“Be careful Anais, abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.” -Henry and June (1990)
I like to think that embody the idea of "moderation even in moderation" but truthfully this is not how my personality works. Given a taste of excess, I find myself becoming overindulgent, an ever widening sphere of excesses, till excess is normal and normal is a distant memory.
Or do I?
Because I know that I can easily become exhausted by excess and yearn for greater and greater degrees of moderation and temperance.
It is as if the body has an internal clock of sorts that says "party's over." We know the internal clock that wakes us at 6:45, but is there one that says "your too heavy" or "your eating too much crap or drinking too much wine or your staying up too late."
Except that my clock is no Big Ben and I do not run on GMT. Normal can be all over the place for me and there is no one standard that I "return to."
The body has an internal roller coaster might be a better metaphor.
Perhaps the problem is that I don't live by a schedule.
The moderate need schedules. Not too much of this, just enough of that. Everything measured and in its measure.
I don't live that way, so do the rules of moderate or immoderate apply?
What would I do with moderation? Or is moderate just another way of saying "standard operating procedure." In which case one man's excess in another man's moderation. Is it all subjective or can these disparate lifestyles be reconciled?
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I guess even though my internal clock/barometer is weird, it still does (mostly) work--what doesn't work sometimes is just me paying attention to it. In other words I *do* know when I'm "eating too much crap or drinking too much wine or staying up too late." I just usually pay no attention and carry merrily on, until I get the flu or find myself exhausted when I most need energy.
Another consideration is that our ancestors had so much less schedule than we. It was mostly like, be awake when it's light (unless it's really hot or cold), be asleep when it's dark (unless someone has a really great fire/storytelling session going). They didn't have Dayrunners, ça veux dire. So when I start feeling panicky about how immoderate I'm being, I try to remember the distant days for which I'm genetically programmed, the ones in which I mostly just had to scratch around in the dirt and try to rummage up some insects to gnaw on, and that was pretty much my whole plan.
Oddly, this does make me feel better sometimes. And FWIW of course I think Henry was wrong. ;o)
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