It Has a First Name

It's hormones, my friend, it's all hormones. Everything that can be done to optimize their profile -- that's what fitness is. For muscles, exercise does two things only. The receptors become more sensitive, and a sufficient amount of exercised muscle mass puts out the hormones that receptors, uh, crave. I suspect that's why babies add muscle -- it's not the little bit of exercise they get, looking and crying and exhibiting metabolism; it's that they're wired to pour out hormones onto sensitive receptors.

I was just idling here supine and naked of course on my lavender satin sheets listening to Satie, staring into the gilt-veined mirror affixed to the ceiling above the wide divan whereon I customarily take my ease, languidly caressing my magnificent torso with lazy tapering fingertips, wondering how I can be so breathtakingly beautiful when all the other male members of my family are so, well, so average. Brothers, nephews -- merely average. All except my son. And his lifestyle is like mine, sans the sheets -- in terms of diet and exercise, I mean. It's hormones. What we do, which is different than what other people do, optimizes, somehow, our androgens, allowing the seemingly effortless grace with which we plow through the wearisome tide of humanity.

I have a young man's hormones, because the diet I adopted as a young man has preserved rather than destroyed my endocrine system. The only major difference was the absence of meat. Other vegetarians are pasty and frail? But they are muffin vegetarians, carbetarians, addicted to an insulin imbalance that ages them as much as meat would. As for meat, yes, there's all that phenomenal protein, and as Americans we understand that beef is a sacrament. But you need only enough. Too much may not be the same problem as too little, but it is a problem. And then there's the putrefaction.

Every dead thing you put into your gut, rots. Meat is rotgut. Of course, bacteria gets to work breaking down everything you eat, but you surely are capable of discerning the difference between the stink of roadkill on the one hand, and, say, the aroma of cut grass on the other? One is rank as poison, the other is actually sort of pleasant. You eat old meat, you get sick and puke all night. You eat old salad and, uh, well, you get some extra fiber in your diet. Now, while all this is very instructive and fascinating to you, the point is the effect of putrefaction in your body. I suggest it is detrimental to your endocrine system. I'll leave it to you to puzzle out your own theory as to how that might be.

No, of course you couldn't possibly continue to endure your drab hollow existence without your precious rotting cadaver diet. Heaven forfend. That lump of malodorous slime squeezing sluggishly through the torpid tube meandering through your slack abdomen is utterly essential to your life and happiness. Who could argue with your emotion? Eat, eat! Be happy! Binge, in fact, on all the fat and grease and parasite eggs you so heartily crave! Who am I, your most humble servant, to wish you anything less than everything your slightest whim desires? A mere nothing, is all. Eat a cat. Eat a baby. Eat something gray that's been died I mean dyed pink and placed in the open and slightly cooled air of a supermarket butcher's display. Yummy! The bright tang of urea squeezed into old Elsie's tissue as she's being electrocuted! So savoury! What sane person would ever give that up? It's madness even to suggest the idea. I would never do such a thing. Glut yourself on the raw carcass even as it swings past, hooked to the conveyor belt in the abattoir that's hosed down absolutely every day that the minimum wage workers think they have to. Slaughterhouse quality control is renowned for its excellence. As is your diet, and common sense. As for me and the ax that I grind, it's clearly inferior to the chainsaws the meatpackers use on the heaped-up corpses that modern technology trundles past the dismemberment and evisceration stations. It's mechanized, for crumbs sake. That's like science! So that proves meat is the best.

I must have been wrong about all that hormone stuff too. You just keep on ingesting the estrogen them farmers and scientists is always injecting into them factory cows and stuff. It'll put hair on your chest, or at least give you breasts. That's good too. So, uh, what was my point again? I forget. And isn't it time to eat? Go have some bacon. Cuz pork is the other white meat. Along with worms.


J