thoughts and eliminate them from my mind. I am sure that my health issues are mental. When I am in the gym, there is very little I cant do. My issues are not physical. My issues are related to something inside me that I am struggling to pin point. Something has to be at the root of the yo-yo nature of this struggle. This goes for most people. This is a mental journey. However, I had an epiphany. Instead of isolating and pinpointing the patterns and perceptions and doubts that have led to me having an unhealthy relationship with food, with the goal of  “eliminating” the neurosis. I should be working to recognize my issues, so I can add them to my bag of tools.

When I was a teenager I played basketball with my friends every Wednesday night at the local Mormon church. Have you ever played basketball with a Mormon? Those fuckers can ball. I don’t know this for a fact, but I have long suspected that the reason they have sacred sections of their temples, is that they don’t want the general public knowing that they hold secret basketball shooting clinics for their youth. Like a fucked up basketball sweat shop operation. It’s a religion made up of 2,000,000 pasty dudes who can shoot the 3 ball like assassins. During our games, we always had too many people show up for everyone to play. We would shoot for teams, first 6 guys to make a free throw were in the game. We played to 11 by 1's and the winner stayed on the court to play the next game. The losing team, and everyone who sat out, would shoot free throws to see who the next group of challengers would be. The one caveat was, if any team won 3 games in a row, we would all re-shoot. The idea was to keep one team from dominating the night. If a team was too good, we had to break them up. This rule always bothered me. It made me feel small. You think you’re better than me? Fuck you! We aren’t re-shooting. Stay in. Defend your court. If we want you off, we need to beat you (which, by the way, I am the world’s most average basketball player, and I in no way was capable of changing the course of events those nights). So why? Why did I give a damn? Its pick up basketball, so why do I care if we re-shoot for teams? I care because this is how I am wired. I am wired to hate being marginalized. I also feel that real progress occurs when you are motivated to work harder. Growth occurs where need exists. 

I am starting to realize that as I isolate my neurosis, I don’t think I am supposed to learn to mute their voice. I think I should be learning to change their message.

I came home from school one fall day in 7^th grade, with the knowledge that I was walking into a buzz saw. Progress reports had been mailed home, and unless my prayers that my mom get into a fender bender came true, I knew it was not going to be a good afternoon. Straight C’s. My apathy for school was about to become extremely public. I came home from school and checked the mailbox. I needed to know if I still had time, or if the jig was already up. The mailbox was empty. The wheels of doom had already been set in motion. I sauntered into the house with the broken spirit of a new inmate. My footsteps were unsure... my head was vacant. I dreaded what waited for me inside. As I entered through the front door, it was obvious that the house was empty. But how? Was this a false sense of security? If no one was home, who got the mail? I know the lord works in mysterious ways, had he answered my prayers of an accident by making the mailman die in a car accident instead of a minor fender bender I asked for to slow my moms return home? Could I be so lucky?

I sat at the table and dreaded what was coming for me. Where was the progress report? Where was the mail? Had the events already been set in motion? I needed to decompress, and that meant food. We always had snacks around… but this kind of sedation was going to require more than a little Debbie snack cake or some fucking Doritos. This was going to call for the only medicine strong enough to ease my soul, microwaved burritos, and lots of them. I spent 30 minutes working through my beef and bean prescription when my brother Jef came out of his room. He walked out with the smirk that only a nosey son of a bitch could have. That piece of shit was clearly our villain… our mail thief. He walked right past me to the refrigerator without saying a word. He did not have to speak. His self-satisfied grin said it all. Before I could set fire to him with the profanity laced tirade that was building in my mind, he started to uncoil from where he was crouched infront of the refrigerator and I could see his head appearing over the top of the door like a mean spirited prairie dog. His head slowly turned to me, and it spoke. “Ed, did you happen to have some burritos?”… Fuck… I knew where this was going. In my panic, I had worked my way through more than one beefy beany Valium. More than 2? Maybe. I knew I had gone too far. Jef knew I had gone too far. Although I knew it didn’t bear mentioning, I was 100% sure it would be mentioned.

“Yeah, I had a couple” I replied. I could tell by his look that he knew exactly how many I had eaten. “Ed, there were 5 burritos in here when I got home. Now there are zero. Did you eat… 5 fucking burritos”. This is what we call a rhetorical question. We both knew I had. Being the consummate little brother, his line of questioning was met with a sea of “mother fuckers” and “sons of bitches” as well as unyielding denial. Jef's slight unhappiness at finding we were out of burritos, was quickly being replaced by a look of pure glee. I knew something awful was coming. This is when that piece of shit dubbed me “Cinco Burrito”. That… that…well… it didn’t feel good. It was not crafted to make me feel better. I wish that this was the end of the story, but that would be too easy. This is actually when the story became a forever memory. Jef lit up as he exclaimed, “By the way, I took the liberty of opening your report card. All C’s. Well done… Cinco Burrito got straight C’s. CCCC-inco Burrito, got straight C’s”. You would be shocked at just how much mileage Jef got out of this joke. 

This was 27 years ago. 27 years ago, and I remember it like it was yesterday. Having an eidetic memory has a down side to it. I remember the bad as much as the good. However, recalling this event doesn’t need to be a bad thing. We are here to grow. To learn. To evolve. You cant know where you are going without knowing where you are now. I need to learn to use these events as fuel for my fire. To propel me forward. Instead of defeating my neurosis, I need to learn to harness them and use them to my benefit. I need to mix my ability to isolate my issues with my “you think you're better than me” attitude. I don’t need to break down my instincts and remove them from the game, I need to compete with them to make me better. I need the message I get from my neurosis to morph from “you aren’t good enough” to “this is how you get better”. I need to be grateful that I understand how these events shaped me, and altered my course. So many people never learn what drives them. So many people never learn "why". I need to be grateful that I am discovering these things and understand how valuable this is. I also need to be grateful that "Cinco Burrito" never turned into "C-cup Burrito" during my soft pink doughboy later teenage years. Bullet, Dodged.