I knew I was cracking as soon as I had to ask. Melissa, “have you had that new burger from McDonald’s?”

She doesn’t eat that kinda stuff. Too much red meat, too much fat, too much McDonald’s. I tried to hold back my disappointment

but it sprang forth, “Well, would you get one for me, eat it, and let me know how it tastes?” If I remember correctly, we were driving around getting high at the time.

“Jason, that’s [just] weird.” Rather than asking to live vicariously through someone else’s taste buds, I should’ve been wishing I was born vegetarian; I should’ve wished against being given a choice. Instead I asked Dave the same question the next day when we were all out at a bar; he said he really enjoyed it. After returning home that same night, I got online and searched for burger reviews. The taste and texture of the thing was compared to dry meat loaf.

My curiosity was sated. My appetite (for destruction!) never is.

It’s been anywhere from three to six months (I’ve a terrible memory and an even worse sense of timelines) I’ve been on this, my second lacto-ovo kick. I’ve broken once on bacon cheese fries; it was the day I got my last grad school rejection letter and was just more frustrated than usual with the cinemas. I’ve been tempted pretty much every day.

While I could extol the virtues of this dietary choice all the live long blog—I poop like a motherfucking champ these days—this is more about dealing with that temptation.

Mentally, I keep a regular sized mason jar next to my bed. I try to put everything bad I do and I especially try to put everything bad I do to myself in it, but it’s only so big, it can only hold so much. I’ll put picking at my cuticles in, but eating the entire tin of cookies is going to have to come out. I’ll try to cram in the people that are bad for me, but I’m going to have to shake everything out onto my bed so I can get to the low self-esteem at the bottom. In and out it goes like this; I always see the jar as half full of bullshit ’cause I’m an optimist. Robin likes to joke and call me King Louis.

For whatever reason, I’ve been especially down on myself recently. I’d share the symptoms but it’d get depressing quickly. But I needed a change, so I gave the jar a good cocktail mixer rattle and hoped the contents would shake down and settle during shipping. There ended up being far less space than I had hoped.

But being a good man means being a good packer means finding a way to cram as much into as small a space as possible—you should’ve see my car when I was moving back and forth between Butler for Summers off. After taking inventory of all the things I wish I could cut out of my life, I decided that maybe the biggest thing should be what I put back in first.

So for not nearly long enough, I’ve not smoked any weed. It fit in the jar like a boulder, and I chipped the rim a little cramming it in there. But during the time all my pot’s been in storage, a lot of my littler self-inflicted problems have turned to sand, and now they fit more easily into the in between spaces—and maybe, ideally anyway, they’re wearing down the bigger things, eroding them.

I don’t really believe in forever, so I’m not saying this is going to last or making any promises. This good mood rising could just as easily be my body’s reaction, a flooding of feel good hormones that’ll subside, but saying I feel pretty clear headed will suffice.

Oh, and my sex drive has been through the roof.