O.B. City: Observations on Obesity #1

“Comfort food” and “taking our comfort” reminiscent of toilet paper, “comfortable shoes”, recliners, cushy chairs and sofas, fluffy beds, down parkas, comforters. All this floofah fwaffing! And yet we despise that fwafféd physique, except in the areas of the ass and the (maternal) breast.

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Aristotle counseled that the obese individual should strip down to their birthday suit and take the air of the city. The patient should go naked in the agora, perhaps to shame the bastard into losing weight? Is that the purpose? If thus, then “Aristotle” appears to be Greek for “prescriptive, smug-ass, know-it-all, vicious cuntface.”

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O. B. City: As with other addictions, it is a family disease. I am the alcoholic, compulsive eating son of a drinking dad and an eating mother. The food and the booze were there to cure our familial structure of the need to isolate, to defy our human instinct for closeness, intimacy, simple human touch, to magnify our individual separations from one another behind that closed front door, as well as dividing our family from the rest of humanity. As we tried to participate in the world outside the front door, the fat members of the family not only were constantly reminded that something was wrong, were constant reminders in their physicality that something was amiss, so too were the Height-Weight-Proportionate members of the family. They were as fully implicated, if only to offer contrast, and were just as suspect as being the source of the illness as were we fatties.

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A social disease, O. B. City, perhaps borne by food itself as it has been altered, distorted, reduced, fortified, futzed with, tampered with to be more “attractive” to “consumers” as the corp(se)orations cut nutrition for efficiency, costs for profit and humanity in general because it just isn’t “sleek”, “lean” or “cool as death itself, dude.” Fat people exists because human bodies are not getting the right nutrition from these “foods” which are nonsensical, non-nutritive and highly caloric and addictive; because profits also extend to the medical and pharmaceutical industries as well as Jenny Craig and the like; and because the leanness and meanness that the civilized wish to cultivate is never the whole of the story. That which is “cut-out” doesn’t disappear—it gets hidden, in this case in plain sight, and in proliferation. O. B. City becomes ever bigger, especially as the classes divide and the poorer classes “eat up” the “food” foisted upon them by their socioeconomic superiors. O. B. City — the end-result of colonialism by dietary means.