Monday, March 14, 2011
Column 408
The Diary of an Unhealthy Dart Throwing Slug. Week Six of Nine.
March 11, 2011
I remember one summer day when I was seven years old. It was 1960. My mother (who, the same year, told my dad he could pack her in a box and send her to Frank Sinatra) gave me four dimes and asked me to go the store and get her a pack of Salem cigarettes. The extra dime was so I could buy a Coke and read comic books.
My buddy next door and I headed into the cornfield behind our houses – the stalks were taller than we were – and made our way…
As we sat in the comics section chugging our 16-ounce Cokes (which at a dart tournament in Vegas would cost $5 or more today) lost in the adventures of Superman, my friend commented that when he grew up he’d never smell like smoke like my mother. My response was worse. I said I’d never be fat like his mother. Neither of us took offense – we were just little kids. But on the rare occasion when I think back to this day I feel guilty.
As I reflect now what strikes me most is how wrong I was on another front. Never would I have imagined that today I’d be an unhealthy dart throwing slug, slammin’ down oranges and sprouts to shed roughly a pound for each year that has passed since Dwight Eisenhower was president and a gallon of gasoline was 31 cents.
But that’s what I’ve been doing for the past almost six weeks and I’m right on course. I need to get through the ninth week of the Whole Health Pan before I can change up my diet a bit. I have stuck to the letter of the Plan all week: warm lemon juice in the morning followed by fruit for breakfast, greens for lunch and whole wheat pasta or brown rice with vegetables for dinner. But the weight is coming off again. At the current rate I will completely disappear by Christmas.
The problem is that today is Friday…
With tournaments and the temptations that surround them, weekends, once my favorite, are now the “best of times and the worse of times” for me (and I was no Charles Dickens fan before I started this diet – I read American authors, like whatever is in Playboy).
March 13, 2011
The diet’s going fine. But the day is going bad.
I’m on an airplane, sandwiched in a middle seat between someone who reminds me of my childhood friend’s mother and a young father with a baby – a crying, puking, pooping baby. Therefore, now is the appropriate time to make some inappropriate comments about babies.
Babies are the root of all evil. Every murderer, armed robber, rapist and terrorist was once a baby. Hitler was a baby. Muammar Gaddafi was a baby (a very ugly one). Everybody who ever beat me at darts (all 4,675,209 of them) was once a baby. These are unassailable facts.
Babies are bad, bad, bad.
Tell me why babies are allowed on airplanes!
Explain to me why they are allowed to fly for free – even in business and first class!
You can’t even buy a ticket for a dog to fly in business or first. Dogs have to be squeezed into little crates and fly in coach. If they are big dogs they have to ride in the cargo hold and freeze their furry arses off. About a year ago I brought a three pound puppy back from Romania. She was smaller than a baby and didn’t cry, puke or poop. She just slept under my seat. She was better behaved than any baby I’ve ever met and cuter than most too (except my daughter)!
Now I have a damn baby crawling all over me. It’s flying for free and making the flight miserable for everybody who paid and is within hearing and smelling distance.
It’s a travesty of airline justice!
But it’s not all bad news. With my ears and nose plugged I have given this deep thought and have figured out what’s wrong with babies – why they cry, puke and poop and basically act like small wild animals until they grow up and become teenagers and act like larger wild animals.
It’s their diet. They eat food contaminated with chemicals and pesticides. It turns them into monsters. They need to get on the Whole Health Plan.
Until they do they’re gonna keep pissin’ me off – just like the double one.
From the Field,
Dartoid
