Fat people – I am talking morbidly obese, legs like stacks of glazed donuts, holy shit don’t eat within a 100 yards of me because your contagious chicken wing gobbling sadness will ruin my meal – scramble my brain.   They make me really sad, nearly on par with people who maniacally play slot machines, live in Connecticut, or collect miniature figurines then incarcerate their porcelain spirits in glass cabinets.   Fat people confound my moral compass, which I built myself out of esoteric trinkets and doodads, some woven dryer lint, and a proprietary blend of faith and distrust in the human spirit.

Instinctually, I want to make fun of fat people because they fall, heavily, (get it? Because they are fat, they fall harder than those with normal BMI’s) into that broad category of everything that should be viciously lampooned.  And yet, I don’t, or, I try not to because making fun of fat people seems like excessive piling on.  (get it? Piling on? You know they way fat people pile on the pounds and the gravy and cheese curds on a hot steaming plate of poutine.)  Making fun of fat people is too easy and therefore, not that funny or creative, and all the jokes end with the “you are fat” punch line that points out the obvious.  And so the creative energy falls fat, I mean flat, and simply hurts people in the silent way that feels like emotional cholesterol clogging up their self-esteem.

This is why I avert my eyes, stare at the ground, and push the cart past the feeding trough at the local Costco.  I’d rather not witness the sad.  As if navigating through Costco on a Saturday morning doesn’t fray my fragile nervous system enough, Costco insidiously serves up a gauntlet of fried grease and high fructose depression on paper trays to top off the Costco experience.  There are only a few things more horrifying to me than watching a triple gulleted family have “a little treat” after an exhausting trek through Costco, where they blocked the traveling lanes like snowplows during a storm.  And yet, every fucking time, some fat mom is teaching her fat daughter how to go down on hot-dogs as I push my fucking enormous cart of enormous shit through that enormous building full of enormous hot dog blowing fat fucks.

I swallow the vomit in my mouth, hand the fatty receipt guardian my receipt, and roll my cart into the freedom of the Costco parking lot, then drive away from that horror house of basic human necessities that I will write about in greater detail when the nausea subsides.   I came here to write about my conflicted attitude towards fat people, so I can’t let Costco do what it does best, and distract me from my purpose so much so that this piece of writing is teeming with a bunch of industrial sized descriptions of shit I never intended to explain.

I came here to write about fat people; I am going home with fat people.  Barf.  I mean, how does sex even work?  Are there gunt jacks available for intercourse? Do these systems run on hydraulics or pneumatics?  Are some integrated into lingerie?  Are there environmentally friendly models that run on expended cooking grease? Should I create one?  Trevor Charles, inventor of the gunt-jack.  So many questions and possibilities.  Barf.  Stay focused.

The truth is that everyone is fat to varying degrees of personal displeasure depending on your circumstance, genes, self-control, and degree of vanity.  If you are psychotically fit, then you are just as much of a lunatic as the fat shit who has to be craned out of his house.  And if you are naturally trim and attractive, then everyone fucking hates you and fuck your “oh I just run a little” self.    But if you are like me, and sometimes get fatter than you would like because you love to eat and drink and have fun and not give a flying fuck about consequences until its too late and your waistline is bubbling over your belt like melted cheese on a bowl of French onion soup, then please don’t get offended by the shit I write.  Or fuck off, take a joke like a big boy.  Or perhaps that ugly, “hey I understand” feeling of empathy and personal disgust will motivate you to lose a little or a lot of chub, the way it did when one of my good friends complimented me on my man boobs and asked if was planning on helping with the breastfeeding.

Outwardly I laughed, “ha, ha, very funny” and then cried inside, big cholesterol filled tears of shame.

I turned to my wife, “Do I have man-boobs?”

“Yes, honey,” she said with such empathy, as if she were telling me that the doctor called and I have the ball or ass cancer.

