The Parthenogenic Man

When you're little the tiniest transgressive act can seem wholly disruptive, revolutionary, perverse, alien or magical. Me to my best friend when I was 5: "Why are you making Chewbacca fly, Chewie can't fly. I think we should play with colorforms instead" Stuff like that. Chewbacca isn't real, but to me the act of lifting his action figure off the ground to fly at my Buck Rogers action figure (which was an entirely different scale, btw) was so patently offensive to the social contract implicit in pulling Star Wars action figures out of my toy box that it involved a complete shut down of the current imaginary scenario playing out on my green shag carpet. No we can't continue like this, this is a lie. Never mind Chewbacca And Buck Rogers had no businesss carousing together on any carpet, green shag or otherwise, I mean Chewbacca is from a long time ago in a galaxy far away and Buck Rogers is from earth 500 years from now. Never mind that Chewbacca who

Dieting is sort of like planning a trip to Boston from New Jersey and only making left turns, eventually you just end up home. No, any road trip worth it's salt requires a map, and a series of turns, on-ramps, exits, roundabouts Retourno's and jug handles. It also requires a fair amount of fuel, good music, Coffee and a sense of adventure and a willingness to embrace your mistakes and let them direct you to awesome new places. That is where my head is. I'm taking a trip. Problem is I'm not headed to Boston, My destination is some-place nobody has ever been. My destination is a me who is finally happy and comfortable in this watery sack we call a body. It's the new World, the Indies, I hope to find spices and emerald cities full of gold there, but frankly I’ll be fine if it's just amazing beaches and corn. Hopefully I’ll be more respectful of indigenous cultures than other people who have previously taken this journey. To my way of thinking directions

Not fat people think they know what it feels like to be fat. I have to believe they are wrong. I'm sure they can empathize, and I'm sure they have the same feelings about other aspects of their lives. Being fat, though, is a wholly unique phenomenon that only fat people can understand. Fatness is so many things, it's physical, it's emotional, it's social, it's accidental it's intentional, it's avoidable and pre-destined. The old joke "I may be fat but you're ugly. I can diet" encapsulates much of the helter skelter storm of feeling and facts of being fat. See ugly people, they can't help it. Fat people, we can...or maybe we can't, or maybe it's both. See, it's this idea that I can fix my fatness that bothers me, because i can, and I cannot. That being fat is either a choice or a tragedy when in fact it's both. Doctor Jekyll had to drink the potion to become Hyde. I spend a lot of time in my brain and my brain knows e

"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