"I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones."
--- Walt Whitman(1819-1892), U.S. poet
The episode I’m about to
recall isn’t my finest hour, but my friends will appreciate this memoir
because, as we all know, the true measure of a friend is how hard he
laughs when you accidentally take one in the groin. I still
remember the time my friend Alan decided that shoving a pie in my face
would be worth a chuckle or two... and, furthermore, that using a Mrs.
Smith's pie, fresh out of the freezer, would be a veritable laugh riot.
Looking back, I'd probably laugh about it myself, if I still had the use
of those particular facial nerves.
Anyway, my problem started when I noticed that my wedding ring was a tad
too tight. Actually, what I first noticed was the vivid contrast of the
gold band against the bright blue background of my finger. I decided it
would be in my best interest to get it off my finger before the finger
itself decided to call it quits, but removing the ring was no simple
matter. I won't bore you with the details; suffice it to say that the
process involved plenty of lubrication and a team of Clydesdales.
Sue was not real happy that I had suddenly decided to shed my wedding
band, even if the reason was less a matter of mid-life crisis and more
one of mid-finger obesity. Wives are funny that way… the symbol of our
33-year union inexplicably holds some sentimental value that is
seriously diminished when I drop it in my desktop paper-clip container.
So, to keep my wife's lower lip from jutting dangerously forward, it was
necessary for me to investigate ways of slimming down my fingers.
I launched into some exhaustive research, which is to say, I watched a
lot of info-mercials and combed the "special interest" section of my
local video shop, but to no avail. The info-mercials showcased all
kinds of contraptions designed to slim down and/or tighten up almost
every imaginable area of the human body (including some I had forgotten
existed)... except the fingers. At the video store, there were all
sorts of work-out tapes hosted by all sorts of celebrities (I thought
the Benji leg-lift video a bit much). My hopes soared when I spotted the
New York Cabbie Finger Work-Out, until I saw that it concentrated solely
on the wrong finger. I went home crestfallen, informing Sue that it
looked like there was no hope for buffing up my ring-finger.
But Sue had, in the meantime, come up with her own solution, bless her
heart. Her explanation for my expanding finger was both classic and
merciful. I wasn't getting fat; I was...
(drum roll)... Retaining
Water!
As
you probably know, the Water Retention Gambit is a strategy that all we
"I'm-fat-but-I-won't-exercise-or-watch-my-diet" zealots rely on from
time to time when we're intimidated into offering excuses for our
tent-like wardrobe. But it's rare to have the excuse just handed to us
on a silver platter (forgive the image). So naturally, I bought into
Sue's theory enthusiastically. Yeah, that was it, I told her.
My fingers aren't fat. They're just... moist.
I
should have known that wouldn't let me off the hook. We couldn't
just agree that I was soggy and get on with our lives. We had to
do something about it, so that once more I could slip my wedding band
over my finger without worrying about water squirting out of my
fingernail.
This is where it gets a little surreal.
Sue informed me that the best way to treat my water-infested body was
to--- get this--- drink more water. I know, I know... I don't get it
either. It reminds me of those tabloid diets: "Lose Ten Pounds A Day
Eating Nothing But Twinkies!" But I had to give her the benefit of the
doubt. She is, after all, a former nurse, and would probably still be
one if she hadn't discovered that I needed a full-time guardian. And
maybe there is some sort of crazy logic to the idea; after all, in order
to ward off the flu, you take a vaccine that consists of flu germs,
right?
No, wait, that doesn't work. When you take a flu shot, you're not trying
to flush all the flu out of your system by flooding it with more flu
germs. That would be stupid. That would be like telling a drowning
victim to drink plenty of liquids....
Well, rather than get bogged down in a lot of messy analogies, I decided
that it couldn't hurt to trust Sue's judgment. Besides, it's just
water. As long as I drank it and didn't breathe it, what could it
hurt?
