The Parthenogenic Man

"It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more." -Albus Dumbledore via J.K. Rowling Chapter 1: The return of the thing. It was cold and i was surrounded by monsters. Latex faces and landscapes of makeup floated around me, the smell of autumn in new england danced with the smell of beer and cigarettes twirling and reeling about, occasionally the smell of portable fry-o-lators cut in. Calliopes, club music, shrieks and bursts of nervous laughter, drunken bravado and cheesy canned horror movie cackles drowned out the sound of my friends. I was in Salem Massachuesettes at Halloween and a clown had just tried to eat me. I hate clowns. I don't like fake faces, they creep me out, and the more of the real face they let through, the worse it is. This is a known quantity amongst my friends, a great amusement to them, and i really had to get my courage up to walk through the haunted wax museum we'd bought tickets to. Okay, courage is not...

In the early 80's there was a cartoon on Saturday mornings by the good people at filmation called "Hero High". When I was 6 it was the most amazing thing ever. Several years ago, via the magic of netflix, I relived my Saturday mornings of yesteryear trying to re-establish in my mind the wonder and bright shine of a 6 year old with a super hero jones sitting on an oval braided rug, enjoying a mixing bowl filled with fruit loops and milk, in front of a tv my whole body could have fit in. I wanted to hear the train rush by my apartment window. I wanted to smell the paint fumes from the auto-body shop my step father owned below. I wanted to bask in the wonder of super humans fighting crime and going to study hall. I wanted to remember what it was like before I knew the things I know. For 22 minutes I wanted to travel in time, I even had the bowl of fruit loops. Didn't quite work out that way. See, Hero High...well...it sucks. It's just awful. There is nothing to...

You guys can all save yourself some time and just read "The Four Hour Body" if you want for lots of details and specific information that goes beyond what i have to say. Also from time to time I diverge from the esteemed writer of said volume, so I'm going to focus on what I do, which may not work for everyone. The diet is called the "Slow Carb" diet, therefore it isn't a no carb diet. It functions similar to one, however, in many ways. One of those ways is it relies quite heavily on protein to reach it's goals and to manipulate your metabolism into burning the fat in your body more quickly, and not storing so much for later. Yes, I said manipulate. This diet is something of a body hack. Observation and experimentation yield consistent results when something is true and works. The authors idea was to compile the experiments he'd done on himself (yup...scary cyberpunk stuff, no) and on hundreds of others into one "diet". Basically the id...

Shopping for clothing as an averaged height fat guy has got to be one of the rings of hell Dante forgot to write about. I'm sure everyone feels this way to an extent because clothing manufacturers make clothing in cookie cutter sizes based off of some ridiculous "ideal figure" that almost no one has. A friend of mine who is a tall woman, and slender but not emaciated, complains of this frequently. Women must have to develop some long dormant psychic ability to intuit the size of clothes because they certainly aren't helped at all by the way clothes are "sized". Miss, junior,junior miss??, plus, queen, ladies, "womens", and thats just at places like JC Penny and Target. I'm sure American Apparel and Urban Outfitters have even more obscure sizing like "Chloe Sevigny" and "I can't be bothered" and "Being Treated for diseases you haven't even heard of yet" and "On Vinyl" and "A Brooklyn 5...

So...I'm sort of hesitant to do this. Not just because I'm not a nutritionist or a physician, but because I feel like my journey isn't about what I eat. But I'd be lying if I said my diet wasn't a tool in the toolbox. And...the question I get the most often is "what are you doing to lose this weight?" Its funny why I get this question too, often times its general interest, it's people looking for guidance or ideas. Frequently it's people trying to ferret out what I'm doing wrong, or what I could be doing better. Most of the time when a person asks you a question about your diet...it immediately becomes about them, about their insecurities and their frustrations. Frankly that's entirely the reason why I am going to discuss the diet. Part of the reason I'm being as visible as I am is to help people who need to know that they aren't alone in the way they feel. I want as many people as I can reach to know that I know what their inse...

So, This is more or less a "sauce" or a condiment as Mario Batali would call it. You might call it a ragout, though I wouldn't because any time you use fancy food words people get all up in your grill and say you're not legit and I aint tryin' to hear that noise. So you and I will call it Arnold. Arnold is served over cannelini beans (my favorite) and sautéed spinach because they are nutritious and delicious and fairly well mimic the carby goodness of pasta. If you aren't a dieting zealot like me, go ahead and serve it over pasta, orichetti would be my drug of choice. Stuff: I used Roma because they were the ones that looked the prettiest at "grocery" store I was at. Shortly jersey is going to be bumping out some hella good tomatoes, I would use those first and firstmostly. What to do: I don't know why there is an "R" in my "Fond" but it's early, leave me alone. and watch this if you want to know whats actua...

First: a Disclaimer. This is not a fat positive blog. I am not a fat positive person, because for me, being fat mostly sucks. I am not a fat person because i desperately love eclairs or because i have some genetic predisposition to it or a thyroid condition. I'm not fat because i live in a so-called "food desert" (sorry, Em) and don't have good options, or because i am poor and suffer the ironic malnutrition of excessive weight. I am fat, because...and I ONLY mean this for me, because i am a profoundly and deeply damaged man. This is not true of a good many fat people who live positive lives and are healthy and loved and valuable as people, but it is true of me, and unfortunately it's something i have to talk about now. When i was very young I saw the vicious thread of addiction that connected so many of the people in my family and I saw it for the bright red filament of destruction that it was. I also saw a fair bit of powerlessness in front of it, and i de...

