Originally Published: 9/8/08By Merton Sussex, Regional Vice President of Snark Allocation
Beginning today, the Diary of Fools will be running periodic salutes to the hallmarks of fat acceptance in America. Great Moments in Fat History will take regular looks at the great lengths we go to in order to rationalize the growing obesity epidemic; and to make things easier for the morbidly obese to feel normal and streamlined in a society that is repulsed by them. We'll examine in depth the incredible attitudes that enable persons of great girth to keep on shoving Twinkie after Twinkie after Twinkie down their gaping, grease-slicked gullets in a pathetic, empty attempt to fill the voids in their souls where normal people are able to put love.
Beginning today, the Diary of Fools will be running periodic salutes to the hallmarks of fat acceptance in America. Great Moments in Fat History will take regular looks at the great lengths we go to in order to rationalize the growing obesity epidemic; and to make things easier for the morbidly obese to feel normal and streamlined in a society that is repulsed by them. We'll examine in depth the incredible attitudes that enable persons of great girth to keep on shoving Twinkie after Twinkie after Twinkie down their gaping, grease-slicked gullets in a pathetic, empty attempt to fill the voids in their souls where normal people are able to put love.
Great Moments in Fat History Vol. 1: The Obesity Scooter
There comes a certain benchmark in the life of every unbelievable train-wreck tub of shit; a crossroads, if you will. A point of no return of sorts where the revolting fatty has a choice to make. Maybe it's after the third or fourth heart attack, or after the doctor's visit that informs them that even their Diabetes has Diabetes...Whatever the impetus, the fork in the road is the same: The corpulent sod must choose either the path of "Wake-Up Call", or the road of "Fuck It, It's Too Late."
If it's the former, Tons 'o Fun may chose to hop on the treadmill, and not get off until he can see his shoes again. Maybe he'll try all sorts of fad crash diets, or even opt for invasive Bariatric surgical procedures. Of course, these measures enjoy varying degrees of success dependent upon everything from genetics to tenacity, but at least Tubby is taking an active role, and may squeeze a few more years out of his portly meat-shell.
But if it's the latter, Two-Ton Tessie really only has one choice: Self-Delusion. "I'm just fine the way I am," she'll tell herself. "I'm perfectly comfortable and happy at 578 pounds. Sure, I can't reach my genitals anymore, I smell like warm brie, and and when I die they'll have to cut a hole in my house and forklift me out, then dump me in a shipping crate, the previous tenant of which was a Steinway Baby Grand, before shoving me into a hole they had to spend two days excavating with a backhoe...But there's nothing wrong with ME. It's the REST of the world that has a problem!" At which point she'll nod her porcine melon, the TEMPLES of which are even slick with flop-sweat at the effort, and when the undulating from her seven chins stops perpetuating itself like those chrome balls on strings that your boss has on his desk, she'll pick up her second large, stuffed-crust two-layer pizza of the last ten minutes, and proceed to sink even further into sideshow territory as she gulps it down without hardly chewing.
It is post THAT stage of the great chub charade that one must seek further rationalization for one's decision. "Hey," thinks the bloated sack of protoplasm. "If the world didn't want me to look like Bibendum's glandular-disorder-affected older sibling, there wouldn't be size 9X sweatshirts, all-you-can-eat buffets, and that most ridiculously enabling of all pachy-person accoutrements: The Obesity Scooter."
For the uninitiated, the Obesity Scooter is a most marvelous invention, to be sure. It allows even the chunkiest of Hutt-proportioned piles of lard to still enjoy something approaching independence in the days and months leading up to the inevitable bedridden, rag-on-stick sponge-baths and impromptu drop-ins from Dick Gregory. The Scooter provides even people whose legs have negative-integer muscle tone to experience a reasonable facsimile equivalent of ambulatory motion; allowing them to perform some version of the tasks that those of us whose flatulence does NOT register on the Richter Scale are able to do. Everything from shopping, to attending social events, to...well, going to restaurants.
