I’m fat. I’m not the kind of modern Fat who thinks he or she is a Fat but is merely Chunk. I was born Fat. For Fat I am. And Fat I will be.
I remain a Fat because I eschew the Atkins diet. I shun celery. The only thing I ever exercise is my right to be a Fat. And I don’t want to sound morbid, but I’ll die a Fat too. At age 27, waistline 60 inches, choking on a stick of butter. On my grave, they’ll write (in big fat letters): ‘He was Fat.’
Every day, in every way, I get fatter and fatter.
If I ever make it big, it’ll be by saving the world from a gigantic space cannonball of sharp cheddar with a hamburger core and wrapped generously in bacon. For some inexplicable reason, it will be hurtling towards Earth at a speed fast enough to fry the bacon. I’ll eat it. They’ll perform Fred Rose’s ‘Roly-Poly’ at the prize-giving ceremony. It goes:
He can eat an apple pie
And never even bat an eye
He likes everything from soup to hay
Roly-Poly, daddy’s little fatty
Bet he’s gonna be a man someday
I come from Bangladesh, and over there, fatness is looked upon as a sign of prosperity. Being fat implies that you have enough to eat, and that’s good enough reason for a swarthy young nymph of the paddy fields to become your third wife. Of course, ‘fat’ usually implies more a general roundness than my profound corpulence, but the associations with the good fortune don’t magically disappear once you’ve crossed the 250 pound line.
In the United States of Marvel and Plentitude, however, everybody has enough to eat. Beggars watch their cholesterol levels and even the huddled masses don’t start yearning to breathe free until the first whopper-with-cheese of the day. What a vile and decadent land it is! And yet I love its tasty cheeseburgers and double servings of Biggie Fries! For I too, as all Fats, am American!
America has given us not merely the method of becoming fat i.e., highly dubious carbohydrate distribution and a moral decadence unmatched since the high decline of the Romans but it has also given us the glorious method of celebrating the Fat.
By which, of course, I mean the internet.
Yes, the internet is where I, Arafat Kazi, genial fat-bumbler and all around good guy, become a celebrity of unrestrained girth and expanded proportions. Some of you might hear the word celebrity and think Brad Pitt or Jennifer Aniston or any of the other 135 cast members of ‘Friends’ (or their real life or fictitious partners), but for a very select group of misfits and weirdos, when you say Celebrity, they think of Me: Arafat Kazi. Fatty. Genius misfit and idiot Martyr: I die with clotted cream upon my lips.
One of the more astounding things about the internet is the way it defies the basic laws of physical reality: the line at McDonald’s doesn’t have enough room for me and some other chubmonger, yet the internet gladly plays home to 3,000+ individuals just like me. Well, they’re less literate and perhaps a tad less post-colonially witty about their rotundity. But otherwise, their entire lives are like mine: conceptually beating to the same cholesterol-ridden heart of internet celebrity, based on our collective abilities to consume an entire roast piglet in the amount of time it takes most people to write their names in the snow.
We might, some day, in a highly uncharacteristic move of reflection, decide to play cultural anthropologist and take apart the mechanisms by which a guy like me who I repeat, in case you’ve missed the other 13,000 iterations of this basic idea, is enormous and monstrously fat can become the idol to several thousand depraved individuals. They write books on this stuff. That’s what my friends tell me they study in our Anthro class, at least. I’m too busy eating! Get it? I’m fat. So I eat. It’s like a gastronomical turnaround of cognito ergo sum, except with pizza.
But me? I don’t introspect; I’m happy riding these liquid tides of molten yellow. It’s me and the fat all the way down Butter Lane and Pecan Pie Way. All I really know how to do is eat. I’ve never tried to think about it in any kind of analytical way. My best friend, who turned 22 today (so Happy Birthday, Imran!), always asks ‘Jeez, Arafat, why are you so fat?’ And I think for a minute maybe, you know, just maybe I should exhibit some kind of shame but then I look in the mirror and I see myself and I see that Browny Smile which I like to call the stare of a Demon Lover. And I know, yeah, that’s just me. Why should I try to figure out who I am and why I’m fat? I’ve got these spare tires and I’m gonna hitch ’em to my ride and I’m gonna go down that lonesome road of high fatness.
My friends on the internet know what that road’s all about: it’s an existential path of praeterhuman decay. We’d come together and give each other hugs except no one can get their arms around my body. So we just give each other knowing looks instead. This fatness is a thick wall, which cannot be scaled or climbed or conquered.
It can only be built.
Arafat Kazi, a junior in the College of Communication is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. His email address is [email protected]