I decided to
attend my high school reunion. This year
will be…nope, not going to tell you how many years it would be. It’s upsetting enough to realize how far from
those days I find myself without dragging all of you into my sudden, newfound
depression.
The first
thing one does when getting ready for a “do” like this is to diet, since we
all have, by this time, put on a few unwanted pounds.
Perhaps more
than a few.
Perhaps a
bargeload.
I had 30
pounds to lose and three weeks in which to lose them.
Ten pounds a week.
I could do
that.
So the first
thing I had to do was get online and find the fastest diet in the world.
After hours
of searching, anxiety was mounting. It
was down to juice fasting, the Twigs and Gravel Diet, a ball gag with a locking
mechanism, or Super Heavy Duty Steel Reinforced Spanx.
I tried juice
fasting. I like juice.
I could do
that.
After three
days of it, oh no, I couldn’t.
Stij caught
me trying to juice a doughnut.
“I want you
to stop this insanity right now!” he cried. “Look at you. You’re a shadow of your former self.”
“That’s the
idea, dear.”
“Not like
this! This is nuts! You’ve swallowed so much vegetable juice that
all you do is fart! I have to sleep in
the guest room because I can’t penetrate the miasma in our bedroom. You can see
the air in there!”
End of the juice
fasting.
Up next: Twigs and Gravel.
This is the
no carb, no fat diet. It consists of fish and tree bark, but after the juice
fasting, I’d take anything I could chew.
I dashed to the store and bought every kind of
fish I could find. After I returned home and loaded up the fridge, Stij
sauntered in.
“What smells?”
“It’s the
fish I bought.”
“Fish is
supposed to smell like a fresh cucumber, it isn’t supposed to stink up the
place.”
“I wondered
why it was all on sale.”
“Oh, God.” He opened the fridge and made the grave
mistake of inhaling. “How many pounds of fish are in here?”
“About 40, I
think.”
“And you were
planning on cooking all of this?”
“Weeeeeeelllll…”
“Out it
goes! I don’t even want to know what you
spent on it. And please, Carson, keep in
mind that we live in Arizona, not coastal Connecticut. Freshwater fish must be shipped in, and I see
that was the majority of what you bought. Fish here is never fresh unless you
go to Lake Pleasant and catch it yourself.”
And with that, the garbage bin was wheeled around and loaded with the
expired (in more ways than one) fish.
The next day,
there were signs up all over the neighborhood with pictures of missing cats on
them.
After taking
out the garbage that evening, Stij returned looking pale.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just found
12 of the missing cats curled up inside our rubbish bin. They each weigh about 25 pounds and can no
longer move. I hope you’re happy.”
“Do they all
have collars?”
“Yep. But I took them off--they were suffocating. Those cats have necks like linebackers now. Their feet are distant memories. I've never seen anything like it!”
“OK, then let’s
match them up to the posters and return them to their owners.”
We got out the
hand truck, piled on the cats, and wheeled them back to their homes. The owners were less than thrilled with their
condition—especially the lady who owned the prize-winning Himalayan, which took
one look at her, groaned, and threw up on her shoes. What didn’t hit her footwear ate right through
the concrete.
We departed
with a quickness.
“Wow, did you
see how fat those cats got on fish? That is obviously not the way to go with
dieting,” I said.
Stij, to his
everlasting credit, didn’t punch me, but his left eye started to twitch. “If you just ate twice your weight in spoiled
fish, you’d be fat, too. And sick. Stop with the dieting already!”
“I can’t. I look like I should be docked next to the
Carnival Cruise Line.”
“I don’t
understand what you’re getting so worked up about. Everybody else probably looks just as bad as
you do.”
“Oh, what a lovely
thing to say, you charm school dropout.”
“I didn’t
mean it like that. You look fine to me
and you always will. I love you. And, according to you, most of the people you
went to high school with didn’t even like you.”
“I was a pain
in the ass in high school.”
“So why are
you going, then?”
“To have some
decent fish?”
“Well, there’s
that, I suppose.”
We finally
arrived at a compromise. I stayed home
and with the money that would have been used for my plane ticket, we overnighted
in 20 pounds of fresh fish from Pike’s Place Market in Seattle. Stij cooked them.
Oh, and I did
lose the weight. The ball gag worked
like a charm!
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