I Did All Your New Year's Resolutions

I had an epiphany. For those who don't know, an epiphany is a great realisation of something, but back in the day it also means the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. In many ways I feel close to Christ in my current form. They say cleanliness is next to godliness, and I am clean as a whistle. My body is now a temple, but not an old decaying temple filled with corpulent tourists. Mine is a newly built temple, the opening of the Ryōan-Ji in Kyoto upon its completion in 1450, a calm sense of tranquillity passing through it. I have shed the serpentine skin of my past life, the scaly opaqueness of my former self left to rot in the winter sun, and I have emerged anew, pink and screaming, damp but alive.

The new year has shined a light upon me and burned the crust from my eyes to allow me to see the errors of my ways. You see, I was once like you. I was once a barrel full of piss and pizza, stressed cork struggling to contain the putrescent goo within. I was once tired, suppressing vomit in the shower, crying black red wine tears – but I have left that life behind. I am writing this at the end of a perfect day. My eyes are shining a bright white light, one of completion and joy. I have changed for the better, friends. I am cleansed.

Have I caught religion? No, I haven't. But in many ways this vegan coconut porridge with red quinoa is much like a religion. You see, I have shirked the life of meat. Never again will the carcinogenic salty tang of a rasher of bacon pass my lips. That would be like taking a big rusty bucket of cheesy nachos and pouring them over the floor of the Sistine Chapel. While my porridge does not taste of much, it is doing much more work than just satisfying my hunger. Its pasty texture is plastering the walls of my stomach, protecting it, all while denying the sick past time of consuming another animal's milk (which no other animal does, by the way!).

Another demon I have excised from my soul is my addiction to Satan's bean. I was finished with office chang, normie nosebag, and its lactose content. Energy should be natural; it should come from within. Instead of my usual c*ffee I sat at my desk, shut my eyes and imagined myself pulsing with energy. I took deep, icy breaths (cold from the force of my inhalation) and exhaled, blowing all my desk papers away with the force of a freight train. This is real energy – not like those fake drugs you people are pouring all over your intestines. But I still love nature and support local businesses (important) so I decided to feed this tree a cappuccino, so it could consume the caffeine and grow a thousand feet tall. Maybe one day I could live in it.

Cleansing yourself and your life isn't just about changing what you eat. It's about violently decrying your past and all the horrible things you did. I was a smoker. Not even a cool smoker. I smoked roll-ups, the reserve of students and the old. I would spend hours of my life pulling "baccy" into sausages and wrapping it in paper just to make my mouth taste like a toilet.

In many ways it was a race to the bottom for me – an attempt to see how quickly I could give myself cancer. I became wildly disgusted at this defeatist attitude. I gobbed into my Golden Virginia and let the saliva burn through the evil. It was a green prison I'd finally freed myself from, and I was glad to flood it, and in many ways emancipate it from its nicotine prison. You were once a plant and should be able to fly free once more.

Next: alcohol. Drinking a pint is like swallowing a petri dish of every kind of avian flu in existence. Drinking spirits is akin to swimming open-mouthed in a paddling pool filled with petrol, a lit Zippo on a pendulum swinging above you. When will people realise that they're killing themselves? When, like me, with they transition to the life better lived? The only drink you need is water. That's science. That's a fact. There is no other drink you need to drink other than water. So stop drinking "lager" and start getting your five a day (litres (of water)).

For those of you from outside the metropolitan cities, this is a falafel salad bowl. I've seen them around before, but had never engaged with one because I didn't realise the beauty that lay within. Sandwiches, crisps… they're just so English, so passé. You may as well swallow a kilo of live TNT if you're going to eat bread in this day and age. My salad bowl was replete with delicious veggies that, I must admit, absolutely tore through my guts. You see I'm only on day one of my new life, and my innards are used to Lucozades and ham, so eating this many vegetables at once feels like a red hot sword slicing through my stomach. But it is all worth it in the pursuit of absolute purity.

Yep, it's a new year and a new me. Those who shirk this massive opportunity to save yourself and others are the Stalins of the modern era. You're sending yourself and all others to death. The only reason I'm writing this is as a friendly warning: if you don't fix yourself, if you don't give, if you don't improve, then you're destined to die. And no one wants to die. I'm never going to die, because I have my quinoa porridge and my steely resolve to show me through the door to salvation. Join me.

@joe_bish

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