Bleeding Neon

I’ve been reading a LOT of friends’ updates on Twitter and Facebook grousing about 2009 and looking forward to its passing. Perhaps even more have done the same for the decade in general (although you guys DO get that the decade really ends next year, right?).

I’m one of those people who believes life is what you make of it. The first half of the Oughts didn’t rock for me compared to the 1990s, but it had nothing to do with external forces — it was all because of personal decisions I made and was forced to deal with. The latter half, meanwhile, sucked way less and it’s because I took active control of my life. I put out awesome, and got awesome back. Go figure.

Of course, external forces are inescapable for a lot of people. The economy took a dump. People lost their jobs — good friends, especially. People lost their homes. Family members and loved ones die. These are all pretty good reasons to call out a year or decade or century or whatever for sucking.

But we have to remember that some of that stuff is — and forgive my bluntness, but this is me here — our own damn fault. Economic crisis? We made that, my friends, we bought into the myth of quick returns, sure-fire investments and “declared income” mortgages. “Declared income?” What the hell is that? “Why yes, Mr. Lender, I absolutely make $100,000 a year walking my neighbors’ dogs!” Our national savings rate — you know, the percentage of our incomes we stash away when not making bad investments or buying toys we don’t need — actually dipped below zero at one point. I mean, you wouldn’t think that’s possible, but it happened.

So was 2009 overall bad? I don’t know. I guess it depends on your perspective. Depends on whether or not your political party won offices. Whether your favorite sports team won its respective bowl/championship/series. Whether you bought your house this year or in 2006. Whether funding for your gender reassignment surgery came through.

Me, I like to spread around the awesome. It’s easy for me to say 2009 wasn’t as awesome as, say, 1993 or something like that. But I was 16 in 1993. So really, nothing beats being a teenager with a car and a job and parents to take care of all the real sh*t while you just spend your money on coffee and music and leather pants (maybe that was just me?) and your free time playing music, chasing girls and sleeping in until 3 p.m. But overall, it didn’t suck. And I guess, a month or so late, here are the things for which I’m thankful from the year of someone’s lord A.D. 2009:

• The fabulous Miss Sara surviving another year living with me. She is obviously as insane as she is awesome.
• Despite losing a member a few months ago, celebrating two years together with my band, As Yet Unbroken — the second-longest relationship I’ve ever had.
• Meeting all sorts of new people via Twitter (for better or for worse)
• The birth of my awesome nephew, Zack Attack!
• Editors still not figuring out that I’m a hack writer
• Making comic books — and people actually buying them!
• Traveling, even if only to San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Orlando and central Michigan
• Seeing my best friend from my freshman year of high school for the first time in 18 years as a result of said travels (and the magic of Facebook)
• Buying Casa Awesome
• Not dying

Those are just the highlights, I guess. Mostly, I’m pretty lucky to be surrounded by so many smart, caring, entertaining, driven and plain awesome friends. You people are the ones who keep the mayor of Awesome City going! So yeah!

(Also: Exclamation points. I could not live without them.)

So 2010 should be even radder. But all of us need to pull together. We need to focus the awesome. Hone the awesome. BECOME THE AWESOME. etc etc.

I’m going to Santa Barbara for a few days, to start off 2010 right: near a beach, possibly in pajamas, possibly crunked.

Be safe tonight, kids. And see you on the other side.

FISTS HIGH!

So here we are. It’s Christmas Eve, and I’ve survived Detox Week 2009. Actually, it wasn’t very hard, and toward the end, it became just sort-of the way things are. Some observations, in list form, because I’m lazy:

• Generally speaking, I didn’t feel altogether better than normal, but then again, I normally feel pretty good, so that’s hard to gauge.
• On the flip side, I mostly had a lot more energy. See, when you eat food that is simply processed from other foods, or you eat animals, you’re getting your energy supplies secondhand, or worse, you’re not getting them at all. Eating straight-up whole foods — natural, unprocessed fruits, veggies, etc. — gets the stuff to your body directly. I learned that sh*t in school, don’t front. Also, I wasn’t eating all the bread I normally do, and it’s obvious what starchy food does to both my appearance and my energy level (which depleted after consuming starchy white rice the other night).
• I started to notice I don’t generally eat that poorly. I just depend too much on foods with too much sauce, way too much bread and way too many processed meat substitutes.
• To answer a LOT of you who wanted to know: I have no idea how much — if any — weight I lost. I will probably check the scale when I go to the gym this weekend, so I’ll report back. Though I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t be disappointed if I didn’t lose weight.
• Cooking every meal by hand (save for a few cans of soup) cost me a lot of time in the kitchen. Like 2 to 3 hours a night, whereas normally I’d spend maybe 30 minutes a day. But it also saved me a lot of money,likely more than $100 a week by not eating out, stopping at Starbucks, etc.