The Genius of the Scooter resides in its (if you'll pardon the expression) "elephant in the room" status. See...Whenever we notice a person with an assistant medical device...e.g. a colostomy bag, insulin pump, iron lung, crutches, prosthetic limb, glass eye, wheelchair, neck brace, trachea ring, CPAP, pacemaker, or even giant, scrap-metal-looking dental headgear...We're obligated not to mention it under any circumstances. To do so is a faux pas of the highest order. When you go to shake someone's hand, and grab a cold steel hook instead, it's considered terribly bad form to recoil in horror, shrieking like a Girl Scout who's just been told that her St. Bernard got into the Thin Mints. Nope, it's incumbent upon us to shake away, and act like we simply didn't notice. Most normal thing in the world, that. Wouldn't even have seen it if you hadn't mentioned it! Reason being, it's polite to not call attention to the glaring differences of others that may make them feel alienated from other people.
And somewhere along the line, the Obesity Scooter got lumped in with the rest of those things, as though it were a legitimate medical device. Out of a shared sort of mob-mentality social decorum, the American populace was hoodwinked virtually overnight into politely regarding the Obesity Scooter as just another meaty leg up for the disabled, like an eyepatch or a Dr. Stephen Hawking Speak-and-Spell thingy. We were bamboozled into thinking, "These people aren't human Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons. They're not Ripley's Believe it or Not footnotes. Why, heavens, no. They're handicapped."
And THIS was perhaps the fat acceptance movement's greatest coup of them all, worth a thousand Mo'Nique-hosted chubby-girl beauty pageants, or a few dozen Emmies for Camryn Manheim. Getting the rest of the world to see these rotund rollabouts not as unrestrained hedonists reaping the consequences of their chosen lifestyles of excess and apathy...But as legitimate victims, plagued by a world that made them the way they are, only to staunchly refuse to accept them that way once they were. There are no notions of entitlement at play, here! When you get right down to it, they're really no different than sufferers of Multiple Sclerosis or Muscular Dystrophy. After all, those, too, are progressive conditions that render their victims increasingly unable to care for themselves, and ever less mobile as the ravages of the disease take their toll.
Except that there are no telethons for the man- and woman-atees who are eating themselves into an early grave. No foundations created to help those who started eating seven meals a day in 1982 and eventually worked up to 12. No fund- and awareness-raising marches designed to assist those who find themselves stricken by the condition. Though, to be fair, you can't cure MD by hanging out with Tony Little or Richard Simmons for a few months, either. In fact, you might CATCH some shit from that. But, I digress.
The point is, when we see someone buzzing around on a scooter, rolls and folds spilling so far over the edges of the seat that we can't even really be sure that there IS one, we're just supposed to let it go. To ignore it. To pretend that the situation somehow DOESN'T embody most of what's wrong with Western culture and it's overindulgent me-first-ism, and treat the plump passenger as if they're just like anyone else. Like they DIDN'T just take the "Fuck It, It's Too Late" path of least resistance when faced with their own crossroads, and use the last thousand dollars they didn't spend on Ho-Ho's to buy electric leg replacements instead of a fucking Bowflex.
So, in the interest of preserving inter-personal propriety, we DO let it go. Rather than look at these planet-proportioned pudge-piles and cluck our tongues, wondering what exactly went so horribly awry in their psyches that things could have gotten to that point, we smile. We treat them like we would anyone else. We ignore the room-elephant.
We shake the hook.
Maybe this is for the best. Because we KNOW if we simply got fed up, and adopted a tone of sneering sanctimony concerning their corpulence, we'd just come off like bigger assholes than they are. Sure, the be-scootered blobs are essentially foisting themselves on the unsuspecting public, forcing us to flatten against the shelving and squeeze our butts into the pickle jars as they hum by at Wal-Mart, parting the people in every aisle right down the center like a goddamned freight-liner trundling down the Panama Canal as they fill their carts with Doritos and Cheez-Wiz, daring someone to say something to them. But the second you decide to drop a pithy bon mot concerning their sheer monolithic mass within their earshot, you can almost guarantee that you've picked on the one person in a few dozen who genuinely has a thyroid that thinks it's in a narwhal, rather than the rest of them who just use that as an excuse.
