Fears

What if Slick just didn't weigh in last week and in fact he has lost seven pounds and is 3 percentage points ahead of me?

What if one of my thigh muscles snaps? You know how when you were in gym class with some sociopath like for instance Earlton and they told you to duckwalk all over the gym and then they told you to run sprints? You know how you feel like your thigh muscle is going to snap? What if it did?? If my thigh muscle snapped, I'd be paralyzed and then how would I get my cardio?

What if Ditchweed Guy NEVER comes back?

Awwwwyeeeeeeaaaaah!

Bye bye, Mr. Slick.

I'm ahead by a teeny tiny little fraction. Now all I have to do is cuddle that newborn baby lead close and water it with my starving tears so it will grow up big and strong.

Plus I today found more puffballs in the neighborhood on the way to the bus stop. Just a little nesting in front of a once-proud cottage now surrounded by condos and abandoned.

I have a plan: when I find a puffball in the spore stage out in some random inconvenient field, I'm gonna stick it in a ziplock and take it home. Then I'll take it out of the ziploc and let it poot its lil spores in likely spots on the way to the bus stop. If it works, I'll end up with a little secret commute farm. People say you can't grow wild mushrooms because they're so picky, but puffballs don't seem that picky, in fact they seem to be opportunists. I think these worksite puffballs might enjoy a little diaspora action.

Puffballs

Puffballs are a fungus that is among us at this time of year. I found several of them yesterday while slogging around at noon in my quest to beat Slick and win $750 at the price of not drinking a daiquiri in what feels like ten thousand years. But you know what? Serendamndipity. In seeking great suffering I find great joy. It's worth not drinking a daiquiri for ten thousand years if it means you find that many puffballs. I took them home and made them into a delicious scramble using this crazygood butter I found at that one store. It's called something like vermontchurned special great butter or something, I don't know the name, but it comes in yellow paper printed with little cow heads, and inside that is a plastic tube with metal closer thingies, like how braunschweiger is packaged. It is the best butter, like the March Hare said. So you cook your puffballs in that til they're browned a bit and then you throw in your eggs and stir it all around. Salt and pepper, keep it simple.

Puffballs are so fantastic because they don't go all watery. They stay firm and meaty and good good good. You can take your old rubberyass morels and be damned. I'll always love puffballs best.

Obviously you don't want to go out and just start picking a pile of mushrooms and frying them up because you'll die. If you know exactly what a puffball is, you don't need to be reading this and if you don't know at all, you sure don't need to be reading this, either. But if you're kindof halfway familiar with the concept and you want to do a scramble, you better find somebody who really knows. You can get a book or look online, but bear in mind, it's probably going to lead to a shockingly fast and painful death because of the similarity between puffballs and baby amanitas. You cut them in half and look at them to be sure you don't see a creeeeepy little outline of the amanita-to-be in the creeeeeeepy fetal thing you plucked, all thinking it was a delicious yumyummity when really it is THE DESTROYING ANGEL!

I really lucked out last night: I'm still alive! I was also able to jam down a round of cruddy American brie and some inferior Greek yogurt (only Fage total cream for me, now and forevermore). All while watching Trailer Park Boys, season 9 or whatever it is, in which we discover that the show has finally and completely jumped the shark. Mozart's Requiem.

Bacon, lettuce and tomato salad

I certainly couldn't eat one of these today, what with Slick breathing down my neck and Earlton cancelling classes right and left, but back in the early days of the competition, I ate a number of these delicious bacon, lettuce and tomato salads. Here is how it is done:

Get a big mixing bowl and fill it with bitter greens--mesclun or what have you. I get from the farmers' market, where they have such as baby mustard.* Chop up a b-load of tomatoes, fry some bacon, maybe say four strips, throw on mayonnaise, crumble your bacon over, salt and pepper, stir, consume.

Two more pounds down. No notion what Slick is up to. Results supposed to go up tomorrow. I'm nervous, but I still got a couple tricks up my sleeve.


*"Such as" used that way is stolen from Roast Beef.

wrst F33rz 2tlly r3@lizd!

Ditchweed guy was not there
and neither were the ditchweeds. I was forced to buy zucchini and cucumber instead. Zucchini and cucumber of dubious pedigree, too. My heart is cold with fear: what if ditchweed guy is kaput for the whole summer? I will be forced to SUPPLEMENT with MAINSTREAM FOOD!

More Bulletins:

• Slick is STILL in first place.
• I walked up some stairs.
• Earlton's Klass is tonight!

I got nuttin'

I was supposed to exercise at lunch today but I didn't. Later I'm supposed to go to step jump and pump or slap kick and tickle or powerjamz or whatever the $#%* is the dumbass name they came up with for it, but you know what?