In an incredible act delusional body dysmorphia, I thought, “I couldn’t possibly be that bad” and sincerely believed that three months of boxed wined, inertia, and not giving a fuck would lead to a moderately physically fit and fuckable body that would be easily transformable with a touch of work.  During that three month stretch of “fuck yeah, I’ll have another beer,” and “my homemade strawberry jams taste so good with gobs of peanut butter,” and “a bag of Cool-Ranch Doritos will take the edge of this hangover” and, the most pride crushing of all, waking up to the shame of an empty ice cream containers, I genuinely thought, “I’ll be fine, I’m fine…”

I wasn’t fine.

I ignored the warning signs.  For instance, simply bending over to tie my shoes became problematic. And yet, I brushed it off as merely being inflexible, not the bulbous growth of belly fat that made it hard to reach my toes in a sitting position.

I started heaving myself off the couch, using momentum rather than muscle.  I passed this off as getting older.  In photos, the double chin was merely a bad angle.    I went “casual”  – khakis from a previous fat stage, un-tucked shirt, sandals – to a summer wedding because it was going to be hot out, not because I needed to be lubed up with Crisco and shoehorned into my suit pants.  I even rationalized away the multiple trips to return a trunk full of empty bottles of beer and wine, thinking, well, it had been a while since I had done this and I should be more diligent in my recycling habits.

The man-booby incident pulled my head out of fat ass of excuses, so I stepped on the scale and had my “this is fucking impossible” meltdown.  Two hundred and fifty-five fucking pounds.   I started doing some conversions.   I could be measured in tons.  1/8 ton to be exact.  Then I realized I only had 45 lbs to go before I outweighed the scale’s own usefulness.  It was a private moment of total humiliation that stung infinitely more than any man boob comment from friends.

And then it got worse.  I did the “am I an un-fuckable middle aged fat fuck test?” in which a man holds his head straight, then measures the angle of how far from a perpendicular axis he must tilt his spine in order to see the entirety of his own penis.   If the angle degree is greater than your age, then you are disgusting.

I was beyond gross.

Then, I turned around and looked at myself naked in the mirror and for the first time in three months I truly saw myself.  33.  Fat.  The model of the doughy ex-athlete whose atrophied, unused muscles left over from grabbing rebounds were covered in blubber.  And those pecks had, in fact, turned into boobs, succulent and supple titties.  I belonged at the Costco feed trough, sucking off a hot dog and washing it down with some frozen chemical white jizz in a sugar cone.  Fuck me.

But no one will.

And then came the piling on from the friends.  I mercilessly make fun of my friends for everything to the point that I am actually surprised I have any friends at all.  But I do, and holy shit, once the man-boob door was kicked open, they all came running through, taking shot after shot of gleeful payback for all those times I blasted them with ridicule, which draws its potency from being rooted in just enough truth to make that shit really hurt.  For example, last night I lampooned my best friend and his wife who are thinking of getting pregnant, but are having trouble quitting smoking.  I proclaimed that I would not help raise their retarded baby because they couldn’t stop ripping butts, then pantomimed a scene between myself and their future retarded baby who wanted to play catch with me, complete with stereotypical retard voices and all.

Nice.

Needless to say, I had it coming to me and I knew it.  However, they were kicking an already broken man.

I think one of my friend’s wives saw through my “I don’t care,” façade and took in the depth of my shame and sadness.  She tried to stop her husband’s attacks, “Oh come on; that’s not nice.”

“Oh fuck him. Besides, I will be in his head and he will go get in shape because of this… this is what he always does.  Trevor grows man tits; we make fun of him.  He goes and works out, then loses them.  So fuck him; I am actually helping him.”

And he was right.  For the last five weeks, I have been at the gym, on the elliptical, flopping my man titties around until they won’t flop anymore.  And every single one of my friend’s comments are right there in my head, urging me on.  I am fueled by pure hate and vanity.

I would love to get all self-righteous and say it is about being healthy and living a sustainable life, blah, bloopity blah.

Fuck that.

This is about man tits.