GLUTTONY BONDING

My niece and I have been engaging in "Gluttony Bonding." It’s sick. Every day, my goal is, today, I am not going to eat until I want to throw up. That’s my big goal. That is my greatest aspiration at this point in my life. It seems like such a humble wish, and yet, I fail and fail.

The day before yesterday, we reached a new low. We went to a buffet restaurant, and smuggled out mini-corndogs in her diaper bag. We have discovered that breast-feeding is the perfect cover for this sort of activity. The blanket goes up, the mini-corndogs slide underneath, and voila, snack for later.

Prior to this outing, I was feeling guilty about my snobbery. I turn my nose up at everything in Spokane. But let’s face it, how much of a snob can you really be if you’re smuggling mini-corndogs out of a buffet restaurant?

My trousers don’t fit any more. I’m going to have to buy a whole new wardrobe if this keeps up. Mind you, at the beginning of the summer, I was this lean and lanky thing (comparatively), and now I’m trying to figure out how to squeeze into my fat clothes.

Today I was riding my bicycle through the neighborhood. This was a sort of nodding acknowledgement to the need for increased physical exertion. At the beginning of the summer, I was cycling around every day, and now I give a passing thought to the bike every six weeks or so.

As I passed one of the nearby schools, a bus was pulling up, and I was wondering how they might feel about having a strange adult passing so close to the loading bus. Then I realized, hey, what will they think? I have a bomb strapped to my bicycle?

Have you noticed that suicide bombers always drive or fly to their deaths? I can’t say I blame them. I mean, if you know you’re going to die in the next twenty minutes, make yourself comfortable. You don’t hear about suicide bombing bicyclists. Or exploding joggers, for that matter.

It’s a well-documented fact that bad people don’t cycle. Admit it—you’ve never heard of a cycle-by shooting, have you? Have you ever told a child, "Never get on a strange bike with someone you don’t know"? Men don’t cycle by to pick up prostitutes. Anthrax-ridden messages aren’t even delivered by bike messengers. They just know better.

I’m trying to develop some kind of theory about this, but the only thing I can think of at the moment is that the endorphins allegedly released by exercise make people in too good a mood to blow other people up. I don’t like this particular theory, because exercise has never made me anything but miserable, and I have to admit that I’d probably bomb some health and fitness guru when I was through, if only I had enough energy left to get up off of the…hey!

I think I may have just figured it out.