Rage against the manatee

As I lay there, slowly being crushed to death, I pondered the burning questions:

“Is this how it feels to die on the surface of Jupiter? What does it say for Brazilian jiu-jitsu when they give black belts to 400-lb teletubbies? To what depths of degradation have I sunk?”

The author and the finisher of these ruminations sat comfortably on my chest, his belly fat engulfing my face. I would have vomited, except for the airtight blubber mask suffocating me.


When Bill first brought him onto the mat, I took it for a joke. At 6’ 4”, he must have weighed 400 lbs if he weighed 1. Our instructor introduced him as his good friend Steve, and a talented Jiu-Jitsu black belt. Say what? I could have sworn that you said black belt? Sorry, I was busy enjoying the image of a beleaguered manatee, swimming slowly beneath a yacht.

The party really started when Steve, starting with the highest ranks, began throwing the students around like ninepins and generally wreaking havoc on the mat. This porker had moves! He moved with the lithe abandon of a Fantasia elephant, and the speed of Sally Struthers chasing the world’s last doughnut.

In fear and trembling I took my turn, and was thrown onto my back within 10 seconds. As Steve crushed me, I lay there completely helpless, and all my Herculean efforts to escape were about as useful as a cock-flavored lollipop.
Did I have it all wrong? Would the obese inherit the earth? I wondered bitterly how many babies he could eat in a sitting as I spat out his sweaty paunch hair. Mercifully, a clock choke cut my suffering short.

I still don’t know how I feel about the morbidly obese doing martial arts. On the one hand, Steve’s infinite mass gave him a supermassive advantage. On the other, he nearly had an aneurysm after 5 minutes of fighting. Chances are if I could have survived sans oxygen for a few more minutes, I would have won when he died of congestive heart failure.

The moral of this story? There is nothing that a tube of toothpaste, half a bottle of wine and a 45 minute shower can't cure.

I guess you'll do

Hey, you. Some girl. It's me, some guy. I guess we might as well have a life together. I'm in my mid-to-late 20's, you're 2 years younger. We're at about the same level of attractiveness, and we have comparable educations. You need to mate, and will probably do about as well as anyone else. Let's begin this typical courtship process, shall we? I guess we should go to some movies, and maybe a concert or two. Let's go camping. While camping, let's take some pictures of us to hang on our wall to remind us of the time we went camping. Perhaps we'll get married a year and a half after I propose. Our wedding will be the highlight of your life, as you will be the center of the universe for about 2 weeks. After the wedding, you'll take a year to reflect upon the wedding. Soon, everyone will tire of your wedding talk and you'll no longer be the center of attention. It's time for us to buy a house so you'll have something new to talk about. We'll decide that we should have children, and we'll take all the fun out of sex by scheduling our intimacy around your ovulation cycle. We will conceive, and you will give birth, just as billions have done before you. Our children will be adequate, but not spectacular. I'll want them to be athletes but they'll lack the size and skill. You'll want them to be creative but they'll lack the talent and drive....

...But I digress. What I meant to say is that I'm excited for our first date, and I'll pick you up at 8.

Startlingly Accurate

Whatever he's doing, they don't like it.

When in Babel....

I barely recognized this dusty old corner of the web when I logged in the other day. The burning question in my mind is whether or not bloggers are essentially narcissists and attention whores. I've concluded that while many bloggers blog purely to feed their outrageously bloated egos, others actually provide relevant and interesting information to their family and friends.
As you have surely guessed, I am not one of the latter. I blog only for the orgasmic rush I feel when I am notified that someone commented on my blog. Your blog comments are like pure heroin injected directly into my carotid. As any good narcissist will tell you, there is nothing quite so worth-affirming as a turgid, throbbing heap of comments praising you for your latest trivial achievement, mind-numbingly inane post, or infinitely asinine fecal nugget of "wisdom". So, dear nonexistent reader, keep them coming. Your sweet sweet comments light up my brain's reward and pleasure center like the Fourth of July.

