I have been to a doctor. The less said about it the better.
Never in my life have I been asked so many questions by someone so little interested in hearing the answers - when you ask a man how he feels you should be prepared to sit there and damn well listen. (We've designed an entire meal around it; it's called
breakfast here, as far as I can tell, although you do a piss-poor job of it most of the time.) And
such questions, too, the relevancy of which I couldn't for the life of me piece together. When - I say again - you ask a man about certain things, you'd damn well better be able to explain what the hell you're getting at. I've tried to call men out for less.
To make a long story short (a device which I'm normally reluctant to employ, but in the interest of sparing you all unpleasantness and promoting the well being of my "blood pressure"), my "cholesterol" is "a little high."
And do you know, I'd rather live with the apparently non-existent symptoms and the thoroughly run-of-the-mill risks that come with it than give in to the profoundly depressing implications of the solution. What kind of piddling race have we become, that dropping off the face of the earth after, say, fifty years of life well-lived makes us so frightened that we spend the rest of our days measuring out our pleasure in pinches and dashes? I'm ashamed to be one of you. You see no difference between food and physic, and by god,
that'll make you sick more than walking around with a little poison in your veins. I'm supposed to look at the walnut - that buttery jewel of autumn in le Perigord - as some kind of dose to be taken like bloody castor oil? I'm supposed to consider a piece of fish, one of the most delicate, aromatic peasant pleasures a man can still experience in a great city, as a number to factor into some confounded ratio? I'm supposed to look at the olive, the
olive, the fruit that kept company with Jesus fucking Christ in his few exquisite moments of agony, as a
pill?
And wine - no. I can't even bring myself to write about the way you talk about wine. I spit on all of you. I won't have any part of it.
Knowledge truly is the engine of Satan. We've lost Eden forever.