MY TWO BROTHERS

My Two Brothers 

A story of addiction 

I stand frozen on a busy New York City avenue, peering into the face of addiction. I take a step but reconsider. Am I going to do this to myself again? Am I going to blatantly mistreat my body, in exchange for a minute of euphoria? Is euphoria a strong word to describe shitty $1.00 pizza?

Hot oregano fumes radiate from the belly of a sedan-sized furnace. The oven is so well seasoned it could win a boxing match behind a Red Hook warehouse… and believe me, that’s a smell.  Serpents of yeasty steam waft through the gaps in a pair of clear glass doors, racing up my nostrils, past my lungs and into my brain.

The lights of passing cars flicker in the glass doors almost like a mirage. As far as barriers are concerned, these doors may as well not even exist.

There is really nothing standing in the way of that intense, if brief, visceral pleasure that is shitty $1.00 pizza. Nothing but a suspension of will power and one American dollar bill. A fair price, I say, for half of a day's worth of calories.

What is a dollar to a middle class white male burning his 20s in the media arts?

Short sight makes it so that the value of a dollar can only be seen in large sums,

while each individual dollar is merely a flag. A pale green flag, that when waved in the air is the intercultural symbol for "please hand me a slice of pizza."

And in no time flat, a slice of pizza appears, produced, as if by magic, by a Latino man in a dirty red polo shirt. If a hard working pizza man's shirt is clean, something's amiss, do not eat that pizza.

Ouch! I must have blacked out in the glee of a bargain-- I don't even remember putting the slice in my mouth, but hot cheese and marinara water are scalding my tongue, leaving behind painful swollen taste buds, that will remain for days to come. Maybe as a reminder that we’ve gone too far.

The human mouth is not built for $1.00 pizza.

Even God himself didn't see this one coming. He must have been off kicking rocks around the space-time continuum, while two brothers of his very own creation were meddling with forces that only slightly resembled Italian cuisine.

These two brothers, or "2 Bros." if you will, discovered that with the right ratio of cheese product, tomato paste and pure glutenous bread protein, they could sell slices of "pizza" for a dollar each, while covering their overhead costs and still turning a profit. What a display of business prowess, especially considering it only cost them each their first born son.

This business plan was concocted, no doubt, in the brimstone cave that Satan affectionately refers to as his pied a terre. 

For the business is sinister to its core.

To expect a human being to exhibit even a remote sense of self control in the face of $1.00 pizza is ludicrous. To keep the pizza piping hot and ready to eat is garden-of-Eden-snake level temptation. It’s got Satan’s hoof prints all over it.

Who exactly were these two brothers? Who cares. We can't eat them.

We can eat pizza. And not to belabor the point, but we can eat it for a dollar.

You won’t, however, catch me saying I only eat it for the price. The flavor is intoxicatingly pizza-like and the sauce’s high sugar content satisfies my glucose addiction. At only 8 Weight Watchers™ SmartPoints™ per slice I might even exclaim, in a moment of true desperation, that I eat it because it is healthy.

