Let’s face facts. If you’re out of the norm, you’re out of the norm, and we in society take our norms very seriously. Being fat as you describe is WAY out of bounds, and entitles we normal folk to point it out — necessitates it actually — otherwise we might get ostracized ourselves.
I watch body builders in the gym (well, I did before the virus hit) walk their thick bodies from machine to machine, their gallon jugs of magic endocrine juice and muscles bound so tight a pinprick would burst them, so it seems. If you ever got to know one of them, you’d quickly come to realize just how out of the norm they are. Awkward in their own skin, a good many of them and the ones on ‘roids can just go crazy on you.
There’s a black dude I see in the gym, not so well built who comes in on his two canes, slow and swinging his one leg that doesn’t work so well. It kinda just hangs there. What a loser. Why would he even bother? He’s got two strikes against him before he even gets out of bed. Seems like a nice enough person, smiles, lets you work in with him on the bench, but he’s, go ahead and say it with me, OUT OF THE NORM. And if you can believe it, he’s friends with a lady in her 60s with that kind of bad hair ladies get when they get old —OMG, that’s just sad.
I was wearing thick glasses when I was five to keep my eyes from rolling in separate directions, and I was so skinny and tiny people thought I was years younger than I was. It was really hard to keep my glasses from being crushed when I played tackle football. And I had no dad to teach me — he was dead, and I want to tell you all that leaves a boy with serious disadvantages in the competition for being male. And playing football, I was always bouncing off the big fat boys instead of bringing them down, and they’d just laugh.
The secret nobody told me until it’s too late to do anything about it is that it fucking doesn’t matter. What matters is how you spend your allotment of time on this rock, shuffling through the day or actually doing something other than fretting. Fret for a minute or two, OK, then get your fat ass back in the chair and write something! Tic tok, tick tok — and BTW, some of us don’t care how ginormous you are, long as we don’t have to sit next to you in economy class. That last bit was meant as motivational, ’cause I’m all about the norms.
I used to run marathons but I can’t anymore — I’m too damn old. Please don’t tell anyone, or they won’t let me in the clubhouse.
Love you anyway.