So, as ever, it's best to keep your mouth shut. Sure, if they'd do the same once in awhile, they wouldn't be in the barge they're in, but that's really not for you to be concerned about. Natural selection will eventually weed these guys out. Or, the other possibility is we'll all wind up like the beefy butter-tubs onboard the Axiom in Pixar/Disney's delightfully thin-veiled attack on consumer culture "Wall-E": Little more than barely-sentient giant amoeba, who live only to ingest and excrete, blissfully bouncing through life without even the merest worry, floating around on the future's version of the Obesity Scooter, the hover-chair. We'll loll about in our own reeking perspiration, never quite cleaning between the folds well enough to completely excise the funk, but not really caring because, after all, that's the norm. We'll eat and shit and eat and shit and then eat some more, eventually winking fatly out, barely noticed by the other slow-witted cattle as they continue to soak up more resources than any organism needs to perpetuate its own useless life-cycle. Evolution does, after all, favor dominant traits that are well-suited to the overall environment of the alpha organism. Which is why I sort of wonder if we WON'T wind up going that route. Because as long as our environment keeps allowing for shit like THIS:
...We're pretty much fucked.
Way to shake the hook, America.
If it's the former, Tons 'o Fun may chose to hop on the treadmill, and not get off until he can see his shoes again. Maybe he'll try all sorts of fad crash diets, or even opt for invasive Bariatric surgical procedures. Of course, these measures enjoy varying degrees of success dependent upon everything from genetics to tenacity, but at least Tubby is taking an active role, and may squeeze a few more years out of his portly meat-shell.
But if it's the latter, Two-Ton Tessie really only has one choice: Self-Delusion. "I'm just fine the way I am," she'll tell herself. "I'm perfectly comfortable and happy at 578 pounds. Sure, I can't reach my genitals anymore, I smell like warm brie, and and when I die they'll have to cut a hole in my house and forklift me out, then dump me in a shipping crate, the previous tenant of which was a Steinway Baby Grand, before shoving me into a hole they had to spend two days excavating with a backhoe...But there's nothing wrong with ME. It's the REST of the world that has a problem!" At which point she'll nod her porcine melon, the TEMPLES of which are even slick with flop-sweat at the effort, and when the undulating from her seven chins stops perpetuating itself like those chrome balls on strings that your boss has on his desk, she'll pick up her second large, stuffed-crust two-layer pizza of the last ten minutes, and proceed to sink even further into sideshow territory as she gulps it down without hardly chewing.
It is post THAT stage of the great chub charade that one must seek further rationalization for one's decision. "Hey," thinks the bloated sack of protoplasm. "If the world didn't want me to look like Bibendum's glandular-disorder-affected older sibling, there wouldn't be size 9X sweatshirts, all-you-can-eat buffets, and that most ridiculously enabling of all pachy-person accoutrements: The Obesity Scooter."
