So i may have already mentioned that i’m uncomfortably, unhappily fat. I’m not even the good kind of fat, either, where you look at someone and think “Hey - there’s a fat person. Hey, look over there - a tree.” i’m the kind of fat where you look at me and think “Hey - there’s a skinny guy with a monstrous gut and manboobs.” A friend at work calls it “Skinny Fatguy Syndrome.” It’s the worse kind of fat, where you’re not even genetically predisposed to being fat. You’re inappropriately, inexcusably fat. You’re not supposed to be fat.

i have very few vices. i don’t smoke, i don’t drink, and i don’t do drugs, but sweet mercy can i eat. Devouring 65 Timbits in an hour was the touchstone of my gluttonous glory, a high point in a career of eating poorly. It was done on a bet, and i won. Then, later on, i made another bet with someone over 65 Timbits. That person didn’t really want to take my bet, but i harassed her into agreeing, so that i could happily munch away on another 65. That, dear readers, was the low point of my eating career. (To my international readers: a Timbit is a small ball of fried dough from a Canadian coffee chain called Tim Hortons, originally marketed as the hole that was taken out of the doughnut.)

i’ve tried to lose weight many times. Occasionally, i’ve succeeded, but never with the results i wanted. i worked out solid for 8 months one year and lost about 20 pounds, but i was still a skinny fatguy, so i gave up and started eating more bacon. i’ve signed up with numerous gyms, i’ve pumped iron with my brother-in-law, who is an Arnold Schwarzenhammer fan in spirit if not in body … and for the past few years, i’ve ridden my bike to work. My bike! To work! You’d think that THAT would do a body good.

The truth is, it doesn’t, and i now know why. Last Friday, i started walking to work. It’s a damn long walk, folks. It’s one hour. A whole hour. In the time it takes me to walk to work, i could watch ONE whole Eddie Murphy movie, or watch the antics of the Facts of Life gang for FOUR WHOLE EPISODES. And it’s hard! Riding my bike is a cakewalk. The bike does the work for me. When i walk, my body is doing all the work - something it’s not accustomed to. When i walk, i actually break a sweat. A SWEAT. From WALKING. i don’t understand it.

Anyway, i think it’s working. i haven’t lost any weight yet, but that’s typical - typical of me both to not lose any weight, and to expect miraculous changes after 3 days of exercise. But the encouraging thing is that i have a strong feeling that this time, it will work. This time, i will drop the weight i packed on so many years ago by way of 130 Timbits, and i’ll look good and feel good and i’ll stay home all day in front of the mirror caressing my sexy body.

But first, a warning to all you skinny fatfolk who think “Well, that guy’s walking to work … and i know how to walk … maybe i could do what he’s doing?” The fact is, you can’t. And shouldn’t. For if you are fat, walking to work is very, very dangerous, and the peril will make itself instantly apparent the moment you step out your front door. Fellow fat people, i’m talking about chub rub.

Chub rub is the instense friction that results from a fat person’s inner thighs rubbing together. Oh you Hated, you have never heard of nor experienced the chub rub. Your inner thighs bow out from your groins like you are riding a very skinny invisible horse. You do not know the dire pain that results from having two mounds of sweaty flesh grinding together over the course of an hour, seering and and frothing as you painfully cramp your way down the sidewalk, eventually flinging one leg out at an angle and hoping no one notices you walking like a crab, trying to alleviate some of the wretched pain welling up between your legs. Chub rub is desperate, and all you Hated do is sit back and say “Yes, fat people! Hooray! You should walk! Look at me walk - it’s no problem! You can do it too!”

i have discussed the Hated at length, and so i won’t waste any more time on them. Suffice it to say that skinny people can do things that fat people can’t, and they do not ever take that into consideration when cheerleading or designing exercises or drawing fitness diagrams on those little charts at the gym. There is never a modifier on those charts that says “alternately, if you can’t wrap your leg around your neck …” But this entry is not about the Hated - it’s about the dangers of chub rub, and what one can do about them.

Keep in mind that i’ve been at this walking thing a total of three days, and by now i consider myself an expert in the field of chub rub. i can tell you with great confidence that walking should not be attempted without the proper equipment, namely a pair of underwears that protect your inner thighs. If you are a man, these are called boxerbriefs. If you are a woman, you are screwed.

i have cold, hard evidence of a life lived under the scourge of chub rub - pairs of boxerbriefs worn specially for the occcasion of exercise which have bona fide holes burned into the inner thigh areas where my leglumps have ground away the fabric. It’s a sobering reminder of the perils faced when a fat person exercises, a lesson to us all to be very careful when taking our health into our own hands.

i have considered an entrepreneurship opportunity focussed around the phenonemon of chub rub, whereby i develop some kind of adhesive patch that clings to each inner thigh, bearing the brunt of the friction for the duration of the fat person’s walk. Perhaps - and i may be getting ahead of myself here - but perhaps i could even offer scented models which, when rubbed, would release a delightful perfume into the air to make the fat person’s walk more pleasant?

