The American Dream and Greasy Tastefulness

What the hell does the American Dream stand for anymore? I’m still trying to figure that out. It was constituted several years ago (being 100 years ago), but has changed since. For a man, does it mean getting a lot of women, living wealthy, financially secured, and geographically content (happy where you’re living)? I don’t know, I just don’t know. I’m going to have to lie down on my bed tonight and ponder this question for a little while.

I got up at 5:30 this morning and ran three miles around my neighborhood. Huffing and puffing, I noticed how strained and fatigued my legs were becoming as I made swift movements to continue to tread along. Before today, I hadn’t ran more than a mile in the morning in over two years, so obviously I had to get my body geared for the approaching day. I didn’t eat before I left. I just got up, put on some sweat pants and a sweat shirt and walked out of my house and began running amok down the side of the road.

I developed an affinity for running a while back because I like to think on the go. For some reason I have these habits where I always have to be on my feet when I’m talking on the phone. I walk around when I’m talking to somebody. If I’m having a conversation while sitting down, I can’t help but to jar my right foot up and down like I’m tapping to a song or something. It’s a habit. And no different with running, except that when I’m running I’m thinking. My heart is pushing through blood and I’m getting a nice flow through my body — I like to imagine that I can get good productivity out of my brain when I’m exercising and thinking at the same time. Let’s call it exerthinking.

When I got back home I didn’t eat much of a solid breakfast. I ate a bowl of Mini Wheats, drank around three or four of those sugar-packed Sunny D orange juices, and then ensued to pop a bag of low fat popcorn. Needless to say the popcorn tasted awful, like it was completely flavorless. I need my popcorn coated with butter, damn it! Though, I finished the popcorn and went on with my day.

I gave some of my friends the link to this blog a couple of days ago, and I asked for one’s opinion today. “It’s cool man, but,” he said, as I interrupted him. “But what?” I asked. His reply: “The premise is great, because you’re writing about all the bad stuff you eat, but after a while it could potentially be boring. You should try eating healthy stuff in the long run and then balance it out. It will make the blog that much better.” That was pretty much the conversation. After having a few hours to digest those thoughts, I’m in agreeance with what he said: I will eventually delve into healthier food when I take up the nerve to get the right amount of material I need for all of it (I’m a man of constructiveness).

I ordered a Pizza Mia Pizza from Pizza Hut today. I needed something, anything quick to eat to fill my hunger’s needs. Comparing it to Pizza Hut’s other pizzas, I’ll say right off the bat that it’s obviously cheaper, but has less toppings (unless you order more, which would cost you $1.50 per topping) than an average pizza from PH. The cheese is actual mozzarella cheese, the sauce doesn’t suck (because it’s not as sour as it usually is), and the crust is a lot better. Oh, and the pizza is as greasy as all the others are. I looked up a little bit on the Pizza Mia Pizza, and on the Pizza Hut Wikipedia page, it says that one slice of the Pizza Mia Pizza weighs 83 grams. Are you freakin’ kiddin’ me, Wiki? So the eight pieces that are apart of the Pizza Mia all adds up to 664 grams? Jeez.

(SIDE NOTE: Pizza Hut, what’s the deal? The Pizza Mia Pizza boxes have hearts on them and look like they’re designed prominently for a female’s pizza. I don’t get it. That’s all fine with me. But still, I don’t get it. It doesn’t hurt my masculinity one bit. I just want to be able to fathom the design of the pizza box or I’m going to lose my mind!)

Once dinner rolled around, my girlfriend surprised me by bringing over her world famous spaghetti. And when I said world famous, I’m not just joking, I’m being serious in the descent of how it got its meaning — it’s great spaghetti with all the right flavors. It comes at you like a spider monkey. The sauce is delicious that, when it amalgamates with the noodles, the heat and spiciness takes you over. I would say that I’m a very lucky man to have this gal.

Though, with all the junk that I consumed today, from the Pizza Mia Pizza to my girlfriend’s world famous spaghetti, all being washed down by about 11 or 12 bottles of Pure Life water, I can only make a prediction on how many calories and carbs that I assimilated from all of that. Don’t remind me.

My American Dream: To construct a freakin’ stable eating system for myself.

(For an ending note: I’m going to be gone for the rest of this week until Sunday night or Monday morning. My cousin is getting married and I’m going to be gone to the wedding. I’ll be back to write about all the junk that I eat while I’m gone, because there’s going to be quite a bit — wait, I’m underestimating myself! There’s going to be A LOT of junk that I voraciously devour into bite size amounts.)

America is Backwards (And So Can You!)

Do you ever hear about the old timers reminiscing over the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s and about how the acceptance of eating cheeseburgers and an order of fries at the local diner was OK? I hear about it quite a bit from the good old folks I know. Thing is, America is now fatter than ever from eating this, but back in the golden days, you could wallow down a burger and fries, a milkshake, and a soda and you’ll still be in good shape.

