I feel so blank lately.

Like there’s a Vacancy sign softly blinking in my mind.

Not that long ago my mind was teeming with ideas trying to get out via my craft and my typing fingers. But now it feels like coming up with any premise at all is like a junkie trying to find a good vein, or maybe trying to get water from a dry well.

I might not have ideas but my similes are on point.

I blame the summer. The heat fries my brain. Bakes the creative energies right out of this tortured gourd of mine.

That’s probably what is making my sleep somewhat more messed up that usual too. Well, that, and my nonstop sinus fucking issues.

On the CPAP front, I have not made much progress lately. After the incident where I discovered that my nose was way too clogged up to support my respiratory needs and therefore felt like I was smothering with the thing on, I have found it very hard to even think about trying again.

So back to square one, in a sense. Or maybe square one point five.

And the thing is, I have no way of knowing before I put the thing on whether my nasal air passages are clear enough to use it safely or not.

All I know is that I am once more hung up on some serious trust issues. I am actually considering giving the old full face mask another try.

I mean, what the hell. At least it works equally well whether i got a stuffy nose. I can just breathe through my mouth instead.

But I am still pissed of that fat ^[1] conspired to dash my hopes for CPAP yet again. I really wanted to get onto CPAP for good and discover what life is like when you don’t smother dozens of times an hour in your sleep.

Probably better, right?

Still, if the O in my Obstructive Sleep Apnea is located in the general vicinity of my nose and not somewhere deeper in my trachea, it might be operable.

I would happily put up with an operation to correct a deviated septum or similar if it led to actual restful sleep.

But doctors don’t like that option because it doesn’t make fat people suffer enough.

They like CPAP. It punishes us for our fatness for 8 hours a day A third of our lives!

Speaking of the medical world, still no word on my life-saving heart operation. I figure my next step is to get Doctor Ebtia, my cardiologist, on the case.

Originally, the plan was that I would call her after the operation. But that op might never happen if someone doesn’t light a fire under this motherfuckers and it seems to me my cardiologist seems like the most logical person to do that.

So when the spirit moves me, I will give her office a call.

Just trying not to die here. Don’t mind me.

More after the break.

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The Skinny Revolution

It had a proper medical name when it was first introduced, but nobody remembers what it was because everybody – from street-corner teens to heads of state and all points in between – called it Fatcracker.

The Fatcracker Cure was what they called it. A month in hospital and a year under observation was a pittance to pay for not only losing all one’s excess fat but for being absolutely sure it would never come back no matter what one ate.

It turns out the secret was in enzymes. A careful campaign ti exterminate only a certain strand of guy flora rendered the patient incapable of storing excess energy as fat, period. What fat there was on the patient at start of treatment soon melted away as the treatment cut off its energy supply and the body got rid of it naturally.

In fact, the received wisdom on the subject was that the enzymatic/gut flora part of the cure was absurdly simple and the only reason the treatment took so long and was so carefully monitored was to make sure people didn’t lose weight too fast and shock their system into going into starvation mode.

The Fatcracker Cure was a smash hit overnight. Even governments and insurance companies could see the benefits of a treatment that for a measly $75,000 USD could save the system millions in future health care costs for the obese.

The public, on the other hand, hated it.

For one thing, it didn’t work for them. It cured obesity and that was it. Those pesky ten pounds you can’t seem to lose before bikini seasons were immune to it.

It cured people of the conditions that led to obesity and that was it.

This ignited a wildfire of pseudo-moral outrage at how it wasn’t “fair” that these horrible fatsos got to be thin and healthy without “earning” it like all these people suddenly decided they had been doing it all along.

Anti-fat hate skyrocketed, with protests, riots targeting the manufacturer of “fat food” like chocolate bars and potato chips, and worst of all, the firebombing of the millions of Fatcracker clinics that sprang up all over the world overnight.

At the height of the hysteria. the anti-fat movement turned on itself via a pogrom of people suspected of not “really” being skinny but being the worst thing of all : ex-fat.

This “fat fire” raged on for six terrible months before burning itself out. Eventually, so many people had taken the cure that they vastly outnumbered the haters and even the most diehard anti-fattists realized there were simply too many ex-fats and ex-fat sympathizers to fight.

Thus, within a year of the Fatcracker cure being introduced, obesity was all but eradicated from the world and the only fat people left were fat by choice.

And people began looking back at their own beliefs about fat people from the Before Times, and realizing how easily they accepted hateful and dehumanizing beliefs about whose only crime was an unsightly addiction, and the Years of Confession began.

Turned out a lot of people had their own burdens they wanted to shed.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

P.S. : What do you think of this kind of top-down storytelling? I enjoy writing it and to me, this is the “good stuff” in concentrated form, but I am curious about how other people see it.