It's been almost three years since I quit smoking. I hardly ever have the urge now. Know what makes me want to light up? Funerals.
I don't know what it is, the hidden stress, the nicotine bonding of the bereaved, the need to share? Whatever it is, I get a powerful urge to go up to the group puffing out side the funeral home and try to bum a smoke. I don't do it, but...
This past weekend I attended a funeral of the father of friends of friends of mine - which makes them acquaintances. That seems to be the way it works as you get older. When you're young, you go to funerals of your closer orbiting social circles - friends and relatives. As you get older, those circles seem to expand outwards - possibly because as you get older more die than get married, but even so, it's um, it's some kind of community bonding, a respectful gesture, or perhaps just a gathering against the coming dark.
The thing about this guy that passed is, he was maybe about six foot tall and weighed a good 650 pounds, easily. He was so fat - and this isn't meant as a fat joke, but - he was so fat, that he could have given birth to a fat person.
He and his growing constituency seem to indicate that America needs a whole new category for being overweight. I mean, this guy was beyond morbidly obese. He pretty much immobile - barely able to negotiate his way out of bed, out to his chair in the garage. There, his buddies would come over and jaw with him, and do whatever chores he requested, and bring him beer and cigarettes. Since he and his buddies are all industrial rednecks that populate this rusted up region of Northwest Indiana, I can't help but think of him as an immobile hillbilly. And thus - an immobilly.
Not to speak ill of the dead, but the other thing that really got to me was, when he checked into the hospital with a blood clot in his lungs and his kidneys shutting down, everyone assumed he would be out in a few week - because he was "indestructible".
Indestructible.
What an interesting use of the term, that a man could do such grotesquely unhealthy things to his body, turn himself into a soft-serve tub of goo, and be considered indestructible because he continues to survive.
(Shaking my head here).
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the fattening of America. it occurred to me recently that the people we called fat when I was growing up are not considered fat today, just normal.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was growing up, we had one kid in the neighborhood who was the "fat kid", because he was unusual. Maybe two, or at least, a runner-up kid ready to take on the role of fat kid should something happen to the fat kid.
ReplyDeleteNow, I'm guessing every neighborhood has one skinny kid called "the skinny kid".
It's the chemical soup infused into livestock in order to fatten them up for slaughter..., cut out the meat, and the body's whole and entire metabolic and functional profile changes rather quickly. There are of course some unpleasant pulmonary and lymphatic side-effects of sloughing off that long-term infusion of crap given to the cows the chickens and the pigs....,
ReplyDeleteGrass-fed beef if you can find it. Th ewhole cows-eating-chicken-shit-derived-from-chickens-eating-cow-parts ag practice is, uh, maybe a little questionalbe, say wot?
ReplyDeleteThat's what it is alright. dayyum, hadn't even thought about that whole zombification of the meat chain issue....,
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