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Fat America: And The Wind Cried 'Margarine'
by Ashley 'Danger' Meeks
Listen up, "over there," you Brits. I have seen the future, and it is America, rolls of flesh poured into a tent-sized "Looking For Groupies!" Wal-Mart shirt and red velour hot pants you could drive twin Volkswagens through.
Last weekend, grocery and sundry-shopping in the space of five miles, I saw some tooshies that even Todd Browning, of "Freaks" fame, would commit to film. I saw tooshies of such nebulous, indistinct human form that they would terrify hardened criminals. I saw exposed expanses of skin that would make mother-rapers sob and teat-clinging scraps of shirt that would make father-stabbers beg for sweet mercy from eye-scorching acids.
Why do people bother going to the grocery store anymore? For all they're stocking their cupboards with, they might as well be getting it through a drive-thru. Same price, same content, less clean-up, occasional plastic toy.
Remember how when you were a kid and every fluffy bit of sugar and fat with a cartoon kangaroo on it or coming in a big red Mylar bag caught your eye and your mom fought the good fight saying "No, dear, that's crap/too expensive/bad for you"? They don't do that anymore. Now, it's the parents who are grabbing for the fried chicken bits that look like Spongebob characters, the tubs of sour cream as big as the tubs of ice cream, the strawberry milk, the french toast fried egg and strawberry jelly toaster pastries the - OMIGAWD - the Pre Cooked Bacon That Comes In Sealed Plastic Packages Like Summer Sausage. Know why? You fill your cart up with collards, dried beans, cheese, milk, lettuce, peppers, potatoes, an Australian lamb hock and some frozen mangos and you've just blown $70. Fattie Chubberton over there with the cart full of Hungry Sow dinners just spent about half that with sixteen million times the Reeses Pieces enjoyment that you will have in a lifetime.
Watch a movie, hell, a newsreel if you're going to complain about the preponderance of attractive Hollywood people, jeez, an old family movie if you must, from like, the 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s. Ever find yourself saying "Everyone looked so...normal then."
Like Vogue food writer Jeffrey Steingarten once wrote, the government doesn't have anyone studying "sustainance" anymore. No one's on the "hunger" beat no mo'.
Look, Americhcreamerybutterica, it's not even like you have to do an hour and a half of exercise every day like Reese Witherspoon post-pregnancy or anything. I'm not saying the can of tuna and an apple Machinist diet is enough (although lawd knows most of y'all could live off that and your own chin wattle for many moons). But it's not like it's bloody torture to NOT eat crap. When you consider there are people out there willing to put their car-seat-sized children in specially designed carseats for obese children (300,000 and counting, apparently, that can't fit into normal sized ones), parents who scour the internet and learn to sew and come up with their own clothing lines for their plus-sized children, people who, when they finally blow an oiled-up butterfly shrimp too many throuh their aeveolar sacs, have to be picked up by ambulance workers on stretchers specially designed to handle their size and weight, it makes you wonder.
I always thought that even the proverbial frog in a slowly heating vat would jump out once it gets too hot. But maybe that's only the case with water. Maybe the rules break down when the vat is filled with choco-flavored melty nougat and caramel.
How is subjecting yourself to the 24/7 indignity of being a chick so fat she can't walk up a flight of stairs or having such a nasty beer gut your dick never gets hard and you have to fuck wheezing on your side so much more preferable to, you know, picking up a carrot and not a tub of Coke whenever your hands become empty? Ever thought that if you have to get your Oxford English Dictionary magnifying glass out for the ingredients list that you probably shouldn't eat it?
Look around. Nah. Guess not.
About the author
Ptiza Odelay was created in a factory by Nazi scientists during World
War II. She was to be the ultimate weapon against the Allies, but
before she grew into maturity in her birthing tank, the war ended and
the project was scrapped. Years later, she was found still in her tank
in a hidden sub-basement of a warehouse in Berlin and inadvertently
shipped to the United States. During transit the casing of the tank
was ruptured and she was born seemingly in her early twenties with all
of the knowledge of mankind programmed into her brain. She speaks
eighty languages and has been known to crush diamonds with her bare
hands. She is wanted in twenty countries and was last seen diving into
an active volcano somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. In her spare time,
she writes popular children's fiction, erotica and groundbreaking
journalism under the name Ashley "Danger" Meeks.Read her 'Confessions of a Recovering Teenager' column
