Mad Atoms

I recently went to Six Flags Magic Mountain. Christ on a bike, I've scarcely seen a sorrier cross section of humanity outside the DMV. I generally think I'm a totally average lookin' dude, but if that's America, then maybe I'm closer to Brad Pitt on the bell curve than I thought.  

I knew people got fat as they got older – that’s painfully clear every time I head back home to the Midwest – but when did people under 20 get so fucking huge? What are these kids eating? When I was a teen I ate Taco Bell everyday and drank Mountain Dew instead of water. And I was a faggy creative kid, so it’s not like I was burning off calories running around being athletic.  

In school, it used to be that there were the "fat kids," just like there were the foreign kids and the nerds who got bumped up a grade. You knew them all by name. Seems like most kids are the “fat kids” now. Which is bad news, cause with the playing field as such, what’s going to encourage these plumpers to get less plump?  

It's like that old joke where two guys are running away from a bear and one guy stops to put on running shoes. The other guy says, "Do you really think those will make you run faster than the bear?" And the first guy responds, "I don’t need to run faster than the bear. I just need to run faster than you."

Trying to look as good or better than everyone else is what keeps us collectively acceptable looking. If everyone you know is a tub-of-shit, you don’t need to be in particularly good shape to be the “fit one.”

And the stupid backlash on “the Hollywood image,” where people decide to take pride in being fat, or "naturally proportioned" as they say (yeah, I bet there were a ton of fat cavemen), is fine for adults, I guess, but now it seems like parents are projecting their delusional, fucked up body image concepts onto their offspring. Anorexic super models might actually be better role models than you, parents. At least they’re demonstrating self-control of some kind.  

Help your fat children! Saying your child is "beautiful" and "perfect just the way they are" isn’t gonna fix their cholesterol.