How to Remain Healthy:
Lately, people have been trying Atkins, a diet that says, essentially:
1. Remember how your mother always said the best way to lose weight is
to eat less, excercise more and eat your veggies? Forget everything
your mother said.
2. Don't avoid eating fat, just avoid eating stuff that stops you from
burning fat. Bread is a good example of this.
3. People accumulate fat by leading a sedentary life: browsing web
pages, sitting in cars, reading books.
4. Read my book.
Another popular diet takes a whole different approach, namely:
1. Remember how your mother always said the best way to lose weight is
to eat less, excercise more and eat your veggies? Forget everything
your mother said.
2. Don't avoid eating fat, just eat less, excercise more, and eat your
veggies.
3. People accumulate fat by leading a sedentary life: browsing web
pages, sitting in cars, reading books.
4. Read my book.
The Clay Sails diet plan involves yet a third approach:
1. Get your wife/husband to nag you mercilessly about every calorie you
eat.
2. Excercise more. Especially common sense when selecting books to
read.
3. Never ever ever believe the hype surrounding a fad diet. (Historical
perspective, for the record: all fad diets appear to have "real
scientifically proven" results. This is not a new phenomenon.)
4. Eat your veggies.
5. (This is the most important one) buy my 7781 page "How-to lose
weight by using this Book". If you carry it with you and consult it
before every meal, you are virtually guaranteed to lose weight.
But I am not here to promote my new, as of yet untested, weight loss
plan. Hell, I am lunching on frosted donuts as I write.
I am here to tell you that yesterday I did my general health a favor by
going to the doctor. Now, for those of you who do not know me, I am not
going to browbeat you with statistics about how when a man gets to a
certain age he requires a regular finger up the ass to ensure that he
will be able to sustain a long and healthy life. First of all, I am not
at that "certain age" yet (but will be at around 114), and secondly, I
would prefer short, sick life to getting an annual meathook in the
colon by a stranger who isn't even decent enough to wear pasties and
call me "hon". (NOte: if your doctor is a fat, hairy man, this image
might cause you consternation...to say nothing of constipation. But best just to move on.) Fortuantely, all
my doctor needed to do was stare at my tongue and root around my ear
for missing car keys. This ordeal was enough to justify the
considerable trouble I had gone through to get to the doctor's office.
Allow me to elaborate.
It has been shitty cold, icy and slushy lately. This woeful weather is
supposedly anomalous in a climate that, locals *swear* is "mild". Yeah.
Mild like Liza Minelli after half a bottle of pills and a 5th of
scotch. "Thank god we don't live in Minnesota, they say". Chuckle
chuckle. Yeah, sure. Whatever. You don't see me trying to get a spread
in St. Paul now, do you?
(bastards)
At least in Minnesota when a body of water un-freezes it becomes a
lake. Here in Maryland when a lake melts, it becomes...a parking
lot...a highway...and, (if you're like me), the front seat of your
leaky car.
Speaking of which -- the car is partly responsible for my health-minded
adventure yesterday afternoon. Remember how I've been bitching lately
about how expensive that little beast has become? $1000 here, $600
there. Something like $2500 in the past 8 months. Remember? What, you
can't keep my rants straight? YOu only remember me bitching about the
thousands I've spent recently on dental bills ($5500 in the past 2
months, no joke, including another $1500 yesterday *after* I went to
the doctor...and not including the wisdom teeth he said I now need
removed...which my wife assures me is ok because the less teeth I have
the less cavities I will have to get filled in the future). But back to
my car. My precious little 1995 Ford Escort. Turqoise. Grandma's last
set of wheels, (may she RIP). A thing that has gotten a new alternator,
a new radiator, a new set of tires, new brakes, new rotors and a bunch
of other new stuff in the past year.
Well, two weeks ago the blower motor (i.e. the heater) broke. It just
went kaput. *Pfft*. Nothing. Now it gives off no heat except for the
occasional disdainful gasp of warmth that works its way naturally
through the ventillation system when I'm going high speeds. Just a fuse
perhaps, you ask? No. I wish. I replaced the proper fuse to no avail.
Probably that means its the heater core itself -- the second most
expensive repair after the transmission. Needless to say, I ignored it.
Who needs a heater? I need a heater about as much as I need a kick in
my fancy new teeth. Besides, when its 11 degrees outside, I can pat
myself on the back that I wasn't foolish enough to acquire my frostbite
in a place with a *really* cold climate (like Minnesota).
So the heater broke and I've been cold. Big deal. Absent a heater, I am
cold in my car. So what. So what? Haven't you been watching the news?
There's been an ice storm the past two days. For those of you
unfamiliar with the concept (I'm talking mainly to the Californians
here), an ice storm is a bit like electing a movie star for governor
except it comes with a massive quantity of hard-packed ice, has no
star-appeal whatsoever, and cannot possibly making your state the
laughingstock of even bingo addicts in Ohio. In fact, when word gets
out that someone somewhere is suffering from an ice storm, people stop
laughing altogether. Everyone from the Carolinas to Canada engages in
one bit, collective gulp, causing tornados to form in Brazil that will
eventually result in small small pacific islands being devoured by
hordes of wayward butterflies.
So...cold in ice storm. You'll grant me that. Again, so what?
Well, cold is unhealthy for one and the whole point of this discussion
is to demonstrate that I was healthy yesterday because I went to get a (3
year out of date) annual physical. But absent a heater, a car has one
other problem: it has no front defroster. Every breath I exhaled, every
wisp of steam from a life-sustaining warm beverage (whose succor can
combat the effects of having my own personal glacier on the passenger
seat floor), will materialize on the windshield in the form of opaque
mist.
Which led me to a catch-22: if I rolled up the windows to build up
(body) heat on the inside, steam would form that would obscure all
vision and might not cut the ice anyway. If I left the window down, the
inside of the car would be so cold that every single droplet of frozen
rain would remain present and frozen on the outside of the window. This
is exactly what happened. The instant I got onto the freeway, a
carapace of ice formed on my windscreen thicker than that which formed
on Hillary Clinton's thighs the instant Matt Drudge outed Monica to the
world.
Yet I still had 20 miles to go, and 40 minutes get there, otherwise I'd
miss an appointment I'd waited four months to get and take a day off of
work to go to. If I missed it, how would I ever find out if I was
healthy or not?
Reasoning thus, I did what any health conscious individual would do: I
sped down the road hell-bent for leather, leaning out the window,
scraping ice on the outside as I drove, blasting music to create
vibrations strong enough to loosen the smaller bits of ice. I guzzled
tepid coffee to sustain my inner strength, and prayed that the misty
blob hovering before my eyes was not either:
a) the onset of frostbite on my iris or
b) a snow plow behind a screen of mist, glass, and ice
I paused at every stoplight to scrape (effecting an odd sort of
"chinese fire drill" in which I exchanged places with myself).
Eventually I made it to the doctor's and found out that despite my
stressful travail, lo! I am perfectly healthy.
I even think I lost some weight in the process.
