Our new President is a lithe six feet, two inches tall and weighs a reed-like 195 pounds. His lean, fat-free body fits his message that if my fellow Americans and I are to extricate ourselves from our economic malaise, we will have to tighten our belts and start living within our means. Our good President has made it clear that our economic woes are a wake-up call to the fact that we have been on a collective binge for too long and an economy built on credit bills that we are in a constant struggle to pay down is doomed to perish.
Let there be no mistake about it, our spending binge has been accompanied by the growth of another binge and that is nothing less than the insatiable appetites of all of us, evidenced by the fact that our calorie consumption is going up and up and up. May I refer you to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization periodical studies of American calorie consumption, which show that between 1979 and 1981 Americans averaged 3,180 calories a day. Then between 1989 and 1991 the calories increased to 3,460. The most recent study covers 2000 and 2002 and the daily calorie intake of the average American is 3,790. I’m a bit alarmed to consider that 3,800 calories is about the amount I ingest on a daily basis, give or take a few. And this number explains why at 46 years of age my 230-pound bodyweight is 30 pounds heavier than I want it to be for appearance and health reasons.
Let there be no mistake about it, a hipster cannot be a porker. For a hipster leanness is of paramount importance since a slender physique evinces someone in control. Look at our most recent Presidential debates between the young mellifluous hipster and the aging maladroit fuddy-duddy. The latter candidate lost points, and eventually the election, because his seething temper, evidenced by eye-rolling, excessive blinking, an hostile exhalations that whistled through his dentures, rendered him unsuitable for the Executive Office and lose he did.
In contrast, our hipster President is a man of temperance and self-control and it is our duty to conform to our leader’s virtues. I therefore must embrace temperance, moderation, and self-control for my own life and there is no better way to begin than by curbing the excess manner in which I consume food.
Ladies and Gentleman, it is strange, but I have been blind to my woefully overweight state and did not become aware of it until our new hipster President was elected. The svelte silhouette of the magisterial Barack Obama highlighted my own bloated condition. This revelation occurred five days after Obama won the election. My wife and I celebrated the Dawn of a New Hipster Age the following Sunday by having a brunch in Hermosa Beach. Uncomfortably full, I convinced my wife Carrie that we should take a stroll down Pier Avenue with the hope that each step might make my breaths less strained. Alas, it was almost impossible for me to walk. Overcome with joy at the knowledge that our new President was a well-spoken intellectual cosmopolitan, I had just ingested a 5,000-calorie breakfast of macadamia nut pancakes, French toast made with Hawaiian sweet bread, turkey sausage patties, and scrambled eggs with melted cheddar all washed down with several tall glasses of freshly-squeezed orange juice. As I strutted my 242 pounds outside the buffet room and past a clothing boutique window, I saw the reflection of a portly gentleman, dressed in safari shorts and a turquoise tank top, which sported the striking image of the iconic sea turtle. This unsightly man I gazed upon looked like the stereotype of an overfed American and was clearly anti-hipster.
I walked closer toward the bloated image and I was overcome by the shock and anxiety that the reflection was not some other guy for whom I could judge with gleeful ridicule but me. I was that dude, the type of person that I had mocked and scorned most of my life.
This was a huge moment for me, what literary people might call an “epiphany,” and I was fortunate to have experienced it. Most people are denied, or deny themselves, such moments of clarity. It is my belief that something like 95% of the human race walk around Planet Earth with their heads up their butts and this is how they die—never knowing what the hell is really going on. But on that clement November day in Hermosa Beach when I saw that the corpulent man in the window was in fact me, my head uncorked from my butt and I was able to see reality for what it really was. And this reality—me being a chubster—was contrary to the new America our lean, hip President was trying to create.
Losing weight—at least 30 pounds—was now a moral imperative. To do so was to show my fidelity and patriotism, not only to my country but to the new Hipster Zeitgeist.
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