I ain't.

I ain't goin'.

FORGET ABOUT IT, GYM PEOPLE.

The.
End.

Green on Green Violence

Okay, so I explained about how to make pesto with kale (actually collards). So then what you do, you have your pesto in the 'fridge and you're using it in omelets and such, and then one day you make

Green on Green Violence
You wash some kale (actually collards) and rip it into random sized pieces and sear it. Then you put it in a dish and you put your pesto on that and some green pepper chunks and some chunks of parmesan. So it's just a MESS of green. Onto that you pour a little more olive oil and maybe some salt and you stir that around.

CONsume.

Economy Nosh
It's true how it costs more per unit of vegetation at the farmers' market than it does per unit of vegetation at the grocery store. It costs astronomically more per unit of cheese-shop parmesan than it costs per shake of dehydrated whey-influenced Dilithium Kristilz(R) or whatever the crap is in the shiny green cardboard cylinder with the yellow plastic shake/pour top. Or maybe it is a red plastic shake/pour top. Anyway, this is all true, about how you pay more for the edible comestible.

However, when you eat nothing but farmers' market fare and snob cheese, you eat far less. So a couple of units of vegetation will last you the week. So you come out better off moneywise. Mmmmhmm, you sure do.

For the past week I have lived on:
home food:

1 bunch chicory
1 bunch some other kind of lettucey ditch weeds
2 bunches collards
4 green peppers
1 can of sardines
about two Tbs feta cheese
pesto
eggs, 4+ per day
about 3 cups dry-roasted mixed nuts
4 peaches
parmesan
various fresh herbs

restaurant food:
1/2 a roast duck
a tilapia, fried hard like they do it at the good Mexican places
roasted vegetables
seared tuna
three oysters

You notice how there's no WHOLE GRAINS in there? That's 'cause I'm not eating them. That's why I'm not hungry. That's why I'm not spending $200/week on food. And that's why I'm going to win.

The Devious Mr. Slick

The other day in Earlton's* Klass, I observed my rival, Slick, minutely to determine what occult powers have enabled him to reach 1st place (for now) in this competition. I discovered that at all times, whether at work or at rest, be he standing, sitting, or lying on the floor groaning and not doing his core strengthening moves, Slick sluices great cataracts of sweat from his every pore.

So! I have discovered your secret weapon, Mr. Slick!

All I have to do is spend the last week of the competition up to my neck in a sealed, heated barrel sucking ice chips and spitting out the meltwater. I'll get plenty of cardio batting away the flying toads and other hallucinations I'll start to have once my brain begins to shrivel in my skull like an oyster left ajar in the noonday sun. Hell, jockeys and Ana kidz do this type of thing all the time. Piece. Of. Cake.

Speaking of cake, after I win I am spending my $750 on cake.

*Not his real name.

I am in second place.

There is one dude, I'll call him "Slick," ahead of me by... 00.34 percentage points. I think. Unless I messed up the math, which is possible: I lied last week when I said I lost 18 pounds. I've only lost 16 so far. But whatever: out of 35 people, I am second from the top. I shall destroy "Slick." He will not win. He cannot win. I will win. The end.

Here's how to make hard boiled eggs:
Boil a bunch of water.
Gently lower eggs, cold from the fridge, into the water. Use one of those wire baskets on a bamboo handle that they sell at the Asian marts.
Bring water back to boil.
Turn it down so they're just simmering.
Wait 13 or 14 minutes.
Immerse eggs in cold water.

My Greatest Fear
When I get to the farmers' market today, ditchweed guy will have quit selling ditchweeds. Then what? THEN WHAT, AMERICA?

How I Done It:

Preamble

First off, I'm not even sure yet that I done it, the contest not being over, yet. But I think y'all should know some of my methods because even if I ain't done it, I done something purt near it.

I don't know if I done it because I don't know where I'm at in the stats right now. And that's because five weeks into this thing there was a big legal shakeup; the guy running it, I'll call him "Stan," got canned, no one knows why, they didn't update the sheets for a week, and then the bulletin board where they'd been posting our standings faithfully, week after week, was suddenly wallpapered all over with giant, 20-pt-type, "Your Rights As a Weight-Loss Contest Entrant" legal blab. Amusing, since this is week six or seven and up to now we have heard exactly zero about the (obvious) health liability represented by a contest based on how much weight you can lose and how much muscle you can gain in a two-month period after living life like a hibernating grub for the previous six years. Gym people are like this, though. All, "Damn the torpedoes, fatass!" regardless of the danger of lawsuits or getting either fired by administration or kicked in the nads by an outraged "client" driven past civility by the constant heckling to "engage your core."

