subject: High School Reunions: Land Walrus Central [print this page] If I commissioned an obesity study, it would be done at high school reunions. A British friend of mine told me about a game foreigners play at airports. They count the number of fat ass land walrus Americans that waddle off planes. When they hold the playoffs for this sport, they should find a flight headed to high school reunion.
High school reunions are an excellent referendum on the American deathstyle. A microcosm of a nation that is eating and ass-sitting itself to death. I not shoving an excess of calories into your pie hole really that hard people?
I just got back from my 20th reunion. I couldn't tell you how many had kids, or who was still hot (well, yes I could), or what their jobs I could care less about were. I should have more chipper gossip to report, but honestly, my singular observation was a question I wanted to shout from the rafters:
How in the hell did you people become so abysmally fat? In the words of Ice Cube, there was no one here so skinny they could hula hoop through a cheerio. Or even hula hoop through a hula hoop, without a back surgeon standing by. If my high school classmates did jumping jacks together, they would disturb the Richter scale.
Go sailing with these fat asses, no flotation safety devices are even necessary because fat floats. Scuba with the whales, and you'd need an entire Olympic weight set.
I should have brought a statistician, had him document the occurrences of heart disease, cardiac arrest, diabetes, chart the number of intertwined varicose veins so myriad they might have been a bowl of spaghetti.
Why not samurai? Have one slice off every hanging chin, and the gut of every male in his 4th trimester. We could weigh what he trimmed, see if could off a full ton.
And the horrific arms on the women. Stephen King couldn't do them justice. They might have been stuffed with cottage cheese. When the arms moved the result was a grotesque kind of time lapse movie. When a woman moved her arm, the fat on it took a fraction of a second to catch up.
200 people were at my class reunion. I wondered what the over under was, on the number of people that could run a mile without dropping dead. Pity the paramedics that had to lift them onto the gurney.
To me, the most amazing thing about America today is that people aren't even embarrassed about being fat anymore. I remember that distant ancient time when fat people at least tried to be discrete and cover themselves up a bit. Not today in the land of the land walrus. Today the fat let it all hang out, wearing spandex and tank tops and miniskirts, inviting everyone to butter the muffin top as it were. Where in the freaking hell did people's sense of dignity run off to?
Grosse Pointe Blank is one of my favorite movies. In it, Joan Cusack says that she went to a high school reunion and it was as if everyone had swelled. If my classmates had only swelled I'd count myself lucky. At my reunion, it seemed like everyone had shoved a helium hose up their asses. Seeing how my classmates looked in the future truly made me question if the country I used to love has a future.
