Donuts Make My Brown Eyes Blue

9:57 pm, Christmas night. I just got off the phone with Nick, my ex-roommate and one of my closest friends. He is enroute to New Jersey from Chicago and was calling me from Indiana. We have not seen each other in about twelve years and as you might imagine, I’m a little nervous. It is stupid to feel that way, I know, because we speak on the phone three to four times a week, so he knows what I sound like and has seen my picture. In theory, at least, there shouldn’t be any surprises.

Why then, am I am scouring the Internet to see if Acai berries or industrial strength diuretics will help me lose forty pounds by tomorrow? Because I haven't seen him in twelve years. Because I am vain and I really wanted to look good..

It is pointless, I know, considering it would take me until Opening Day of baseball season just to work off the immense quantities of crap that I have consumed over these last three holiday-bacchanalia days, much less twelve years worth of processed, useless food . I am like David Crockett at the Alamo; well-intentioned, but doomed to failure. 

I have always had this ‘thing’ with food. Not the good, wholesome stuff that is packed with essential vitamins and minerals, which  help build strong bodies twelve ways, but rather the types of sustenance that could never do me any nutritional good unless I were trapped in an atomic bomb shelter  after a nuclear holocaust.

Just to illustrate how twisted my relationship with food is, today I posted ON MY FACEBOOK PAGE,  and with great fanfare, mind you, that after nearly a year of deliberation, I have added CHEESECAKE to the list of Ten Foods I Would Take to a Deserted Island. Not sensible things like fruit, meat, eggs or vegetables, but Cheesecake.  What's worse, in a world full of starving people, where a meal for some is a bowl of flies and grasshoppers, I have the audacity to proudly proclaim that after giving it a total of THREE years of careful thought, the list now only stands at FOUR, with the lame justification is that it IS a deserted island, after all, with little chance of a 7-11 existing there. When I am in my frenzy, it is perfectly reasonable to think this way, reasoning that one must be extremely cautious in one's culinary choices since the duration of my island strand-ation is unknown. Didn't any of you see the movie Castaway? By the way, the others lucky list makers are chocolate, peanut butter (natural creamy), and pizza.

The thing of it is, I KNOW that I’m doing myself harm. I am a reasonably intelligent adult with a college degree, for crying out loud! I can play a musical instrument, understand enough of one or two languages to know if I’m being sworn at or not, and I’ve got my private pilot’s license. I AM AN OVERALL DISCIPLINED BEING!!! Yet, when it comes to passing up a package of Tasty-Cake sugar sandwich wafer cookies in a convenience store, I am Wimpy, the Spineless Cookie Junkie. God, how I can relate to Cookie Monster’s addiction! I wish that we could meet one day. Perhaps he and I can be of support to one another and succeed in crumbling this cookie insanity that holds us helplessly in her vise-like grip.    

Oh, I’ve analyzed the problem six ways to Sunday and for the life of me, I am no closer to breaking these doughy, gluten-filled chains now than when I was six. For me food is comfort and joy, a sensual romp in the hay with a lover that rarely leaves me unsatisfied. It is a friend, a foe, and a fiend; but at the very same moment, it also has the ability to induce the euphoria of Mommy Time, those moments where I can imagine my fantasy mother, the late actress Anne Bancroft,  cradling my infant body in her arms and singing a sweet lullaby to me while I, toothless and oblivious to the horrors that await me in adulthood, happily gum on a Hostess Ding Dong.

It’s sick, I know, and don’t think I haven’t tried to mend my dietary ways. As recorded by the United States Department of Fat Statistics, I have gained and lost enough weight to build several adult human beings and an extremely obese, one-armed Capuchin monkey.

The term for this nuttiness is aptly named; I am what is known as a yo-yo person. My tonnage will balloon up to the point where I start getting the stink-eye from people whose job it is to determine if I am within the weight limits for amusement park rides, MRI machines, and airplane seats. However, once I actually realize the extent of my adipose excesses, I then undertake an extreme plan to lose it, which generally consists of taking four, two-hundred dollar a month  miracle fat-burning pills per day (order now and get a second month FREE!), along with three vanilla Oreos and a glass of soy milk (the soy is for appearances only).

 I usually know when I’ve hit the top of the Fatometer, when there is an event I must go to that requires me to buy a new outfit, something I dread even more than having to spend my afterlife listening to Liza Minnelli caterwaul for all eternity.

To begin with, I have never been a woman who  might be referred to by the general public as petite, with the exception of pro wrestling legend Andre the Giant, who delighted in calling me Shorty.  Come to think of it, that was his pet name for everyone. Hmmph ... Figures. But no matter. Eons ago, through the universal crap shoot that is genetics, it was determined, and subsequently carved in granite on a Tibetan mountaintop, that the closest I will ever get to seeing a ‘2’ on my size label is if there are two “Xs” after it. The very idea of being able to shop in trendy stores with sexy firecracker names like the “Wild Side”, “Blazin’ Hot Bitches”, or “Smokin”, in this or any other galaxy is so remote that it would take the Hubble Telescope to find it within the realm of possibility. No, for me and women like me, we have the “Plus” stores. These places have names like Lane and Bryant, and the Dress Barn, the latter implying that we bigger ladies are incapable of shopping in normal stores because we are big, like cows.

“Herd em’ up Curly, get these heifers into the dressing rooms! Hey lady, no Cinnabons in the store, savvy?”

What’s worse is that the plus stores seem to have an unnatural aversion to pants with buttons and zippers. Instead, they seem to have single-handedly managed to keep the elastic waist-band business going. Listen up, bigger woman clothing industry fat cats;  I have NO ass here to hold up your elastic pants!. I NEED buttons and belt loops to avert a all-out pants down emergency!

The thing that pisses me off the most is that men can have the physique of a woman in the late third trimester of a pregnancy and not care a whit. For them, it is a badge of honor to shop at the BIG AND TALL MEN’S stores. Wait ... Did you see the difference? Their fat store sounds like lumberjacks and he-men shop there; no shame, right? Now compare that to the Dress Barn ... big difference isn’t it? I never really noticed it when I traveled with the other tribe. Men, as I understood it, were supposed  to get old, bald, and fat. But women are expected to look like goddesses 24/7, to which I say, SCREW THAT!

Let’s just get this straight buddy boy.... I am old, and I have earned the right to relax a bit in my goldens. If I gain a few pounds, BACK OFF, okay?  Sure I’ll try and lose it, even work out a bit. But if I ever hear the words, Pilates, Zumba, Yoga  or Dance Party again .... if you so much as make a peep about those pounds, I will pummel you so badly that you will be swigging beer through your wired jaw via a flexi-straw!

So Nick, I hope we enjoy our long-postponed visit as you wend your way across Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania toward New Jersey. But when you see me, the first words out of your mouth had better be ... “You looked damned good for an old broad!”

That’s it. I’m done bitching. Everybody hug, everybody eat. Abbondanza!