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Monday, September 28, 2009

Heavy: My Anti-Thin



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.