Ftrain, by Paul Ford

I was talking with [Wife] about cunning people. Unpleasant people who don't particularly want others to get along. Full of the sheerest apery. I am thinking in particular of a few people who grate on me, for whom backstabbing is second-nature; who are cruel about other people to me, and thus, I know, are full of sneers about me when I turn my own back. Not the typical mockery and gossip, but, again, cunning. But not people with weird fat-pathologies who externalize it oddly. I'm talking about assholes.

But. When such folks point to my weight as a weakness, well, there I am helpless, because along that axis they are smarter than me. They win, instantly. I may not be X, they say, but at least I don't eat a whole fucking pizza. I've heard them say it, or variations on the same.

Which all goes to my point that this is not about being thinner, which is an artificial construct. This is about being smarter. And trusting less.

One way to get smart may be to simply remove ourselves from the situation; to stop worrying about, say, buying a house in Brooklyn and leave. My wife would be happier with an acre of vegetables. I could re-learn to drive. Before the Internet the city was more important. Thus you build a moat and stop following so many RSS feeds.

Of course as I make progress the narrative will shift. "I have to give it to him," they'll say, "but he's still blah blah blah." They will find another reason to despise me. I know well enough from my own loathing, sneering, cruel self.

Much of me, of course, has always wanted to please and help; when despised I want to win their trust. But already I am killing that shameful thing. I am not replacing it with hatred or cruelty, which would be easy, but rather with the freedom to hate, the freedom to look at them in their inherent thinness and see nothing superior. That is, rather than a process that goes:

1. That person is a patronizing, manipulative asshole;
2. Well, I am kind of fat.

I will instead--already am--seeing it like so:

1. That person is a patronizing, manipulative asshole;
2. Fuck that person.

This then is progress.

Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

Not that many roles for fat actors. Wikipedia has a list

Weight: 327 lbs