0417blog

Two Weeks of Hell, Then Joy

I came across a novel idea for a diet in which you eat only foods that make you want to gag for two weeks and that way you will lose weight because the thought of eating will repulse you although the diet does allow you to drink beer. The need for the new “Eat Shit” diet was triggered by news that millennials have reported gaining an average of 41 pounds since the pandemic started.

I dropped that dieting idea pretty quickly because I couldn’t stomach surviving on a diet of liver, tripe, head cheese and kale flavored with fennel, basil, cloves and cinnamon all covered with a dollop of Vieux Boulogne cheese which smells like a cow’s butt.

Having discarded the idea for the “Eat Shit” diet, I came upon another plan along the same lines, this one is guaranteed to help people to appreciate the good things in life and not dwell on all the horrible, terrible, reprehensible things that seem to define our existence every waking hour, minute and second.

And in order to get back to the beauty of life, I propose two weeks of doing the most horrible, terrible, reprehensible things I could come up with and I would name the process “Do only shit that you wouldn’t want to do in a million years even if you were paid handsomely to do it.” You must do a minimum of one horrible, terrible, reprehensible thing a day although those among you who are particularly game, can do any number of horrible, terrible, reprehensible things over the course of two weeks. At the end of the two weeks, you will appreciate all the small thing in life and realize that life really isn’t that bad.

So here we go. I’ll give you just a week’s worth of examples but you have to come up with your own very special horrible, terrible, reprehensible things or it won’t work.

Day one I would start by intentionally nicking myself with a razor, biting my tongue, dropping a wine glass on the floor and stepping on a shard and then traveling to the doctor for my regular colonoscopy who informs me that they have found a tiny node but won’t know for two weeks if it’s cancer or just an innocuous node.

Day two would include immersing myself for two hours in television travelogues to Estonia that have no dialogue and use fast sequence photography to cover all the bases of the tiny, former Soviet satellite where anything of beauty has been destroyed. I’d follow that with a summer stroll on broiling pavement while wearing no shoes and having no place special to go.

Day three I would travel to the Vince Lombardi Rest Stop on the turnpike and use the bathroom continuously for several hours where I would smell the unbearable scent of unflushed toilets and see how people can be so incredibly disgusting and after I was done that the roll of toilet paper only had the final sheet remaining for me.

Day four starts with a breakfast of four Slim Jims on white bread, all washed down with a six pack of Kaliber beer and then a relaxing for an hour of smoking unfiltered Kools before going to a job interview and getting stuck in the elevator for two hours with five very cranky people and a woman who is intermittently laughing and crying hysterically.

Day five includes a visit to the daily, four-hour long meeting of the Young Republicans Club and you cannot say anything negative about Trump or Republicans in general, although it may be fashionable to dis Liz Chaney and this is followed by attending a meeting of Sex Addicts Anonymous and recognizing your neighbor’s wife is next to you, eyeing you.

Day six is a time for cleaning up around the house, starting with the bathroom and using ammonia to scrub the floor, then raking leaves for four hours while it is very windy and finally, for the coup de grace, straightening up the garage and then watching a continuous, six-hour loop of Trump’s debate with Hillary when he’s stomping around behind her.

Day seven includes running out of gas on I-80, calling AAA and realizing your card has expired and the AAA guy arrives and fills your tank and charges you $6 a gallon. And finally, you arrive home and must offer innocuous chatter with a distant cousin from Detroit who dropped in unannounced and stays for four hours and expects dinner and then you try to open a beer and the pull tab breaks.

So there you go and I guarantee that after the two weeks of self-imposed horror is over that you will again treasure the beautiful things in life or you will kill yourself.