Lilac, daffodil, chrysanthemum. And bacon.

i didn’t want to do it … i resisted the urge as long as i possibly could … but now my journal is all about my stupid cats.

i’ve tried very hard to make this journal an exciting, interesting and informative read for all. Perhaps at times it could even be described as … titillating? Only if you’re weird. Honestly, i don’t actually know the exact definition of the word “titillating,” but it has the word “tit” in it, so i’ve picked it up in context. At any rate, i have striven (strove? stroven?) to ensure that this journal was not a simple log of how much laundry i did in the day, unless there was something terribly fascinating to say about my laundry - like if i sorted a pile of coloureds and found a dude in them. (Apologies to my readers of colour, but laundry is one area where unfortune derogatory language has not been updated by the political correctness push in the 90’s.)

Anyway - what was i talking about? Oh yeah. Cats. Household pets and babies have this incredible knack for abusing the best that technology has to offer. For my birthday, i received a very spanky digital camera that can take time lapse shots and macro shots and stitched panorama shots and all manner of very exciting pictures of people and things. Currently, the camera is packed with pictures of my tubby cats lounging around on the bed licking themselves. i’m positive - POSITIVE - that i can think of a better subject for a photo … but every time i sit down to seriously brainstorm a good subject, one of my cats rolls over and puts a paw over his face, and there i am clicking like a fashion photographer because he’s so darned charming.

Computers are expensive too, i hear. My computer was so expensive that my brain, in self-defense, burned scar tissue across the part of itself that remembers how much i paid for the computer so that i don’t wake up in the middle of the night screaming about it in horror. But again - a computer is an expensive piece of high technology that can accomplish so much good in the world, and here i am using it to tell you all about what my cat did last night.

We were sitting at the games table playing games, because that’s what it’s for, and my wife made that sidelong eyeballs-craning-too-far-to-the-left look to indicate that something was going on to her left that she didn’t want anyone else but me to see. It turns out that, despite having new people over who are unused to our barbarian modes of living, one of the cats had spat up on the carpet and was presently poring over the pile of chunder looking for something that might be worth re-eating. Holy CRAP. i suavely excused myself, scooped it up in a paper towel and shot a blast of carpet cleaner at the stain in one smooth motion, but MAN! Where exactly do cats get off? It’s not like we were entertaining Lord Falderall and the Duchess of Westporkingshire or anything, but WHY?? Why oh why can’t cats sense when it is, and when it is not appropriate to eat their own barf?

i mean, could a PERSON get away with this? Absolutely not! i can’t imagine a single social event where i’ve ever felt at ease enough to vomit my dinner and then pick out the good bits for double eating. It boggles the mind how rude and thoughtless cats can be. They’re nothing more than animals. And all our technology - our computers, our clocks, our cameras, our missile defense systems and our Space Sand - somehow revolves around them.

People of Earth: fear me!

Quake - QUAKE in your Earth-booties. For i have returned … from SPACE … bearing a small packet of SPACE SAND.

Of course, i haven’t REALLY gone to space, because it is cold and i haven’t a helmet. But i HAVE been to a furniture store on Queen Street West in Toronto, which at times can be adequately alien, and i’ve finally broken down and paid my $2.99 (plus applicable taxes) for a bona fide packet of Space Sand. Space Sand does not come from space, but rather from a lab, where they have done lab things to it so that you can put it in the water and it don’t get wet.

She sells she sells she sells socks
Nine cents a pair and a dollar a box
The longer you wear them, the shorter they get
Put ‘em in the water and they don’t get wet!

Friends, the spooky prophecy of this popular camp song about socks has proven true. Except with sand. Pull Space Sand out of the water, and it’s as dry as a bone. Aaaaand … that’s about it. That’s what $2.99 (plus applicable taxes) gets you these days. And since i’m an idiot, i dare say it’s worth it.

My master plan is to somehow display the Space Sand on my coffee table as a sort of curio item, like a coffee table book with really interesting artwork in it, or a human head. The trouble, of course, is that i have two cats, and they enjoy drinking water every couple of weeks. Or at least that’s how often i refill their filtered cat fountain. (Filtered cat fountain. No joke. A hundred and something dollars, plus applicable taxes. Supposed to be filled with water … usually filled with speckles of kitty litter and bloated bits of [once] dry cat food.)

So because they occassionally enjoy drinking, and because Space Sand is ideally displayed in an open vessel filled with water and spoon, i intuited that there may, in the near future, be a conflict. i don’t know what would happen if kitties were to drink the water from the Space Sand jar. Would they figure out that drinking Space Sand was bad and then stop? Would they accidentally ingest some Space Sand and then poop it out? (i bet it comes out dry) So many questions, most of them scientific.

The only real way to ensure the safety of the Space Sand (and, as a secondary consideration, of the cats), is to train them - to employ positive reinforcement for their good behaviour. So i’ve decided that whenever i catch the cats NOT drinking Space Sand, i will reward them with food or a treat or somesuch. It will require extreme vigilance on my part, because i suspect (or rather, hope) that most of the time, they will not be drinking Space Sand, so i had better have a nearly endless littany of treats and goodies lined up with which to reward them. i suppose that before the End of All Things my kitties will be absolutely enormous. i guess that’s alright. If they’re too fat to move, they won’t exactly be able to haul their fat cat asses up onto the coffee table to sample the Space Sand, will they?

Me: 1 Cats: 0 (plus applicable taxes)