Heavy is the opposite
of not heavy and not being heavy has been the dream of every American since
before Barbies® were invented or before Baby Gap starting making big and tall
sizes. Vast swaths of citizens in this
great nation have waged a pitched battle against the evil forces of gravity for
most of their lives. Heaviness is relentless and unforgiving. Plump never sleeps.
You can run but you can’t hide, and especially not behind the refrigerator
which doesn’t have enough cubic feet to keep you even remotely decent. Put on
some pants and try hiding behind the minivan.
New tactics to out-fox
fat are the purging techniques, which make sense if you think about it. We take in calories only through the mouth but
we can expel them through a host of orifices. So why not use them all? This
will leave the intake of food vastly outnumbered by the forces of expulsion. The plan goes something like this: You eat
something and then you eject it out of every hole in your body, sometimes even
having new holes surgically implanted. Who
among us couldn’t use another blow hole? With this sort of fire power a Hostess
Twinkie doesn’t seem to have a chance.
But gravity never
sleeps, it takes no sick days, and it shows up uninvited at all of our major religious
holidays. Fat never excuses itself by
saying, “Sorry, did I come at a bad time?” It is a pitiless foe preying on the
old and infirm as well as the young and the restless. In the old days fat mostly spared the poor
but not anymore. Poor folks represent a ballooning new market (other acceptable
puns for “ballooning” include “burgeoning,” “mushrooming,” “hefty,” and
“sizeable,” to name just a few).
Heavy keeps coming at
me. Heavy is kind of like the Terminator if the Terminator were an ice cream
topping or a brand of tortilla chips. I can’t slow it down by blocking its path
with empty liters of soda or discarded popsicle sticks. I wonder why I’m out of
breath and then I remember that I have a Philly cheese stuffed in my mouth, but
I shouldn’t be winded just from riding the bus. Heavy gets on at the next stop
and asks to sit down next to me. Heavy
is reading Chili Fries Digest
magazine and eating a box of donuts. He politely offers them to me. Heavy talks
the driver into pulling into the drive-thru at the fast food joint on the
corner. I order a #3 and move to another seat. I need the room.
We say that the bad
guy in a movie is the “heavy.” Heavy is the bad guy and thin is mostly the good
guy. Even a thin drug addict has a better image than a heavy person. Remember those anti-drug commercials with the
eggs and the frying pan? Man, those made me so hungry.
I
think that there is one thing upon which we can all agree: Fat is not funny…except
for Hardy, John Belushi, Chris Farley, Roseanne Barr, John Candy, the fat one in The Three Stooges, Ralf
Caliendo, Sam Kennison, Jackie Gleason, Curly, Lou Costello…OK, so I guess that
fat is almost always funny.
