Gideon Pike became interested in fibermaxxing on a Thursday, which meant by Saturday he had already made it everyone else's problem.
It started, as most of his schemes do, with a single search term. He'd seen it in some summer trend roundup — "fibermaxxing," Americans going absolutely feral for dietary fiber as a form of self-optimization — and he had absorbed this information the way Gideon absorbs all information: completely, immediately, and without any sense of proportion.
By the time the four of us arrived at the arts weekend on Saturday morning, he had a folded piece of paper in his back pocket. He produced it at the first food tent.
"It's a fiber chart," he said.
It was, in fact, a hand-drawn grid. Across the top: every food vendor he had pre-scouted on the festival map. Down the side: each of our names, plus columns for "mood trajectory," "hydration tier," and something labeled "GI confidence" that none of us were emotionally prepared to discuss at 10 a.m.
"Gideon," said our friend Priya, "we haven't even walked through the gate yet."
"That's why we're doing intake now," he said. "Before the chaos sets in."
The sky was already doing something ominous — that heavy, gray-green Indianapolis July thing where the air feels like a wet sweater and your phone keeps buzzing with flash flood watches. The festival grounds at Newfields were muddy at the edges. A thunderstorm was clearly twenty minutes away. Gideon was unconcerned. He was annotating the chart.
His system, as he explained it while we stood in line for coffee, was this: each of us would eat in a specific sequence designed to stabilize our collective moods, prevent "afternoon sluggishness," and — this is a direct quote — "front-load the legumes so we peak cognitively before the main installations." He had assigned Priya a falafel wrap. He had assigned our friend Dexter a black bean situation from a tent near the east stage. He had assigned me lentil soup.
I do not like lentil soup.
"The chart doesn't have a column for that," Gideon said.
The thunderstorm arrived at 11:47. We were in the sculpture garden, which is to say we were standing in an open field when the sky made a sound like someone dropping a file cabinet. Gideon, who had been cross-referencing the chart with the festival map to plan our "optimal digestive routing" between exhibits, did not immediately register the lightning. He was explaining why we needed to hit the fiber-heavy vendors before the ambient art tents, because — and I want to make sure I get this right — "you want to be full but not peaking when you're meant to be emotionally open to installation work."
We ran. The chart got wet.
We sheltered under a vendor canopy selling handmade ceramics, which is where Gideon spread the chart flat on a folding table and attempted to reconstruct the water-damaged columns from memory. The ceramics vendor watched him do this without expression. Outside, the rain came down in the specific Indianapolis way where it's not quite vertical anymore.
"I can save it," Gideon said. He was using a finger to squeegee water off the paper. "The mood trajectory column is still legible."
"Gideon," Dexter said, "my shoes are full of water."
"That's a hydration tier issue," Gideon said, and Dexter looked at him for a long moment and then accepted a free sample of someone's lentil hummus from the adjacent tent, which Gideon received as a personal vindication.
By early afternoon the storm had passed, the way Indianapolis summer storms do — suddenly, theatrically, leaving everything steaming and the sky a bright, exhausted blue. We ate what we wanted. Priya got a funnel cake. I got a grilled corn situation that had nothing to do with any column. Gideon ate the falafel wrap he'd assigned Priya, because she didn't want it and he couldn't bear to let the chart be wrong about everything.
The chart, now dry and slightly warped, lives on our refrigerator. He taped it up there. He says we can use it as a "baseline" for the next festival.
I asked him what "GI confidence" meant, finally.
He said, "You know what it means."
I did, a little. That's the worst part.