And, thus, here are my take-aways from eschewing all but fruits, veggies, seeds, nuts and beans for 10 days:

• I’m going to eat out less and cook more. Make the eating out more of a treat, and being more conscientious when I do. Or enjoy it more. Either way.
• Daily Clif Bars are giving way to raw food snacks such as Pure or Larabar. Sorry, Clif. We’ll save you for special treats and hiking trips.
• I have to go to the gym more than once every two weeks. Have to. There are always distractions and excuses, but it’s intolerable. My body is just a wreck otherwise — my back hurts, my posture sinks, it’s just not good.
• Coffee cake from Starbucks is NOT a valid breakfast.
• I’m not going to stop eating veggie “meats” completely, but seriously, veggie sausage for breakfast, veggie turkey for lunch and faux chicken nuggets for dinner is not only texturized vegetable protein overload, it defeats the purpose.
• I’m probably going to do a completely raw day once a month. Probably definitely.
• More experimentation in the kitchen — basically, if there is a dish I find I like at a restaurant, there’s no reason I shouldn’t try to make it myself. I have more control over the ingredients, and will save dough in the long term (and maybe host an awesome dinner party where I can dazzle guests).

I guess that’s about it. Last night I prepared the topping for my world-famous bruschetta (WORLD FAMOUS), which I’ll be serving at our annual Christmas Eve gathering tonight, along with veggie samosas, hummus, non-homemade salsa, etc. All pretty mild re-entries to non-asceticism. And, so, here is your final Detox Week menu, from yesterday:

• Breakfast: 1 apple, 1 banana, 1 cup orange juice
• Morning snack: 1 chocolate brownie Pure raw food bar
• Lunch: 1 can Trader Joe’s lentil & vegetable soup
• Afternoon snack: 3 to 4 dried, unsweetened pineapple rings, a handful of mixed raw nuts
• Dinner: We actually went out, to Sweet Tomatoes. I had a salad (romaine, celery, carrots, cucumber, cauliflower, sunflower seeds, bell peppers) with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, a baked potato with onions and chives, and tomato-potato soup (in vegetable broth with spinach)
• Evening snack: 2 small stalks celery with organic peanut butter

Happy holidays, everyone. And thanks for your support.

Remember when at the beginning of this thing I was talking about that mild upper abdominal discomfort that I was experiencing about a year and a half ago that sent me to the doctor?

Well, mysteriously, it’s come back, somewhat. And I’m not sure why. Why would the same issue I had when I weighed 10 to 15 pounds more and ate lots of foods high in cholesterol reappear when I shift to a purely vegan diet?

As I mentioned, two different doctors and multiple types of tests never found a good reason for the location or on-and-off nature of the pressure. Yes, my liver was “fatty,” but why would it be “fattier” now than then? My now-regular doctor theorized it was a muscle, not an internal issue. And sure enough, when I began to regularly get back to the gym, the pain dissipated.

Between the holidays, my workload and this detox (which really doesn’t afford me enough calories to do much more exercise than walking), I haven’t been to the gym in more than three weeks. I notice this discomfort only really appears when I’ve been sitting at a desk for long hours — which I do daily, obviously. So what I’m hoping is that once I ramp up the caloric intake again and re-diversify my diet, returning to the gym regularly will fix whatever this is.

Does anyone else have this problem, though? I know people get back problems from bad office seating, but anything like this? I dunno, would be great to know I’m either not alone or not dying.

Otherwise, tonight I tried adding jasmine rice back into the food game, because we’re coming to the last 36 hours of Detox Week and as I wrote at some point in the last week, I didn’t want to drastically return to semi-normalcy. Not a big thing, just steamed rice and vegetables with a splash of Bragg’s Aminos. But remember how I said I’ve had pretty much boundless energy without those post-food comas or mid-day drags? Sure enough, about 15 minutes after finishing dinner, I got sleepy at my desk. I managed to shake it off, but it’s amazing how much more obvious the effects of eating certain types of food are made clear when you can actually isolate the components. Those starches, man, they’ll get you.

I did boil down another batch of vegetable stock, made from all the leftover veggies I’ve accumulated over the last few days, and also cooked up another batch of vegetable stew for lunch or dinner tomorrow. I’m going to be co-hosting a little Christmas Eve gathering at Casa Awesome (as usual), but I think I’m going to take it easy on the snackage and drinkage. I really want to refrain from diving into cookies and potato chips or rum-infused egg nog (actually, no egg nog at all) and shocking my system. Will probably stick with vegan appetizers such as chips and salsa and samosas. Because nothing says “Christmas” like Mexican and Indian food.

Anyway, here’s your second-to-last Detox Week menu from today. Enjoy!

