Ftrain, by Paul Ford

As folk realize I am serious in this endeavor they start to spin narratives of my projected thinness--even though the real process, initial loss aside, will be too slow to see. Not quite geologic, not epochal, but certainly invisible day-to-day. I am the little glacier.

What is thin? This:

It's the 1980s. Those people are perfoming at BAM and they live in emptied lofts in the East Village. There are parties with Linda Fiorentino and with Griffin Dunne's eyebrows. No one even thinks to make food at these parties. They think Faye Dunaway is a cow. Brian Dennehy showed up once from the 1970s and got so bored that he left and went out for hamburgers.

I would also say the song "Tara" by Roxy Music is thin, but the only video I've found of it is is 20 years later, and everyone is old and the song has grown bloated and fat. The alto sax might as well be a baritone horn.

(An ad that runs on the New York Times.)

The concept of before/after dominates the obesity narrative--personally, nationally. This is because the journey is not supposed to reward; it is supposed to be purgation. The reward is the moment when you will be welcomed into polite society, slender as a debutante. Ready to join the club. Transformed. Acceptable. "Look," you will say when you are thin and encircled by other, approving, thinningtons, "I am wearing a shirt made of chocolate and pastrami pants. Not only could I never have fit into these a year ago, but I couldn't have stopped from eating them."

A golf clap from their wizened narrow hands, dusty flesh, the rattle of jumbled bones.

You turn; you smile; you faint.

This is not my goal. I don't want to be in the video. My goal is to be the most beautiful monster possible. Running across a scorched field into an onslaught of arrows, carrying a hammer longer than my arm. Howling in old Norse, attended by a flock of crows with silver beaks and flaming wings. Bigger in every imaginable way.

Weight: 339.25 lbs