In other news...
I think my blogging hiatus is over. I don't think I can match Amber's blistering blogging pace, but I'll try to post every now and then. It keeps the brain active and helps break out of existential funks. Incidentally, so do cattle prods.
I took up Jiu-Jitsu about 4 months ago. Why? Well obviously because I enjoy being wrapped up in the slippery, pungent embrace of another sweating man. Silly question. It's actually a fantastic workout, as every training session takes me within 1/2 dozen beats of heart failure. I also find the ability to physically dominate others very useful. It takes all the annoying small talk and expense out of the dating scene. No longer is it necessary to take a girl to dinner and charm my way into her good graces; I simply throw her to the ground with Seoi-nage, and place her in a compromising and pleasurable hold such as a triangle choke as I have my way with her. I plan on competing at the Pan-American tournament in August, so I'm going to train every day, and post video of my glorious victory as white belt heavyweight champion (or not). Either way, it should be amusing.

Untitled

A little brown cork
Fell in the path of a whale
Who lashed it down
With his angry tail.
But in spite of its blows
It quickly arose,
And floated serenely
Before his nose.
Said the cork to the whale:
"You may flap, slap, sputter and frown,
But you never, never, can keep me down;
For I'm made of the stuff
That is buoyant enough
To float instead of drown."

Though I see the end approaching - the end of the familiar, the rearrangement of the elements of beauty... I know that as the night presses it's ever-expanding claim, the things in which I put my faith will come most alive, and fight their undoing by rising up to their full and majestic height.

Here's to cork, and here's to you.

Here piggy piggy

What do you do when you have a pig that’s so big, he can’t walk? You either:
A-slaughter him, B-put him on a diet, or C-keep feeding him, which is more or less what the health care debate boils down to – the pig representing the current state of our healthcare system. Let’s discuss in a non-partisan way some points about the health care debate that everyone seems to agree upon.
1: The USA spends an inordinate amount of it’s GDP on health care, more than any other nation.
2: Our current healthcare system is radically unfair. –That’s not to say that other healthcare models wouldn’t be more unfair.

First, we have the people who want to ‘kill the pig’.
Some argue that we need a large-scale, govt-run insurance company. The so-called “public option”, which everyone would be able to buy into, and for which the poor would pay less than the rich. This government-run insurer would then be able to negotiate lower costs for procedures, and cut down on the number of procedures used.
Although the “public option” wouldn’t eliminate private insurers, private insurers still HATE the prospect, because they know the government-run company will be larger, and therefore more able to leverage lower prices – making the public option less expensive, and making people less inclined to buy private insurance.

Second, we have those who want to ‘put the pig on a diet’.
These people advocate the creation of some sort of non-profit insurance companies that will compete with private insurance. Because they are non-profit companies, they will not be incentivised to work for shareholders (like for-profit insurers), but instead work for the patients they represent. The downside of the “put the pig on a diet” plan is that you still end up with tens of millions of people with no insurance whatsoever.

Then, you have the people who don’t want healthcare system overhaul. They want to ‘keep feeding the pig’. These people are happy with the current state of their healthcare, and probably don’t want to pay for people who make stupid decisions (gang-bangers with gunshot wounds, alcoholics, smokers, the obese). On some level I can empathize with this. At the OC fair a few years ago, I remember seeing a vendor selling chocolate-covered bacon. I don’t want to be on the financial hook for people that eat chocolate-covered bacon.

Although many people are screaming that they don’t want socialism, what they don’t realize is that many aspects of our government have already been socialist for some time. We share the cost of school, roads, and the military, to name a few. Also, we already have socialized medicine, just an outrageously bloated and inefficient form of it. At most hospitals, ANYONE can go to receive treatment. That treatment may bankrupt you, and it may be of poor quality, but nobody is refused if they cannot pay upfront. I would argue that it is the very inefficiency of our current system that makes medical care so much more expensive than it needs to be.

Is healthcare a privilege, or is it a right? If it is a privilege (even if it’s a very desirable privilege, like indoor plumbing), then we need to STOP giving healthcare of any kind to people who cannot afford to pay for it in advance.

But I think the reason that hospitals continue to treat people who are uninsured is that we, the people, don’t believe that healthcare is a privilege. We believe that it is a right. And if it is a right - like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - then it is the responsibility of our government to protect that right.