Reasons I Do Not Want a Front-Butt *

*Perhaps the less sophisticated reader is not familiar with the term "front-butt." Let me explain. It is a butt on the front of your body. A gut that has gotten so out of hand, so enamored with its own girth, that it has grown in such a way as to almost perfectly mirror the butt you have on the back of your body. It's just up a little higher. There are those few special people in the world who have managed the front butt to be the same height as the back one. They have rare powers. Mostly the power to make masses of innocent people on the street puke up things they ate 25 years ago. But still. That's power.


Now, REASONS I DON'T WANT A FRONT-BUTT:

1. While sitting in the bathtub, I would like to be fully able to look downward and tell which gender I am.

2. During sex, it is more romantic not to hear a guy driving a forklift over to the steel-reinforced bed, to lift your front butt out of the way of the Hallowed Love Tunnel.

2. a. If you're unlucky enough to have a front butt, and so does your partner, sex becomes a futile display of amateur sumo, each of you splamming into the gut of the other, smooshing those lipo-lard bags together, and the sound it makes when you come apart, well, no human should ever ever hear.

3. Your choice of pants is limited. In my hometown, deep in Indiana, you see nothing but stretch-pants on women. A pair of zip-up Levi's have not darkened the door of the city limits in decades. They were made extinct by the tepid turquoise blues and dull maroons of polyester whale garments. Orca-wear. Why? Because the people in my hometown have front butts. Nearly all of them. Those who do not have front butts stay inside. To go outside would be to risk being the target of 100 cans of whipped cream pulled from 100 mouths of front butt owners, sick with envy over the tantalizing world of jeans.

4. The front-butt can travel. It can mutate innocent-bystander parts of your body. Case in point, my ex-mother-in-law. That heifer was some kind of deep jungle amazon-tribe queen of the front butt. I mean, she was fat everywhere, but that sac of primordial ooze on her gut started to develop ennui over where it was, and it packed up and took little one-way trips. Her ankles became so fat with front-butt-matter that when she wore her lovely black church-going pumps, her ankles frothed over the sides of them like foam off a cheap mug of beer. Beware the migration of the front butt.

Buttock-Oriented Reasons to Cut Out the Sugar

1. I do not want my ass to be visible from space.

2. I do not want my ass to be so big that I have to have a specially made gargantuan shoe-horn to pry myself from the bathtub.

3. I do not want people to attempt to rent my ass. For things like showing home movies. Or for using it under a balance beam to catch the stick-bone gymnasts when they jettison off the wood.

4. I do not wish to eventually find items in my many ass-folds. Remote controls, spatulas, DVD cases, cans of cat food, missing neighborhood accessory dogs (a la schnauzer-in-a-purse) outdated concert tickets, expired coupons, family scrapbooks, AWOL houseslippers.

5. The "bigger the cushion the better the pushin'" is true only up to a point. Then the "cushion" becomes a treacherous marshmallowy swamp of death.

6. I do not wish to struggle to fit a bulbous mass of ass into a standard economy airline seat. Having sat next to the massively, heinously fat air traveler more than once, and having had to endure the unpleasant dampness of what I thought was my arm rest but what turned out to be a sneaky, rubbery flap of fat attached to the lipo-factory next to me, and having felt sickened by the wafting scent of the usual cheap-ass perfume worn by virtually every woman hailing from the Kingdom of Pork, (with brand names like "Night Secrets" or "Hot Pink") I prefer not to be otherworldly fat.

The Tongue of the Undead

I'm in Arizona visiting the best boyfriend in the world. One of the reason's he's the best:

There's this mom and pop shop ice cream place here, and they serve Black Licorice ice cream. The first time I saw the tub of it in their display case, I thought I'd puke. It is the blackest black you have ever seen. It looks like someone poured napalm on the Creature from the Black Lagoon and reduced him to a boneless sandwich spread, then mixed in about 3 gallons of tar. It looked putrid. But the crazy rebel yell in my head demanded a taste. The girl behind the counter winced and oh-so-gingerly poked a miniature pink spoon into the demonic mess. She held it out to me like it was the dirty sock of a leper. I took it. I tasted.

DAMN, that shit was good! I mean it was bitch-get-outta-my-way good.

