March 2, 2005

At the end of last summer, I emailed my editor for the haiku book with a bunch of questions. At the end of the email, I wrote, “By the way, do you guys need a photo for the book jacket or anything?” He replied to all my questions and then said “Yes, we need a photo, by September 22.” This was five weeks away.

And I was like, I wrote a book called Gay Haiku. Do you think I don’t need THREE MONTHS to get ready for a photo?

At the time I weighed 143 pounds–severely up from my usual and preferred weight of somewhere between 130 and 135. I went into overdrive, spending all my free time at the gym and sacrificing anything I could get my hands on to the gods, so that they’d let me lose ten pounds in five weeks.

The gods were, in the end, deaf to my pleas.

This may have had something to do with the fact that, during this period, every time I saw chocolate I shoveled it into my mouth as if it were antivenin and I had just been bitten by a rhino viper.

In the end I went to my photo shoot weighing something like 141 pounds. (I say “something like” not because hadn’t gotten on the scale in the morning and found out how much I weighed to within two tenths of a pound–of course I had–but because on the way there I was so miserable about being so enormous that I stopped at City Bakery and inhaled as many melted chocolated chip cookies as I could get my fat little hands on.)

Fast forward, if you will, to now. I am below 140 for the first time in a year, and fairly lean and muscly for the first time in two years, a state I attribute to having gone on The Abs Diet. I looked in the mirror yesterday morning and the person I saw staring back at me was so hot I wanted him to fuck me. Of course he was a bottom so there wouldn’t really have been any point, but still. I looked damn good.

So I’m thinking maybe I should have new photos taken. It would cause a disastrous delay in publication but at least my picture on the ruined book would look fabulous.

It’s important to have one’s priorities in the right place.