Whether because of stress or celebration, I find a reason to visit my Two Brothers on a semi-daily basis. Like any Italian-American marketing strategy will tell you, family is the most important thing. There’s really no one else to turn to when you’ve found yourself at rock bottom, addicted to shitty fucking $1.00 pizza.   

~~~

Hi everyone, Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this essay, or thought it was funny, please share it with your friends and family. Share it with someone who you may think has a similar addiction. 

I wrote this because it's all true, I love $1.00 pizza so much, and it's been a significant roadblock in my journey to lose weight and rebuild my body before Sexy Halloween 2016. W

As of now I've lost 4 pounds... It's really happening! 

I'm having before pictures taken before I lose too much weight. So next week you can look forward to seeing me in my undies. 

Only 250 Days until Sexy Halloween 2016

Thanks again! 

Ian 

DISGUSTING PURPLE SOUP

DISGUSTING PURPLE SOUP

Halloween 2016 is 257 days away.

In my first week of Weight Watchers I lost 3 pounds. Down from 245.5 lbs. to 242.5 lbs.

Which is good news! Sure I’ve probably taken shits heavier than three pounds, but it’s progress.

Was I as vigilant as I should have been in counting points and exercising? No I was not.

Am I easing myself into a realistic change in lifestyle? You bet your skinny ass I am.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that if something is going to stick, it’s gotta be easy.

Anyone who is familiar with Weight Watchers knows about Zero Point Soup or as I like to call it: Disgusting Red Soup. It’s a cabbage soup, considered to be one of the most powerful weapons in a weight watcher’s arsenal, alongside meringues and watching food television instead of eating.

Basically you take cabbage, carrots, green beans, zucchini, onions and garlic, chop it into various shapes and sizes, and boil it in vegetable broth with a little tomato paste (hence the red).

As I am trying to trick myself into putting effort into losing weight, I made a huge batch of Disgusting Red Soup to reluctantly eat all week. But I used purple cabbage, so the whole thing turned purple-- It’s kind of a “Bullshit Borscht,” and it truly looks like a culinary abomination. Imagine carrots and green beans drowning in an enchanted cartoon swamp.

No one said getting pretty was going to be pretty. I’ve started running on a treadmill (almost) every day and the chub rub between my thighs looks like the surface of Mars.

But ugly soup and skin conditions aside, I feel like I’m gaining some momentum. When I force myself to eat disgusting purple soup, I find that I’m more motivated to go running. When I go running, I find that I’m more motivated to do squats-- which still count even if you do them while you watch Downton Abbey… I checked.

WATCHING MY WEIGHT

Oh my god I just ate Macdonald’s.

There are 264 days until Sexy Halloween 2016, do I have the willpower to take on a challenge like this? Let's take a look at some cold fat facts: 

I have struggled with my weight my entire life.

Struggle, I guess, is a strong word. I've been fat, but it's not necessarily a struggle, it's more like a very heavy shirt that you never take off. It's literally just another part of me. For a lot of my life I've been complacent with my weight. It certainly makes me appear to be funnier and more relatable than I actually am. And for that I'm even a little grateful. My shape has shaped me.

I'm genetically predisposed to be fat.

My father, mother and younger sister are all overweight. We've all had out yo-yo weight loss moments, but we're bread people, we love to eat bread. There's really nothing more to it than that.

Eating is my compulsion. 

Along with hoarding and pulling my hair out, eating is just something to do frequently and en masse.

I’m the kind of person that will continue to eat as long as there is food in front of me. Sitting in front of a bowl of kettle corn is my worst nightmare because I won’t be able to get up until I’ve done a pass around the bowl with a wet finger for crumbs and kernels.

If I’m really going to lose weight, I’m going to completely change the way I relate to food. As of now, I relate to it by putting as much of it into my mouth as I can before I feel like hell.

I have relatively strong self-destruction streak. I fight it for the most part, but it tells me that I deserve to be overweight, it tells me to ignore the direct connection between my weight and the melange of ailments I deal with on a daily basis (joint pain, back pain, sleep apnea, celibacy etc.). I don’t eat as a means to an end, I eat in the moment, based solely on my emotions. Food is a reward or a punishment, but never just sustenance.

There have been times when I’ve been successful in losing significant amounts of weight.

During my two year stint at grad school, I lost about 30 pounds.

I looked great, I felt great, and then I experienced that swift descent from the paradise that is school, down into the 7th circle of the inferno that is real life.

I turned back to stress eating, I stopped going to the gym, and I gained the weight back almost faster than I lost it. NOW LOOK AT ME.

There’s one program that has worked time and time again for me, and that’s Weight Watchers.

