My wife recently told me what she is giving up for Lent: “I’m giving up giving up.”
She’s right. It’s time to strike a blow against Americans’ obsession with self-denial. A classic example would be the proliferation of faddish “elimination diets,” where you successively stop eating nuts, corn, soy, dairy, citrus fruits, nightshade vegetables (tomatoes — Tom Brady’s bugaboo), wheat, gluten, pork, eggs, and fish to see if any of these foods make you feel bad.
Good luck inviting these people over to dinner; their eating habits border on the breatharian, the diet where “you replace physical nourishment with air and light.” When you ask these guests if they are avoiding any food groups, you get a list as long as a CVS receipt.
Where food is concerned, I’m giving up giving up. Call me the happy omnivore. I’ve decided to binge on pork after reading a whiny Wall Street Journal article (“Some say pork is misunderstood”) about the vicissitudes of the US swine industry, which is facing a price collapse.
Maple bacon cupcakes? Why not?
I’ve given up drinking so many times that I can announce that I have now definitely given up, meaning that I hereby forswear not drinking. I confess that I’ve been influenced — negatively — by the holier-than-thou, “sober curious” young who are guzzling “mocktails” in “temperance bars” across the land.
Boston, to its credit, has a Carrie Nation bar that in no way promotes temperance or the bar-wrecking “hatchetations” of its anti-alcohol-crusading namesake. They’ve got drag queens! I don’t think Ms. Nation would approve.
Another option is to become “California sober.” That’s what Alta magazine’s endearing feature “Ask a Californian” calls “an intoxication model that typically shuns hard liquor and rough drugs in favor of marijuana, psychedelics, mellow-looking wines, harmonically vibrating beers, and even [the plant-based psychedelic] ayahuasca, if you have any.”
The magazine concludes: “Essentially, being California sober means being pretty high.” That would be the definition of giving up giving up.
At this rate I’ll start smoking again. Well, maybe not. I haven’t renounced thinking entirely. And I don’t think I’ll stop wearing sunscreen, or give up driving on the right-hand side of the road. Because after all there is still plenty to live for.
For reasons of domestic harmony, I’ve had to lift my personal fatwa on watching cuddly animal TV shows. By now I’ve seen so many episodes of PBS’s fuzzy-wuzzy “All Creatures Great and Small” that I find myself rooting for a German invasion of the Yorkshire Dales just to put feel-good veterinarian James Herriot and his furry friends out of business for good.
But I won’t surrender my objections to half-baked costume dramas, e.g., “Bridgerton,” “The Great,” or another bizarre personal bugbear, animated films and TV shows, i.e., cartoons. Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner yes; “BoJack Horseman,” and Walt Disney heart-tuggers, e.g., “Moana 2,” no.
Family members have noticed gaping holes in my knowledge of current literature. It’s true. I’ve observed a policy of avoiding books by authors younger and more successful than I am (dead writers don’t count). Right now that comprises almost every living author, so I am renouncing that small-minded, spite-driven boycott.
Eleanor Catton (“Birnam Wood”), Alice Winn (“In Memoriam”), Michael Crummey (“River Thieves”), Ben Fountain (“Devil Makes Three”), and the 8,300 other writers who fall into this category — you are better than I am and you always will be. I give up.