Guide to Being A Big Fat Miserable Sack of Shit

Guess what goes first when you get older? Your gut. You'll notice it before you notice anything else like your back hurting or your skin getting way drier than it was last winter or the fact that you sometimes want to sleep more than you want to fuck. It starts off casually and understandably enough. Like "I don't want to eat Cheetos and strawberry ice cream for lunch. Because of what will happen to my body, specifically my digestive processes, that's a bad idea." Maybe that particular meal never sounded like a good idea to you, but you get my drift. Substitute the Cheetos and strawberry ice cream equivalent for you.

Regardless, around age 29-30, you'll start noticing other weird gut-related changes. You'll find yourself getting morbidly curious about your own bowel movements. What they're like, what might be causing their awful or satisfactory nature, that kind of thing. You will come to think about these questions as an interested party rather than an "oh well" young experientialist. Your level of devotion to your own shitting patterns will be akin to studying for a professional test: Certified Connoisseur of Pooping. This is real. It really will happen.

Your face will get fat.

By the way, I'm not saying this as if everybody in the world will experience it. I'm telling a young, bored me. With "you" and your metabolism and your lifestyle and general worldview: these things will happen, me. They will happen.

And sooner or later you (me) will start to feel like a big, bloated, gross pig. You will often forsake booze and/or sex for the comfort of a hamburger. Use that as an analogy. It will appear a bunch of times. It will sneak up on you. Sometimes you won't even know what you're doing until you think about it mid-sandwich.

And do you want to know why? Because you're a chickenshit loser who hates his life. Or else you're in a weird phase where you're proving to yourself how bad things can really get when you give in to a challenge-free life of easy choices.

Is this over your head? Sorry, young me. I don't want to scare you.

Here's a good analogy for where you're headed: next time you go to the DMV, notice the people who work there. They are fat and miserable slow-moving bastards who take more enjoyment in your pain than they do in the pleasure of competently fulfilling their necessary work-related tasks. And do you know why they're like that? Because they work at the DMV.

Nobody wants to work at a DMV. But there are worse places to work. There's a state employee pension, good benefits, and enough workplace protocol to ensure lifetime employment unless you just stop showing up to work or kill somebody on company time. For workaday schlubs like you and me, the DMV is as close as we'll ever come to a Supreme Court appointment. At a lofty $37,000 a year. You'll notice a lot of married women working at the DMV for necessary supplemental household income.

Is that depressing? Yeah. That's kind of the idea. Either you work your ass off to make your dreams a reality or you end up eating Cheetos and strawberry ice cream (just this once times a million) while you're on your lunch break from the DMV. I'm not judging. It takes all kinds to make the world go 'round. And of course also: those big ladies at the DMV are probably delightful people the second they clock out for the day. And I mean real-world-mother-of-a-family delightful on a level that douchebags like you and I are likely incapable of even dreaming about. Yet.

So there's pluses and minuses.

Kids are a terrible nuisance to my understanding of the world. I kind of want one just to see what it's like to not care about myself as much. This is probably the primary/worst/best reason to have kids, for all I know. And in a weird way, having kids allows you to be more selfish. In a "I just want to eat Cheetos and strawberry ice cream for lunch while I'm on break from the DMV, just this once, and I don't want to hear your shit about it, little man, because I've got three kids at home that I'm responsible for and I work my ass off there, and since life is hard I also work at the DMV and anyway it's none of your business and this is all I want and I have the money for it and you can't stop me" way.

Then when your kids grow up, in that period between potentially-giving-a-shit-about-other-people and my-own-neck-is-getting-fat, let's arbitrarily say ages 24-28, those little shits (if you raised them right) will actually have the nerve to get mad at you for not taking better care of yourself. As if that was ever the plan.

Do you want the good news? Fuck you. There is no good news. We're all gonna die. The sooner you get right with that ineluctable fact, the better. Instead of the good news we get the silver lining that nobody really gives a shit if you bloat out a little in your 30's and have to move up a tee shirt size. I'm a large now for the first time since I was into hip hop and hardcore. Do I feel good about it? No. But I feel good about not having a choice. What else am I gonna do? Join a gym and start wailing on my own body as if I hated myself in order to look a little less round? No way. I'd rather choose the "eat buffalo chicken anything and then get to bed at a reasonable hour" method of hating myself. But that's just me. And I'm applying for a job at the DMV.

Wait. Did I just chart a life-based timeline of American obesity?

Probably not. There's the "menace" of childhood obesity to consider. But maybe it still works. Just slide everything up a few years. Guts go early these days.

Speaking of going. I just heard the microwave beep. My cheeseburger burrito is ready and I need to blast out a bunch of shit out of my asshole. I would call it a 9 urgency, 4 relevance event.