Of course, it wasn’t fast food necessarily, and the fast food chains that exist today didn’t stand in the ’40s, ’50s or ’60s. And the reason why people were OK with the eating of the burger, fries, milkshake, and sodas is because there was actually a thing called exercise back then. Or, if it wasn’t exercise, it was the invisibility of video games, or, as I am reluctant to say *gulp*, the computer. Everybody worked all the time and didn’t have the chances to waste away hours in front of TV screens. Imagine if video games and computers were around then. How fat would America be right now? I don’t know if I can pose that question in a regular sense so you can fathom the meaning of it, but if you think about it, politically correctness wasn’t as screwed up as it is now. Sure, you had your hippies and other people experimenting on the new horizons that nobody had heard of before, you had World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War occur between those three decades, but compare it to the newness of today. People then are now considered old fashioned.

(By the way, I’m writing this post while listening to the Stevie Wonder/Temptations/etc. collaborated song Uptight/Everything’s All Right. Y’know, just to spark some inspiration on my part for the good old days that I wasn’t around to see.)

But if you look at the technological advances of today and how they’ve prolonged the growth of video game consoles and computers, you forget to look at the advances of food. You got all this new food coming out over the past forty to sixty (40-60) years that you don’t pay it much heed when you give it thoughts. All this chocolate being branded into these new shapes (M&Ms or Easter Bunny Chocolates, anybody?). It’s great for marketing campaigns, and once people started looking more into food, they took enjoyment into it.

I don’t know what’s up with everything compared to ‘back then.’ The majority of women are smaller now compared to what they were in those times. I guess the cheeseburgers, fries, milkshakes, and sodas from those diners done some damage, at least. But, if you look at the skinny women today, many are anorexic or have unheard of eating disorders. Not to mention the widespread use of drugs plays an immense part on the continuing of American history.

Look, I’m not a historian (that’s for sure), but I’ve made my own judgments on America’s food for the past 40-60 years, and the significant difference is freaking me out, and will continue to.

The Early Days

I grew up where I live now, in a very small town in Southwest Virginia. When I was born, I was only a couple of pounds, and was born three months earlier than expected. I was kept at the hospital for a while, and the final verdict (or speculation, rather) was that I was a perfectly normal, healthy baby boy. Cool stuff, I think.

I grew up as an incredibly skinny kid. When I was 2-or-3 years old and scared to sleep alone, I’d sleep in between my parents (And uh, as I got older I never did apologize for ruining the things they could have done, but I digress!). My father would always be scared he would accidentally roll over top of me. I didn’t eat that much growing up in my early childhood days. I focused on running around outside my house and playing with my friends. My mother was 5′6 and my father was 5′7, so my expectancy to be tall was little to be expected of.

I was around 10-years-old, only 5′1-5′2, when I started eating a lot of junkfood. I got tired of my mom’s cooking and, since we had a garden, I grew a disdain for garden food. So I’d sneak Slim Jims into my room and eat them for dinner. I’d watch a movie with my father, he’d get out some barbecue potato chips, and we’d eat a bag every night. My father suddenly passed away when I was 12, and it was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through, emotionally. Usually when somebody is depressed like I was, they start eating a lot. I didn’t. I listened to music and I began to write. So I guess that’s when I started losing the unnecessary pounds I had put on.

I was 13-years-old in the 8th grade. Still chubby, I participated quite a bit in gym and met one of my lifelong friends that year. He and I would hang out in my backyard and pass football, baseball, shoot basketball. Hell, I lived near two baseball fields on a park, and we’d go over there and act like we were playing in the World Series. We’d pitch to each other. We’d throw out our arms. We’d run around the bases acting like wild childs. One of my fondest memories of that was acting like Hank ‘Henry’ Aaron when he’d hit his 715th career home run to pass Babe Ruth on the all time home run list. We’d imitate the Dodgers’ Kirk Gibson’s incredible pinch hitting home run from the 1988 World Series.

I grew taller. I lost weight. I grew to be 6′2-6′3. And that’s what I am as of today. Though, I still have a bit of flab, it’s hardly noticeable unless you’re feeling around my stomach (and that’s only accepted for foreplay, but again I digress). I still play the occasional pick-up game of basketball, though I haven’t thrown a baseball in a couple of years. I haven’t thrown a football in a couple of years. So the only healthy living outlet I’ve partaken in is the healthy running of basketball. Back and forth, down a court, several (more than several) times a [pick-up] game.

When I look back at the unhealthy choices I made as a kid, I think it reflects on how I eat now. The Slim Jim’s, Wise Barbecue Potato Chips, Sour Patch Kid Gummies, those delicious Sugar Straws. I’m almost just as bad now with my idiotic eating of fast food and other restaurants where I make poor choices of food that taste good but emanate terrible consequences later. I have daily headaches. I have one right now. I chug water every day to hope that I can urinate or defecate it out. I’m a Tylenol addict. It’s pathetic, but that’s why I’m writing this blog.

