September 17, 2009 - Breakfast
I have been searching out obesity-related patents, or fatents, to see what people have come up with. It's weird how much can be patented; gene sequences and lap bands and stomach tubes and breath monitors. The entire range of human experience reduced to Victorian-era line drawings. You could, I believe, patent this blog. Weight management Software with Narrative Function, pat. pending.
I spent a long time staring at the stomach stapler. From 1981. I'm going to print out a picture and put it on my wall. It wraps almost lovingly around your stomach and shoots nine staples through to the other side, leaving a tiny pouch to process the food.
No matter how much they dress any of this up it's barbarism. It's monkeys with problems. It's monkeys hating other monkeys for being different, or monkeys who can't listen to reason. There's no logic to it. Call it an epidemic or a plague or what have you; science it up all you want. Fatties can complain about oppression, slends can complain about fatties, everyone can look at the way that Kentucky Fried Chicken has made a sandwich that replaces its bread with fried chicken. This is monkey shit. This is staples in the stomach and receptors in the brain and a fear that someone is going to take away your sandwich; it is social exclusion. All that the epidemic, of which I am an obvious part, has taught me is that the ape will not go into some box. The ape knows what it wants, and it wants a beer and a sandwich and NetFlix and a bigger apartment and faster Internet, much much faster Internet.
The obesity epidemic is the same epidemic that brought us sport utility vehicles and cheap DVD players. It's all one big plague, the years of plenty, and I have to wonder if when it ends the last thing people will be worried about is the 15-pound average weight gain in Americans (and you should be thanking me, because that's an average and I'm obviously doing more than my share). All the proposed deaths from plenty--it seems like begging God for retribution. "You have given us too much," they say. "Now do something to take it away."
The whole world will look like a used bookstore after a flood. And we will all be thin, perhaps even wasting.
Down a pound and three-quarters.
| Food | Qty | Calories |
|---|---|---|
| Cereal, Nature's Path Organic Heritage, 3/4 c. | 1.3 | 160 |
| Cereal, fibrous, 2/3 cup | 1.5 | 120 |
| Milk, 1 percent, 1 c. | 120 | |
| Total | 400 |
Weight: 320.25 lbs