Weight Watcher assigns a point value to every food, based on its nutritional value, and I truly believe that system changes the way people relate to food. There’s no punishment, no deprivation, just setting easy goals and meeting them. So I’m joined back up.

Watch this vid to see Oprah say the word "bread" six times.

That's my kind of program. Bread, bread, bread!

Now that Oprah has hitched her caboose to this train, it’s never been clearer: Weight Watchers is top-of-mind and requires the least research. That’s what I’m down with.

Bad news: advertising works, folks.

So yes, I ate Macdonald’s for breakfast. One sausage egg and cheese McGriddle cost me 20 points. Which means I have 27 points to spread out over the rest of my day. Which isn’t so hard!

Weight Watchers makes everything seem more manageable, and doesn't demonize lapses in judgement. Plus you can eat three whole bags of baby carrots for ZERO POINTS!!!!!

Next week I will give a weight loss update after my first full week of weight watching. When I started this blog, I weighed 245. Next week, hopefully..... 185? God, I wish.

I’m gonna go and eat a goddamn vegetable. Thanks for reading!

(P.S. Weight Watchers is not sponsoring these posts, but if you, dear reader, work for Weight Watchers and would like to put this blog in front of Oprah, be my guest. I love money and strong Black women.)

IM NAKED UNDER THE VAAAPPPEEE

It's Tuesday February 2nd, there are 271 days until Sexy Halloween 2016, and I’m happy to announce that I’ve chosen a costume. Here it is:

TADAAAAAAAAAAA!

"What the fuck is that?!" Is what I'm sure a lot of you are thinking. And you're right!!!

I believe it's a "meme," a "Snapchat" that went "viral" on "Reddit."

I'm 80% sure that I first saw it on one of those horrible Buzzfeed lists. You know, the really meaningless ones:

"43 people that literally could even in 2015!"

"You do relate to these 186 people who are totally nailing this whole crazy Monday fiasco! Yes."

"Look at 2600 pictures that we stole so we could sell you Caramel Toffee Fucking Peanut Butter Frappuccinos™."

Anyway, I love those lists. They're just the kind of empty stimulation that my ADD hummingbird brain craves when I'm trying to get something important done.

When I first happened upon "naked under the vaaapppeee," I laughed out loud for about three minutes. Try to do anything for three minutes-- that's a long damn time. I asked myself the question that every creative person has asked at one point or another: why didn't I think of that first?

I thought, I could have done that. But I didn’t.

Let me explain to you exactly why I think this is so funny.

Vaping

Vaping is so funny. It’s newest iteration of supreme American douchebaggery, so much so that it is commonly referred to as wearing a fedora-- for your mouth. I think it’s a riot because it does look cool sometimes, but at what cost? Dying alone? It has blossomed into its very own culture. There are vape shops and vape lounges popping up all over New York City. Just for reference: here’s one I strode past last week: 

Nothing attracts assholes quite like a purple fluorescent light. That's nature.
[picture: vapeya.com]

The Gall 
I don’t think I’ll ever know if this "naked under the vaaapppeee" picture was taken in earnest. I like to imagine that this young man concocted this image as a romantic gesture. He took the picture using Snapchat (An app on which you can send pictures that expire and disappear, for those of you not privy to Snapchat). So I can assume that he never intended to become a viral meme, let alone the subject of a hilarious blog. But every millennial knows that the internet is a place where things live forever. Nothing is ever truly deleted. This vapist took a bold risk, and for that he will forever live in infamy.

It’s a Rom Com
What could be funnier than sexting gone wrong? It’s a texting version of the rom com fodder we’ve come to know and love from the late 1980’s through to the early 2000’s. Romantic blunders have been the subject of movies, sitcoms, even television commercials. This picture tells such a funny story in just a glance.  It’s the Something About Mary of imgur.

"Im naked under the vaaapppeee," isn't what you'd call a blockbuster of a meme. It's only been viewed about 15,000 times on "imgur" ("reddit's" image "sharing" "platform.")

But it's a bit of a cult hit, having inspired multiple people on the Internet to try and conceal their own genitals in tobacco vapor for long enough to take a picture.

It's got parodies and reaction memes; INUTV is a teeny tiny lil internet phenom.

                   

It meets standard gay Halloween criteria in that it's contains partial nudity. And it meets my own Halloween costume criteria in that I think it's fucking hilarious, just obscure enough, and will have to be crafted from scratch.

So now you can see why #SexyHalloween2016 is going to be such a difficult challenge. I essentially have to look good naked; it's right there in the name.

As of today, I've lost umm zero weight. 
It's hard! And I wasn't prepared.

HOWEVER, I have taken strides in going to the gym 5 out of the 7 days since I last posted. That's much more than the twice-a-month schedule I was on before. I already feel better, I've got more energy, and (who knew) working out really regulates the 'ol digestive schedule.

This upcoming week is going to be all about changing the way I eat. 
Check back next Tuesday for more on that.