“Recently I had contact with a scale. Not an old squeaking household scale, but an industrial-grade scale with metal footholds and a very precise digital display boasting accuracy in the hundredths. I was naked, and the scale was thus threatening to tell me the only truth. I waited for a short moment, then gathered all my courage and hurtled onto the scale…”
This sounds like a typical story in our overweight, decadent society, with its absurd value of lightness, the exact opposite of what the system imposes on its prisoners: maximal throughput of materials, maximal absorption of the “resources” to be taken from the earths remaining rain forests, or from their local supermarkets.
What, then, does the above paragraph in this gently absurd book? Well, I did have that experience, and we find the scale I described in a Korean sauna I visited the other day. Its verdict was unequivocal: barely 56 kilograms which is, given my length of 1.78m, in the danger zone. Why am I so light? I do eat a lot: 4 or 5 times per day is the regimen I prescribed. Is it a pre-conscious protest against gluttony my body has organized independently? And if so, what more can I expect?
I guess it’s just a fast metabolism. But that is exactly what I which my readers and everybody else: We have to mentally metabolize fast in order to build and maintain a counterculture that doesn’t fall prey to cynicism, esoterism, or worse: is re-absorbed by the system.
I know I wouldn’t be able to finish this post without a remark about fighting the system;-