Intro

What makes these things hurt so bad is that it’s always on my mind anyway, from the time I wake up in the morning to look at myself in the mirror when I’m only wearing underwear, to my last look in the mirror at night when I’m only wearing underwear.  I know I’m fat, I know I suck as a human, and I know I need to do something about it, I just can’t start or can’t maintain, or can’t seem to give enough of a shit. 

I put on my 48×30 Dockers – that’s 48-inch waist, 30-inch length measurements, and I put on my XXXL shirt that fits pretty tight, and I hold my breath and slowly groan it out when I put on my shoes, though now I just wear slip-ons, so that helps curb the misery of having to hold my breath before bending over to tie my shoes, and lastly, I put on a belt that when I hold it up, is nearly 5 feet long.

I’m saying that it’s no good, and I hate myself.  But sometimes, though it’s always on my mind, it does get pushed to the backburner if I’ve got something constructive going on.  At my current job, those times were few and far between, but, at the moment, I was sort of on a work mission.   I was following a couple of scientist-type people down the hall from my office to a lab to investigate something or other.  I was actually going over in my mind how I could help them solve a problem as we passed a line of other folks waiting to go into a conference room for some training.

The hall I was walking down led to a chemistry lab if you kept going straight, and the cafeteria if you took a right midway down the hall.  As I passed a guy that was waiting in the line to go to the conference room, he said, just loudly enough that everyone waiting and everyone walking heard, “Lunchtime isn’t for another hour fat ass.” 

I took several more steps before the delayed reaction kicked me in the stomach.  I stopped and turned around.  The beginning of the end started.  The pain started there in the stomach and as it flowed outward from there, made me feel like I was lying in a bucket of ice, and then it choked me off at my throat, and melted and burned right there at my eyes, and wanted to escape out of those eyes as tears. In my clenched jaws, there were sticks and stones and across my forehead someone pressed a branding iron that seared me with the statement “words will always hurt me”. 

Those words, without doubt, are what sent me to the canvas.  Knocked off my feet. Shit-canned. Pow.  And for a moment I felt like never getting up again, but then I remembered that I am a fighter.

“What the fuck did you just say to me Richard?”