Long story short: every time I come here, the fantastic boyfriend takes me to get the nasty frozen blackness 2 or 3 times. Which may not sound like much of a sacrifice. Unless you know that the Black Licorice ice cream turns my tongue immediately, horrendously black. The black, black tongue is nicely accessorized by dark purple lips and gray teeth. My very laid back, not-easily-ruffled boyfriend is absolutely repulsed by this blackness of the tongue and discoloration of the surrounding areas. I begin wolfing down the ice cream even while he has yet to receive his change from the drive-thru girl, and in ten seconds, I've got the slithery netherworld tongue thing going. While he's just trying to mind his own business and drive us home, I stick out my tongue and he screams like I've shot him in the neck with a handful of tasers. I then go into my childish ritual of pretending to be sorry, then sticking the evil tongue out again and making him look at me, endangering both our lives.

One night I ate the bowl of tar, brushed my teeth, even brushed the hell out of my tongue, but it was still as black as a Halloween cat and he had a tough time kissing me goodnight. He said "It's not like I can associate that black tongue with someone living."

I get it. I get the undead. They're not sexy. They're not hot. They would not be seen canoodling at a corner table at Spago's with Clive Owen. More like scrubbing down an aluminum trash barrel behind In & Out Burger with Kato Kaelin.

But I must have my dip of the tres noir. I must blacken my tastebuds temporarily and hear my significant other say "I hate when the Plague comes to town."

Sometimes the Enemy Comes to My House. Sometimes I Go to Her House.

The enemy, of course is SUGAR. Yummy sugary treats.

Last night I went out late and got a pint of Breyer's chocolate ice cream. I ate it. 4 servings. Right. 4 servings for a flucking Lilliputian.

Today was a rough day. Bad gear day as my boyfriend says. I stopped at Steak 'n' Shake and got a large, creamy, exquisitely good chocolate shake. DAYUM those are good.

So yes. Sometimes I bring the bad creature here, lure it into my den of iniquity. And sometimes I just go to its cave/drive-thru and pull it out by the hair. And eat it. Don't make anything sexual out of that.

The Hodgepodge Flurry of Forces Running My Life

I won't bother mentioning how many times I've lost the battle with sugar since I last posted here. It's too humiliating. And it's even more humiliating to have to describe this push and pull as a battle with sugar. Sugar.

Sugar is not heroin, crack, alcohol, gambling, nicotine, kleptomania, etc. etc. It's me against sweet things to eat. What a complete pansy I am. Poor poor widdle Candy, she's having a rough time walking across the board of the Candyland game without falling down and shredding her face on the steely splinters of peppermint sticks.

As you may have gathered, I'm a bit repulsed by my own inability to just do what's healthy for my body and to shut the fuck up. But no. It's a drama. Save me! I'm on the edge of a cliff, about to jump to my diabetic death into yummy Milk Chocolate Bay.

One of the stupidest sugar-intake freak-out low points of the past few weeks: Nutella. Me and Nutella. Never heard of it? It's next to the peanut butter at the grocery store. Made of chocolate and hazelnuts, ground up to make this smooth, creamy, sinister, decadent, spreadable, spoonable best treat in the galaxy. I bought a jar. A jar has 10 2-tablespoon servings. I ate the jar in 2 nights. I bought another one. I ate half of it. I saw the error in my ways. I knew I couldn't just toss the jar in the wastebasket or the trash bin outside because I would toss my pride to the western wind and crawl in like a weasel and get it out and start up again. So I opened it and poured in some apple-green Dawn dishwashing liquid. Like I had to kill it. I had to slay it. Like it was one of those mythical many-headed snake monsters and you cut one head off and another grows back.


There are people in the world with serious problems. At church this evening, someone asked for prayer for a friend of hers who has just been diagnosed with lung cancer, and has been give four to six weeks to live. Yeah. Imagine it.

So there is no reason at all to whine and whimper and freak out over the fact that I need to stop eating sugary, poisony things that are going to make me sick. And there is no reason to make a big deal of it. Right?

But here's the thing. Take my comforting little habit away from me and there's nothing left between me and, uh, me. If I can't flip my head open like a Pez dispenser and ram a half pound of chocolate down into my anxious tummy, I have to stay where I am, in the life I'm living, and just deal with it. By the way, if I get any more cliche in the next 30 seconds, please, someone push the big eject button that will jettison my little house, with me in it, into the outer regions of the Milky Way. Fuck. Milky Way.

OK, never mind what I was saying. I'll sum it up. Ready?

I'm tired of struggling. Fighting the same boring, frustrating, mind numbingly repetitive repetitive repetitive battles, fears, hang-ups all the time. Give me something new and interesting to fight. Not life-threatening. But maybe a fresh fear of penguins. Or an obsession with those tiny little collectible spoons from all over the place, like Nag's Head, North Carolina and Bugtussle, West Virginia. Or make me yearn to travel the length of Route 66 on a unicycle.

Give me something.