Okay so the gravy is gray, not pretty but pretty delicious. And the "glaze" isn't really so much a classical glaze so foodies be damned Gordon Ramsay can shove it. So i use pre-sliced "assorted gourmet" mushrooms which is mostly just crimini's with a few shitakes and chanterelles thrown in. an interesting tweak would be to use mushroom stock instead of chicken stock here btw. I toss a little stock in the pan just to keep it all juicy and hydrated during it's bikrham phase. So by the was H&S means herbs and spices, S&P means salt & pepper. Probably unnescessary to explain but... also i add a bit of the pan juices to the mustard before i brush it on the breasts. and i only broil for a minute or 2 at most just to make the glaze brown and kind of crispy...kind of ...i can imagine it being crispy, though it isn't really. still yummy though. so the mushrooms definitely make the blended mixture into an unpleasant color, but oh so yu...

"I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking." -Albert Einstein Chad Fowler is apparently a genius computer programmer. He was also fat, something he's changed in recent years. A change he decided needed to be made whilst shopping in the Harajuku district of Japan with friends. When he thought to himself "It doesn't matter how nice the clothes i buy, i'm not going to look good in them because i'm fat." He may have even said it aloud, i'm not sure, this is all anecdotal. He calls this his Harajuku moment. The moment at which he saw the problem and vowed to turn it around. I think Alchoholics call it hitting bottom. It's always darkest before the dawn. No matter what you call it, it sucks. It's the moment where your self loathing has developed free will and more or less taken you over, and you've just realized it. That awkward moment when you realize your body is not your own, and it is driven by a...

"Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart." ~Kahlil Gibran I'm sitting across from, quite literally, one of the most beautiful women I have ever met. She is turned toward me, her legs crossed on a fake wicker divan, a glass of chardonay grasped by her delicate fingers. The moon, almost full, floats behind her in a swirling aurora of carnival colors cast by the lights of strip mall signs and cars parking and un-parking. The breeze is gently moving her hair at the fronteirs of her face. I'm looking at her from across the top of my pinot noir, and i am quite convinced that at that moment, and not for the reasons you may think, there is no man alive more lucky than me. There is a man talking on his phone, he thinks i don't see him. He's staring at us while he talks. She's talking at the moment, i turn to glance at him, he looks away quickly. I know precisely what he's thinking. I know because the signs are unmistakeable. He has n...

CFL is just my way of not having to type out the whole word "cauliflower" because it's an onerous word. I do not mean Compact Fluorescent Light. I've Omitted any number of things you could add to this, like butter, or...bacon...mmmm bacon. So seriously, next time you're grilling just drop some CFL in some tin foil (maybe with a little bacon?) and put it on the grill for just ridiculous amounts of time. When it's soft it's done. This is my absolute favorite food mindfreak. While you know you're not eating mashed potato it is a really really good place holder. mangia!

This should be fairly obvious what i'm doing here...but, uh, by way of explanation it's um...recipes i've made up for my new diet. Let me know if you try them out. I forgot to mention Fennel seed. I put crushed fennel seed in the initial batch with the onions that I sauteed . And also my 3x5 cards don't have spell checks, so i don't want to hear about it. those are the directions, I guess that is obvious. I'll be doing this a couple of times each week. Hope you like!

"And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized." Acts 9:18 I have to tell you all two things. First some of you may know this already but to a great many who knew me when i was younger, particularly ladies of whom i am greatly fond, i was known as Pooh Bear. Yup brown, fuzzy, pantless, huggable loveable old bear. A monnicker i adored and kind of was uncomfortable with at the same time. The other thing i have to tell you is that I am a mutant. Like..an x-man. My mutant power has always been the ability to never really see whats happening. You say TORNADO! I say, Gentle Breeze. Then i wonder why my house is suddenly two towns over. It doesn't really make me useful in a battle against magneto or racist senators, but i think somehow it's protected my psyche for 30 plus years. Truth is truth though. I want to see the truth. I can handle the truth. The strange thing about being on this cru...

Time is weird. Life just kind of marches on at strange intervals, bits of you that you'd like to keep get left in the dust, but the parts you don't want seem to latch onto you like train cars, trailing behind you, moving in your same direction, each successive car making you less and less responsive to changes in direction and requiring more and more fire and steam to move forward. What is time's ultimate destination? When are you experiencing and not just going toward or away from experience? How can you tell? When you filter your life through the vagueries of time it becomes a surrealist nightmare, An Andalusian Dog waiting to slice your eyeball with a straight razor. Despite all our attempts to master time we cannot. The best we can hope for is a constant revisitation of divide and not conquer, first we name seasons, then we name months, then weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds. Some days we make special because of lunar occurences or deaths of important people. Nev...

I was terribly excited when i was chosen to play Santa in my third grade christmas paegent. To my way of thinking Santa is the star of any third grade christmas paegent and even though i wasn't the one solving the mystery in our little play (because for some reason it required a mystery)how could i not be central? It was Santa, it was Christmas, clearly this role required someone with my gravitas, my je ne c'est quoi, my star power. I was glad the world had finally taken notice. Delivering this news to my family was something i really couldn't wait to do. My family: my mother and I. That was it. A dead father, a divorced step father had left it just the two of us, binary stars trapped in each others gravity. Occasionally, my mothers gravity being what it was, others were drawn into our orbits. When i was finally discovered, that orbit held a man who my mother was with for quite some time, he wasn't awful, but he wasn't great either. He was the first of two men w...