Bacon and Biscuits

Last night, I was nearly starving (yes, after I ate the McDonalds at 4 in the evening that would subsequently give me a raging headache), so I fried some bacon and put in some quick and easy biscuits in the oven. Like I said, I can’t cook at all, so frying bacon is like tying shoes to me, but the laces would be like whipping and cracking snacks snapping back and forth compared to the pops of bacon grease barely missing my left eye. But I digress.

Six pieces of bacon, four biscuits. Wolfed down with two bottles of Pure Life Water (yep, bottled, plastic water, but pure life is supposed to be 30 percent last plastic. Should we so believe?). Somebody once told me that bacon contained a cancerous protein, but I never looked it up or anything, so I’m still ignorant to all the other harms of this natural breakfast food that I’ve been eating since I was a child. Heck, when I was a kid — around 10, 11 or 12 — I used to eat a pack of bacon every freakin’ morning. I was around 5′3-5′4 then, very chubby, and ate a lot of junk food compared to today’s still-yet-overabundance. The difference from my eating today from then is that 1.) I’ve calmed down on soda/pop, 2.) I no longer eat a pack of bacon per morning (maybe 5-8 slices, and that’s too much anyhow), and 3.) I used to be in love with chocolate; more specifically Hershey’s — I used to eat maybe two bars a day, now I only eat about one bar every month or two.

So, I got taller, exercised more, and became a decently healthy guy. But from all the unhealthy crap that I eat, I wouldn’t call myself healthy. This is usually my routine on a daily basis, most of the time:

6:30-7:00: Wake up and sit around on my computer until I feel hungry. Once I feel hungry, I go into the kitchen, get out eggs and bacon (I usually eat three to four scrambled eggs with, as said, five to eight slices of bacon, maybe some sausage every now and then), occasionally I’ll eat two pieces of toast (but it is seldom), and that’s my breakfast. To wash it all down, I’ll either drink two of those small bottles (half the size of say a soda bottle) of Sunny D Orange Juice. Then with some water.

4:00-5:00: I can usually go a while without eating. On my lunch break, there’s nowhere to go (besides the annoying fast food that I’m trying to stray away from), so I usually don’t venture out. When I come home, I find something to put in the microwave from my fridge, or I’ll fix something else that’s incredibly easy. Other times, I’ll eat what you think — fast food, baby! The joyful, deceiving, ‘makes you feel good when you taste it but will make you feel like a bowl of crap two hours later’ FAST FOOD! Of course, there’s one restaurant that I’ll order from every now and then, and that’s a place known as El Mariachi. It’s an actual sit down restaurant (pretty much the ONLY one here). What I usually get there is chicken wings or tacos (the tacos are a lot better than Taco Bell’s, but you guessed it, more lucrative). The wings are good, but after a while they’re easy to get tired of. They always give you chips and salsa when you order, so that’s a plus, too. But I bet sodium and carbs are packing all over that, but I’ll let my ignorance be uncorrected.

Anyhow, I’m going to go and eat breakfast. High in protein. High in fat. High in the category that’s not listed on the back of the cartons/packs, but known to you and I as Clogged Arteries.

Fast Food and You

I’m not a health expert or a guy that can give you a run down on everything the human body is made up of and what it should consist of and what it lacks. That’s what I think is going to make this blog appealing to a couple of people — some may be able to relate to it from their own experiences.

Like many Americans, I’m addicted to fast food. I live in a small town in Southwest Virginia that doesn’t have a wide array of restaurants to choose from (OK, we have three McDonald’s, one Burger King, one Taco Bell, two Wendy’s, a Hardee’s, and, uh, that’s about it). And because I’m a horrid cook, there’s not an alternative. I’m not overweight, but the food that I consume is ‘potentially overweight threatening’ and seriously health damaging. But I believe you know that already.

When I said that I was addicted to fast food, I mean it — I’m addicted to it like the way drug addicts are addicted to crack. I’ve gone weeks without fast food before, but those weeks were just as unhealthy. I didn’t receive a good source of vitamins or protein from what I ate whatsoever (Ramen Noodles for the win!). So, on a tight schedule during the week, I visit McDonald’s, Burger King, , Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, and Hardee’s various times. Too many times, actually. To drive out to a restaurant that has any food that’s remotely health would be an ardent drive for me to do consistently, considering that it’d be an hour or two drive to obtain the said healthy food.

So I’m going to keep a journal of the fast food/other unhealthy food that I consume during days of the week and will try to update often.

And for the record, if you wanted to know my height and weight, you no longer need to wonder:

Height: 6′2, banking on 6′3
Weight: 198 lbs. (How much you wanna bet that that number increases by the end of 2008?)

Today, I ate a hamburger, an order of fries, and 4-piece chicken nugget meal from McDonald’s. In fact, I just finished eating around an hour and thirty minutes ago, and already I feel the effects of the food impairing my mind and weakening my stomach.