My
bladder could have answered this question, but at the time I was only
consulting my brain, which usually ignores what the rest of my body
tries to tell it anyway.
Sue helpfully supplied me with a two-liter bottle of purified drinking
water (the kind where they've taken out all the things that your local
water company goes to all the effort to add) that I could take to work.
The idea was that, in the course of the day, I would consume the entire
contents of the bottle, flush my body with clear spring water, refill
the bottle from the charcoal-filtered, double-reverse-osmosis system at
the office, and start the whole process over again the next day.
Or to put it in shorter terms: drink, rinse, repeat.
The bottle Sue gave me was rather interesting. It's sort of a
cube-shaped thing, with indentations that act as a handle for easy
chug-a-lugging. The label is a fount (so to speak) of information.
Besides letting me know that its convenient 67.6 oz. size contains the
minimum recommended dosage of H20 (my mind won't even attempt to surmise
what the maximum dosage is), it also mentions that the attractive cubic
decanter is perfect for keeping on the table while entertaining guests
("Why, Doris, I adore your table cloth and your bone china is divine,
but that water bottle!... Well, you simply must tell me where you got
it. And do they have matching salt and pepper shakers?").
So
I took my bottle to work and began my daily regimen. I kept the
container on my desk so that every time I noticed it, I would take a
swig. The results were amazing.
To
put it bluntly, I had to go to the bathroom every ten minutes.
This is not an exaggeration. Every. Ten. Minutes.
One minute I would be sitting at my desk, minding my own business, the
next minute I would be overwhelmed with the need to both visit the
restroom and break the sound barrier while doing so. The last time
I had felt such bladder distention was during my childhood, when, on
summer trips, my dad would test the limits of my endurance by insisting
I could wait to use the restroom until we had to stop for gas (his
theory was that however many gallons of gas the tank held at the time of
my request for a pit stop, that was the same number of gallons I could
accumulate in my bladder before reaching critical mass).
As
discomforting and bothersome as this situation can be, it's still not a
real big deal as long as I'm within easy access to a bathroom.
But, at this time, my job sometimes required me to do outside estimates,
and nothing was worse than finding myself stuck in a Los Angeles freeway
traffic jam with that terrible ache that could easily be relieved if
everyone would just turn their heads for a minute. I've yet to
come up with a convincing story to explain the teeth marks on my
steering wheel.
Even if I could get off the freeway, finding a restroom wasn’t easy.
When I was a kid, you could stop at any gas station and run into the
bathroom. Heck, when you got back, somebody had checked your oil
and your tires, washed your windshield, and was politely waiting for you
to toss them a quarter for the gas. It's different now. If
you can even find a gas station with a public restroom, you have to a)
determine what language the attendant speaks, b) ask him for the key,
and c) hope he likes you and won't use the credit card you left as a
security deposit. It's rather ironic that in contemporary gas stations,
it's easy to obtain a 64 oz. soft drink, but almost impossible to
dispose of one.
I've found that the national chain fast-food restaurants are the best
bet for desperate water-logged individuals like me. You can quickly pull
in and park, make your way discreetly through the playground, and 6
times out of 10 find an unlocked bathroom door. The other four
times involve some discreet door-pounding and discreet whimpering, or,
if that fails, some super-discreet usage of the women's restroom.
But I'm digressing. The point is, this process wasn’t really be
doing any good, was it? When a person drinks that much water, and visits
the bathroom as frequently as I did, isn't it just the same as pouring
the water directly down the toilet? It certainly would be a lot
more efficient and a lot less painful, not to mention reducing the
zipper wear-and-tear.
The heart-breaker is, that after three draining (ha ha) weeks of this
regimen, my wedding ring still had no intention of slipping over
anything other than my pinkie. I had no choice but to resign myself to
either resizing my ring, or looking for a no-job-too-small
liposuctionist. Adding the notches to my ring seemed the way to go.
All material copyright 2009 Chuck Thornton