Mystical Breakfast Vision

There are a lot of astrological events right now that point us into meditating on desire. I have a whole collection of lovely thoughts about desire. The one I keep feeling the urge to share is about the very short time I attempted intermittent fasting.

I was in the car on the way back from a gig at an unwieldy time, and I was trying to figure out where I was going to cram a cheeseburger into my late commute/bedtime schedule. I had heard about intermittent fasting, which is a style of fasting that shortens the window in each day in which you assume calories. The idea is that your body switches modes between eating and digesting, and if you eat all day, your body has to digest on eating mode. It's like keeping the lights on when you're trying to sleep - uncomfortable and inefficient. Anyway, people do it both for weight loss and some kind of relationship with their metabolism. I didn't know too much about it, but I knew it would be a pain to get dinner and that I often feel like crap, so I took a chance on it.

It didn't exactly last. When I woke up in the morning without having had dinner, the thought of breakfast sparkled before my eyes like a beautiful angel. Like Queen Frostine from candyland, or Rhyme and Reason from The Phantom Tollbooth. Breakfast's image emitted a sweet song like the angelic forces in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Breakfast embraced me from the future like a dear friend in almost childlike earnestness.

It was kind of cool. I mean it was definitely a "high," trippy moment - and a natural one, too! But it made me deeply skeptical, and I ceased my experiment. Eating shouldn't feel like that, I reasoned. It should be a normal, everyday thing.

I have long dwelled on this lesson. When you deprive yourself of eating, your body has no reason to think that you are not depriving yourself of living. It is as dangerous as it is not to eat as it is not to breathe, only on a longer timescale. And what does it mean to die? It means to lose experience from the whole spectrum of lived experience - the most interesting level of which is that sparkling, transcendent. "Eat breakfast and you'll have a chance at experiencing magic vis a vis living," the breakfast vision promises...