“If I see one more three-hundred-pound woman in hot pants I’m going to barf! One woman’s confidence is another woman’s disgust.” - supermarket clerk

I have often used the food metaphor to identify the ‘victims’ or targets of aggression. Recently folks who keep up on the news, which I do not, have congratulated me on my prophetic assertion that modern human society is essentially cannibalistic. Apparently, so I am told, various freaks up and down the East Coast are snorting something called bath-salts and then eating each other. I will never go shopping for my sister at Bed Bath & Beyond without feeling like Stephan King again.

It has occurred to me—recently that is, when I was beseeched by the supermarket clerk quoted above, that we are really just livestock. She wanted to know if she was wrong, even apologizing for her lack of tolerance of unashamedly dressed morbidly obese people. I, crank social Darwinist that I am, blurted—well, coming from me it sounded like sage commentary—that these fat people are not to be blamed. They are just livestock being bred and fattened by the State and corporations in collusion. Modern society, I said, is nothing but ‘people farming’. Our natural omnivorous primate impulse to consume coupled with our curiosity and status consciousness is the driver for our economy, which is largely built on feeding, clothing, hauling and entertaining us. To me, powered wheel-chairs is the metaphor for humanity’s future—our destination.

In the meantime, until you too have become a prisoner beneath your own subsidized blubber, here are some survival tips on managing your fellow humans, who have, like Odysseus’s crew, been reduced to grubbing livestock…

They make mass transit tough, taking up two and three seats at a time. But, what a human shield! Many a Middle Eastern terrorist would like to have one of these for a firing post. Squeeze in next to the food-stamp beneficiary and use them as a crash pad when the bus wrecks, or at the bus stop use them to shield you against wind, rain, menthol cigarette smoke, and 9MM slugs.

I have worked crowd control where 30% of the controlees were morbidly obese and 10% were two to three chairs wide. You cannot push them with your hands. They are however, by nature weak-willed and sensitive. If you can get them upset enough at you to move away, all you have to do is stand opposite from the direction you want the rest of the people to move, and your one-man-crowd will move them for you. The skinny ones that eddy around their mass are easy to pick off and shove into their ponderous wake.

Once I worked at a market that had a pretty blonde security guard who boasted [well, she did not actually boast about it] an enormous posterior. Her butt was three feet wide. She used to lay her torso face down on the belt of the last register with her butt facing the front door while she read magazines and ate ice cream cones. We had a suggestion box by the front door. One customer wrote, “Please, remove the giant ass from register 15. I am getting sick of seeing it every time I come through the front door.”

The night captain dutifully moved the ‘giant ass’ to a folding chair in the drug aisle and posted the owner of said posterior there to yell when she saw a shoplifter. When Sally told him that she didn’t yell [I don’t either] he said, “Then you can moo or squeal, I don’t give a shit. Just make noise.”

Later that week we grabbed a small, skinny man trying to leave with ill-gotten goods.

The night captain asked Sally, as she rolled up front on the handicapped cart, to throw him her handcuffs. She said, “I forgot them.”

He said, “Well then sit your fat ass right here! Sit on this piece-of-shit while I call the cops!”

As the night captain kept the 120 lb shoplifter pinned down by pressing his forehead to the floor Sally took a seat on the shoplifter’s lower back. The man howled in protest, “Oh Gawd yo! Dis big bitch be breakin’ my back yo. I’s gonna be crippled yo! I’s, suin’ dis joint—Good Gawd yo! I’m dyin’ unda dis fat bitch!”

I have rarely laughed that hard. Sally was not feeling merciful, and actually ground her butt onto the man’s back who had made the mistake of insulting her while she had him in a double reverse cowgirl mount.

I work in an industry that has thrived by selling high-fat, high-carb, high-sodium foods and beverages to low-income, low-IQ people who buy this stuff with my tax dollars. I see nothing wrong with using the resulting body-mass to gain a survival advantage.

James LaFond, July 4th 2012

Fighting Smart: Boxing, Agonistics & Survival