Sixteen Volts

Perhaps the most disgusting morbidly obese woman that I have ever seen in real life was the one we encountered in the parking lot of our local supermarket. She was about twenty years old and weighed approximately 400 pounds. She was sitting in the driver's seat of her car that was appropriately tilting to the left under her humongous bulk. This woman was emptying the litter and trash that had accumulated inside her car, and did this directly onto the ground. Seeing us walking by, she actually looked at me and smiled like she wanted sympathy. Well, she's not going to get it from us, that's for sure. We just walked past without even changing our expressions as she took this expression of resignation and continued to toss her chocolate wrappers and other kinds of litter that you would expect on the ground.

In the era before blogs and even the World Wide Web, there was the text-based Usenet. When I first became familiar with Usenet, my favourite newsgroup soon became to be alt.tasteless, the Internet's then-premier place for cheery social darwinism and all-around political incorrectness. One of the important linguistic contributions of this group was using the term "apeshit" for mass murder, which started from the posting "Dilbert goes apeshit". I am sure that other achievements of this group were legion, and its spirit lives on in many other places on the Web. The most enjoyable reads in this group were always real-life anecdotes of nurses, policemen and other people who get to see certain aspects of life that the average person rarely encounters.

When I was browsing through my SiteMeter statistics page yesterday, I noticed that a google search about obesity had brought some reader to my blog. I clicked on that same search and all righty, my blog was the second search result. On top of the list was a LiveJournal community "Fat is Not OK", which turned out to be quite funny. In a sense, this community kind of reminds me of the group alt.tasteless. Some examples that caught my eye:

I'd like to thank you all for your comments on how to deal with my fatass sister-in-law Laura. I wish they worked, but I know you all had good intentions for both of us. Sadly, I will not be speaking to my 430+ pound sister-in-law anymore. Do not get me wrong. I have nothing against fat people. I think that if a fat person has a good personality, then she will get nothing but respect,love and friendship from me. But my sister-in-law is nothing like that. Her morbid obesity is costing us. Her health problems cost a large sum of money. She isn't your average jolly fat person. She is a mountain of mass. She refuses to do anything to change. But she also uses her fatness as a crutch and a pity excuse. And I would love it if we could be a family once again, but she is beyond help and I do not wish for my kids to have her as a role model. It is not just because she is morbidly obese, but she also has a horrible personality and she is greedy,rude, inconsiderate, and extremely gluttonous. (When we used to eat out at restaurants as a family, she'd grab half the food off everyone's plates without asking.) I also can not simply handle the fact that she depends on us for everything instead of doing it herself. I don't think anyone could possibly understand what I have went through with this girl. She demands everything be done for her and everything must be done perfect. And since I felt as though she was my new family, I put up with a lot of abuse from her. It's also pretty sad when you think of how she let herself get that big. Everytime I sat in the backseat of the car with her, She practically engulfed me! Seriously! She also is extremely narcasstic. She'll say things like "I am soooooo much more prettier than her!". I do believe that many morbidly obese people have low to zero self esteem. While it's good that Laura is not self deprecating like the majority, It is not good that she feels so confident that she feels the need to put others down. She believes herself to be physically beautiful. Moreso than the rest of the female population. In my opinion, She is not. She has enough pimples on her face to feed the starving villages in Africa and she has enough grease in her hair to cook an omelet. I recall too how she said "I made the most beautiful bride in the world on my wedding day!"

When I have kids I am going to tell them that if they eat too much and get fat then Giggles the child eating clown will get them. And then periodically i'll leave animal bones around the yard just to put the fear of god in them. I'm so thankfull my parents did this for me.

I work at a retail store. We have a total of three (3) electric carts for handicapped and disabled folk to use. And quite often, they get taken by 500 lb tubs of ass who are simply too lazy to walk around the store. I've brought this up in places before and have been shot down because "OMG TOTAL_STATIC U R DA INSINSITAVE HOW DU U NO THEY DONT HAV A MEDICUL CONDITION OMGOMGLOLOLOL!!!!!11:!1" I know this because they are walking on their own power, perfectly FINE, into the store. I know this because when there are items that are larger or high up, they get up out of the carts, waddle over to them, pick them up and carry them back. Maybe it's just me, but if someone had a serious medical condition that affected their walking, I don't think they'd be very capable of constantly getting up and down and lifting 50-60 lb items to put them in their carts. So conclusion: These people are just fat asses who do not wish to waste extra energy and burn a few calories by taking a regular cart and waddling around the store.

I work in the ER. The other night the ambulance brought in a 550lb 47 year old woman who had arrested at home. It was a chore getting her out of the house while the family was screaming at the medics to "get in there and do your fucking job." Somehow, with the help of the fire department and cow sling, they managed to get the beast into the ambulance. It took 8 of us to move her out of the ambulance onto a stretcher that I was sure would buckle. The doctor is yelling for us to feel for a femoral pulse which required me to pick up this enormous apron of fat to find her groin. No pulse. She died in spite of it all. I felt bad for the coroner. I don't think it was a big mystery as to why she died. (She was diabetic for one thing). A petite female funeral director showed up later to get the body. I told her, "Uh, you're gonna need some help." I love my fucking job sometimes.

Dan Savage in his latest columm once again strikes comic gold when he addresses obesity, this time in goths:

I've never actually seen an extremely beautiful goth girl myself—most of them seem to have weight problems, which has always struck me as strangely contradictory. From the neck up, the look cultivated by goth girls seems to say, "O, we despair of this world and long for the sweet embrace of death!" From the neck down, their look seems to say, "I'll take the bacon cheeseburger, two orders of fries, and a Diet Coke, please."

I'm not really a rabid fatty hater, but has anyone else noticed that there seems to be a trend that the more overweight the woman, the more likely she is to be bisexual?

I am a staunch supporter of gay rights, though I am not gay myself. I just thought it was kind of wierd. And maybe a little bit unlucky (I almost typed unlicky, that was a Freudian slip) for all the lovely lipstick lesbians out there.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Monday, February 20, 2006 at 10:24 AM