For the uninitiated, the Obesity Scooter is a most marvelous invention, to be sure. It allows even the chunkiest of Hutt-proportioned piles of lard to still enjoy something approaching independence in the days and months leading up to the inevitable bedridden, rag-on-stick sponge-baths and impromptu drop-ins from Dick Gregory. The Scooter provides even people whose legs have negative-integer muscle tone to experience a reasonable facsimile equivalent of ambulatory motion; allowing them to perform some version of the tasks that those of us whose flatulence does NOT register on the Richter Scale are able to do. Everything from shopping, to attending social events, to...well, going to restaurants.The Genius of the Scooter resides in its (if you'll pardon the expression) "elephant in the room" status. See...Whenever we notice a person with an assistant medical device...e.g. a colostomy bag, insulin pump, iron lung, crutches, prosthetic limb, glass eye, wheelchair, neck brace, trachea ring, CPAP, pacemaker, or even giant, scrap-metal-looking dental headgear...We're obligated not to mention it under any circumstances. To do so is a faux pas of the highest order. When you go to shake someone's hand, and grab a cold steel hook instead, it's considered terribly bad form to recoil in horror, shrieking like a Girl Scout who's just been told that her St. Bernard got into the Thin Mints. Nope, it's incumbent upon us to shake away, and act like we simply didn't notice. Most normal thing in the world, that. Wouldn't even have seen it if you hadn't mentioned it! Reason being, it's polite to not call attention to the glaring differences of others that may make them feel alienated from other people.
And somewhere along the line, the Obesity Scooter got lumped in with the rest of those things, as though it were a legitimate medical device. Out of a shared sort of mob-mentality social decorum, the American populace was hoodwinked virtually overnight into politely regarding the Obesity Scooter as just another meaty leg up for the disabled, like an eyepatch or a Dr. Stephen Hawking Speak-and-Spell thingy. We were bamboozled into thinking, "These people aren't human Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons. They're not Ripley's Believe it or Not footnotes. Why, heavens, no. They're handicapped."And THIS was perhaps the fat acceptance movement's greatest coup of them all, worth a thousand Mo'Nique-hosted chubby-girl beauty pageants, or a few dozen Emmies for Camryn Manheim. Getting the rest of the world to see these rotund rollabouts not as unrestrained hedonists reaping the consequences of their chosen lifestyles of excess and apathy...But as legitimate victims, plagued by a world that made them the way they are, only to staunchly refuse to accept them that way once they were. There are no notions of entitlement at play, here! When you get right down to it, they're really no different than sufferers of Multiple Sclerosis or Muscular Dystrophy. After all, those, too, are progressive conditions that render their victims increasingly unable to care for themselves, and ever less mobile as the ravages of the disease take their toll.
Except that there are no telethons for the man- and woman-atees who are eating themselves into an early grave. No foundations created to help those who started eating seven meals a day in 1982 and eventually worked up to 12. No fund- and awareness-raising marches designed to assist those who find themselves stricken by the condition. Though, to be fair, you can't cure MD by hanging out with Tony Little or Richard Simmons for a few months, either. In fact, you might CATCH some shit from that. But, I digress.
The point is, when we see someone buzzing around on a scooter, rolls and folds spilling so far over the edges of the seat that we can't even really be sure that there IS one, we're just supposed to let it go. To ignore it. To pretend that the situation somehow DOESN'T embody most of what's wrong with Western culture and it's overindulgent me-first-ism, and treat the plump passenger as if they're just like anyone else. Like they DIDN'T just take the "Fuck It, It's Too Late" path of least resistance when faced with their own crossroads, and use the last thousand dollars they didn't spend on Ho-Ho's to buy electric leg replacements instead of a fucking Bowflex.
So, in the interest of preserving inter-personal propriety, we DO let it go. Rather than look at these planet-proportioned pudge-piles and cluck our tongues, wondering what exactly went so horribly awry in their psyches that things could have gotten to that point, we smile. We treat them like we would anyone else. We ignore the room-elephant.
We shake the hook.
Maybe this is for the best. Because we KNOW if we simply got fed up, and adopted a tone of sneering sanctimony concerning their corpulence, we'd just come off like bigger assholes than they are. Sure, the be-scootered blobs are essentially foisting themselves on the unsuspecting public, forcing us to flatten against the shelving and squeeze our butts into the pickle jars as they hum by at Wal-Mart, parting the people in every aisle right down the center like a goddamned freight-liner trundling down the Panama Canal as they fill their carts with Doritos and Cheez-Wiz, daring someone to say something to them. But the second you decide to drop a pithy bon mot concerning their sheer monolithic mass within their earshot, you can almost guarantee that you've picked on the one person in a few dozen who genuinely has a thyroid that thinks it's in a narwhal, rather than the rest of them who just use that as an excuse.