• Breakfast: 1 banana, 1 cup “Dynamo” juice blend
• Morning snack: 1 peanut butter cookie Larabar
• Lunch: Large salad (romaine lettuce, celery, bell peppers, cauliflower, carrots) with Bragg’s Aminos
• Afternoon snack: Mixed raw nuts
• Dinner: Jasmine rice with steamed broccoli, carrots and cauliflower, spritzed with Bragg’s Aminos
• Evening snack: 1 piece raw “fudge” from Go Raw (all gone!)
• Beverages: Water, plus a few swigs of Trader Joe’s “Green Protein” juice blend

Is anyone else bored by this yet? I’m guessing not entirely, because a lot of people I know who follow my exploits (boring as they may be) still haven’t glommed on to Detox Week yet or are actually ASKING for updates. Crazy, right? But we all know this is really just an excuse to get me to update this blog, which wasn’t happening in any way, shape or form before.

I didn’t feel too great yesterday morning. Just some, er, post-digestive stuff. I wonder if that rice I made was either undercooked or just didn’t agree with me. Either way, I felt a lot better over the weekend eating mostly-raw, so, well, we’re not going to try to do that rice again.

One of the things I realized last night (though it should have been obvious before) is that I’ve been spending about 300 percent more time in the kitchen than normal throughout this process. Making every meal by hand takes time! A lot of time! Time that, honestly, I don’t have. Seriously, we’re talking multiple hours a day, between the chopping, cooking, cleaning, storing, etc. No wonder we drove our mothers insane!

Of course, my time already is strained. The band is starting to get active again (met with potential new bassist last night again, had a pretty decent jam), more freelance work is looming, and full-on roll-out of Omega Comics Presents is beginning. Something has to suffer, and looking at how terribly my time has been consumed and how much I’m beginning to feel strangled by my own obligations (not to mention the lack of time I’ve been able to spend with Sara, which I’m sure has not thrilled her), I’m dropping down The Utopian updates to once weekly, on Wednesdays. It’s just too much for me to write, pencil, ink, color and letter two full comic pages every week even as I’m editing an anthology, writing, drawing and lettering eight pages for each issue of that and trying to actually hit my other work deadlines.

I’ve been so stressed about trying to “get ahead” in order to just get out of town for two or three days. And I don’t like that feeling. But I also can’t just, as Sara suggested last night, go on holiday with the webcomic. If I do, honestly, I’ll never pick it back up. The weekly obligation is what keeps me driven to the end goal. I don’t work well without deadlines. Like most work-for-hire creators, you can give me a deadline a month ahead and I’ll start and finish the article/illustration/story the night before the deadline. That’s just the way it is.

So yeah. I guess it’s that time of the day where I review what foods I consumed yesterday, huh? You know, when Detox Week is over, I might start keeping a food journal anyway, to really force myself to pay attention to everything I eat. Until then, here’s yesterday’s line-up:

• Breakfast: 1 banana, 1 cup “Dynamo” juice blend
• Morning snack: 1 apple pie Larabar
• Lunch: 1 bowl homemade vegetable stew (I think I’m definitely going to be making this once a week from now on)
• Afternoon snack: Approx. a handful of raw almonds & walnuts, plus 1 serving of dried, unsweetened pineapple rings
• Dinner: 1 can Amy’s Organic Lentil Vegetable Soup (also becoming a new staple)
• Evening snack: 1 piece raw “fudge” from Go Raw Cafe, plus two stalks celery with organic peanut butter

Gonna keep this short and sweet. Spent most of yesterday working on comic stuff, because things are really ramping up now, going to print on The Utopian #2 as we I type this and doing final editing and prep work to meet a Dec. 31 deadline so Omega Comics Presents #1 gets to the printer by the first week of January. And if you haven’t pre-ordered that issue yet, please do so to help, you know, pay for it (and more importantly, ensure the creators get paid). Previews of OCP #1 are featured today on Ain’t It Cool News!

This week’s going to be pretty mad, as I have deadlines aplenty and need to get caught up before the New Year so that POSSIBLY Sara and I can make a break for it and run away where none of you little bastards will find us. For a day or two.

In the meantime … yesterday’s menu (only three days to go!):

• Breakfast: 1 apple, 1 banana, 1 cup “Dynamo” juice blend
• Lunch: Salad (romaine lettuce, carrots, bell peppers, celery, tomatoes) with Bragg’s Aminos
• Afternoon snack: 1 peanut butter cookie Larabar
• Evening snack: 2 stalks celery with organic peanut butter
• Dinner: 1/2 cup mixed, long-grain rice (boiled in homemade vegetable stock and mixed with diced carrots, celery, onions and garlic) with steamed broccoli and cauliflower — this should have been really good, but I think the crunchy texture of the rice threw me off. Either I prepared it wrong, or I just don’t like long-grain rice. But I boiled it down for like 50 minutes, so … uh …
• Late-night snack: 1 piece raw “fudge” from Go Raw Cafe
• Beverages: As usual, aside from the above-listed stuff, just water, and an ounce or two of Trader Joe’s “Green Protein” juice blend.

Well, I’ll tell you ONE thing good to come out of this process: I’ve blogged daily! (What, that’s NOT good?)