Here's an example of typical gym-people thinking:

I have a paralyzed serratous anterior muscle in my left upper arm/shoulder/back. It's the muscle that keeps the shoulder blade in tight while you lift your arm so that you can lift your arm over your shoulder. Mine's been out of commission since I was 12 years old, as a result of a demonic summer P.E. session in which the various psych-experiments running middle school gym made everybody, regardless of ability, hang from the chin-up bar and try to do ten chin-ups. Not every 12-year-old can do even one chin-up straight off; some of your weaker 12-year-olds will need to build up upper body strength before they can haul off and do a chin-up. But they didn't take that into account, and now I will NEVER be able to do a chin-up--or at least, I won't until I build up my right arm to Pop-Eye proportions and can do a one-arm chin-up. At 12, I hung from the chin-up bar struggling for two or three minutes or whatever was the coach-mandated torture interval until "blip!" My arm went out. Everybody heard the "blip!" They shielded themselves with their Starsky and Hutch lunchboxes. Now one of the muscles necessary to raise my arm over my head has ossified: it is no longer a muscle. It has become... fibrous tissue. I wonder... if you pay for private school for your kid is that one of the perks? The meatheads running P.E. won't partially paralyze your child out of pure, rocklike stupidity? Might be worth a look-see.

So but anyway, what I've noticed, the meatheads running the grown-up gyms are the same old meatheads, lightly varnished with an all-over layer of Susan Powter blab. There are a bunch of classes that feature the push-up; until such time as I get my right arm to PopEye, I can't do a push-up any more than I can do a pull-up. The gym is plastered with CYA signs encouraging you not to do anything you don't want to do and to modify any exercise until it's no more strenuous than needlepoint. So they can't yell at me to just do the push-ups, wimp, like in the good old days. But every time we get to push up time and I make some candy-ass modification, depending on who it is running the class they either look at me as if I've got the Munchausen's real bad, or they come up all dripping with sympathy and announce that we'll get that shoulder back shipshape in a matter of months. They all think one of exactly two and only two things is the case: either I'm awash in sloth or I have a rotator cuff injury from too much tennis. Very limited imaginations, I'm saying.

Despite them, I have managed to prevail.

What I Done:

I lost 18 pounds; I'm now three pounds under where I was before I began the DeNiro Coke 'n' spuds weight-gain diet. And there are a few weeks to go.

A Very Little Bit about How I Done It:

Besides fattening up beforehand, which was an EXCELLENT idea, by the way, despite the fact that EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the WORLD told me it was stupid, here are a few things I did:
I ignored party line about eating breakfast.
I ignored party line about whole grains.
I ignored party line in general.
I made sure to get a lot of sleep.
Most of all, I did things gradually--I added exercise in increments and I took away calories in increments.

You could do this, too! Anybody can win a weightloss contest simply by ignoring pretty much everything they tell you to do to lose weight and doing what works, instead.

Larry McMurtry

When you're eating to win, you have to cook all day. The way I manage, I listen to Larry McMurtry books while I chop and chop and chop and chop and dice and mince and sauté and bake and stew and steam and blend and stir and eviscerate and wash and spin and rinse and drain. It is just verb verb verb verb verb when you're in the kitchen, and it's hot and dull in there. And in my kitchen they put the sink and counter in a stupid place nowhere near the window, so you're trapped standing in the same spot for hours, staring at tile. Also the lighting sucks and I lack the inclination to do anything about it. But for Larry McMurtry, I would die in there. Unfortunately, the version I have of All of My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers isn't read by Wolfram Kandinsky, if that is how you spell it. I hope it doesn't mean anything happened to Wolfram K. I would cry.

I've developed a rhythm with this. I lose weight Wednesday through Friday, hold steady Saturday through Tuesday, lose more weight the following Wednesday through Friday. So far it's working a treat. I was in fourth place last week because of all the Red Stripe you have to drink when you're on vacation, but I expect to see some movement this week.

Hey-Wow Things To Do With Kale!
You know, it turns out kale soup blows. But there is another hey-wow thing you can do with kale that doesn't. You can chop it up coarse, flash fry it 'til it's bright green (it's inedible at this point because it's still all fibrous), then snatch it out the pan and throw it in the food processor. It will be much reduced in bulk. Grind it all up, add basil, nuts, garlic, olive oil and cheese, grind some more, and you have pesto with greater food value than pesto without kale. It tastes mighty fine and is jewel green. These days I'm actually doing this with collards and the various weird ditchweeds sold by Ditchweed Guy at the farmers' market, not kale, because it's so hot nothing but collards and ditch weeds will grow. There's still basil, though, so I'm good.

Thank you, Larry McMurtry (I know you're reading this). I love you.