So, as ever, it's best to keep your mouth shut. Sure, if they'd do the same once in awhile, they wouldn't be in the barge they're in, but that's really not for you to be concerned about. Natural selection will eventually weed these guys out. Or, the other possibility is we'll all wind up like the beefy butter-tubs onboard the Axiom in Pixar/Disney's delightfully thin-veiled attack on consumer culture "Wall-E": Little more than barely-sentient giant amoeba, who live only to ingest and excrete, blissfully bouncing through life without even the merest worry, floating around on the future's version of the Obesity Scooter, the hover-chair. We'll loll about in our own reeking perspiration, never quite cleaning between the folds well enough to completely excise the funk, but not really caring because, after all, that's the norm. We'll eat and shit and eat and shit and then eat some more, eventually winking fatly out, barely noticed by the other slow-witted cattle as they continue to soak up more resources than any organism needs to perpetuate its own useless life-cycle. Evolution does, after all, favor dominant traits that are well-suited to the overall environment of the alpha organism. Which is why I sort of wonder if we WON'T wind up going that route. Because as long as our environment keeps allowing for shit like THIS:
...We're pretty much fucked.
Way to shake the hook, America.
Posts
11 comments:
here here sir. My (fat) obliques actually hurt from the furious giggles.
we must do our best to force the term "shake the hook" into our everyday lexicon.
effing brilliant, mert. i've changed my mind and decided i want to be you when i grow up instead of the hamburglar.
come on guys there should be something more productive to write about than over weight humans...it not funny, its sad.
@anonymous
productive? i'm not sure if you're familiar with how blogs work, but blogs and productivity are sworn enemies.
we must do our best to force the term "shake the hook" into our everyday lexicon.
Aye. I'd be as pleased as a baby in a barrel full of tits if "Shake the Hook" became euphemistic catch-phrase code for "give the appearance of politely ignoring the one freakish thing dominating your attention about someone." Why the fuck not? It worked for "Jump The Shark," and that makes about as much sense divorced from context.
"come on guys there should be something more productive to write about than over weight humans"
Of course. But if this blog were about productivity, we'd be actively raising funds to buy acres of rainforest, or trying to raise Spina Bifida awareness, or something. And, while certainly beneficial, that kind of shit is admittedly about as much fun as an apartment fire. So if I were a betting man, I'd continue to push all of my chips onto the spot marked "Skewering Pop Culture" when it comes to the great roulette-spin of the venerable Diary's future.
I mean, I guess Blaine COULD wake up tomorrow and decide he wants to re-focus our collective effort on trying to spread the word about sustainable housing construction, but that's about as likely as Amy Winehouse dying of natural causes surrounded by cherub-cheeked grandchildren.
Wait do they actually let you go through a drive-thru on a scooter? I once tried to on foot and got yelled at . . . apparently you need some sort of motorized vehicle to use the drive-thru
I need to remember next time to not read your blog while I'm trying to eat my lunch.
Anonymous-Your grammar is sad.
Well, I don't disapprove as much when people are handicapped prior to getting fat and riding around on one of those things. Maybe they got in a car accident, lost the use of their legs, and then got sad and fat.
On the other hand, fat people who have no handicap other than being fat NEED to walk, wtf
as a fat man!!!! i say boo ya!!!! haha funny.
chris thomas
P.S. im not motorized cart fat, just a bit "fluffy"
I find the fact that these motorized carts often have a large shopping-basket welded onto the front particularly inspiring. Thanks to this genius addition, the blubbery lard-balls at the controls never need to be far away from their next snack and/or meal.
I earnestly hope that the next step in our collective evolution gifts us with a shopping basket growing out of our stomachs, or replaces our fingers with forks.
Fantastic work, sir.
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