By the middle of 2021, I was, in a word, fat.
Not the cool kind of fat, as in phat, but just plain-old fat. In the middle of my battle with Longhaul Covid and following a course of Hail-Mary high-dose steroids to fix a Longhauler mouth issue that remains to this day, I punished my scale by stepping on it, and in return it nastily told me I was 218 pounds.
“Hmm,” I thought. “Interesting.”
Not interesting enough to do anything about it, of course. Not for a few more months, anyway. It wasn’t as if exercising was an option. Most of the time I couldn’t walk up the stairs without my lungs feeling as if they were going to explode.
Alas, all I had to do was completely revolutionize the way I ate.
Once I ditched traditional Western medicine and, in desperation, went to a functional medicine doctor (shout-out to you, Dr. Laura!), I was confronted with the reality that just about everything I stuffed down my gullet caused massive internal inflammation that was making me, well, to be generous, puffy.
So I changed everything. I gave up anything processed, and I became one of those annoying assholes who asks for gluten-free options (but not without lots of shame, so at least there’s that). I essentially became a more strict version of paleo.
And I lost more than 30 pounds.
Now, to be fair, when I started, I didn’t give a rip if I lost a single pound. I just wanted to maybe feel like I wasn’t going to die.
“Oh, I could never eat like you eat!” I frequently hear.
Yeah ya could … if you’d tried everything else to get back to the land of the living and were still just as lost as you were the day you started your journey. Desperation is a wonderful motivator.
The problem is that my pants now are fallin’ down all the time.
I’d bought new pants near the height of my fatness. These pants no longer fit.
“Why don’t you just wear a belt?”
Duh. I wear a belt. Put it this way: You can tighten a belt only so much before you’ve created new problems. One, the little clasp that fastens dress pants? It comes apart easily when you tighten them so much. And two, tightening the pants doesn’t change the fact that they look like tents on me now.
Enter Tony Kornheiser.
For those of you not in the know, Mr. Tony is the host of the long-running ESPN show “Pardon The Interruption” — PTI, to us cool kids — and has a not-quite-daily-these-days podcast called, aptly, The Tony Kornheiser Show. He’s a veteran Washington Post journalist and an aging curmudgeon who makes me laugh.
One of his podcast sponsors is Indochino, a made-to-order dress-clothes etailer. Never doubt the power of testimonial advertising, kids. It is solely because of Indochino’s frequent TK Pod advertising that I punched up their website, picked out some dress pants and then had Wifey Poo measure me.
In a series of how-to-measure-someone videos, they tell you to find a friend and a tape measure. I wondered what kind of mere friend I could possibly have who would be comfortable measuring my crotch, which is accomplished by starting the tape measure at your belly button and running it to your lower back as if it were the dental-floss part of a thong.
Thankfully, I’ve got Wifey Poo and she has no issues working in that general area.
And so it is that I placed my order for two pairs of pants last night that hopefully will actually fit the new me. They’re supposed to take four to six weeks to arrive — something I was extremely familiar with when I ordered cassette tapes back in the 1980s but that seems excruciatingly long in the Prime twenty-twenties.
So to wrap this bad boy up, special thanks to everyone who made this possible — Dr. Laura, Tony Kornheiser and, most of all, Wifey Poo, whose hazard pay is in the mail.
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🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Late Savior📖Dead Romance💔REM🎶 THE DAILY UPDATE Once again, Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has disappointed, failing to show up despite telling one of this most ardent supports that he was coming back. South African pastor Joshua Mhlakela has claimed for months that God’s Only Son personally revealed to him that he…
Flying Fly — September 24, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Travel Buddy🪰Sleep😴Swinging🎶 THE DAILY UPDATE There was a fly on my flight from Washington, D.C., back to the STL on Sunday. This made me wonder how confused that fly would be when he got off the plane. And before you say “Flies aren’t capable of confusion,” are you really so sure?…
School Debauchery — September 23, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Freaking Fox Lane🤯Math Zap⚡Swinging🎶 THE DAILY UPDATE I spent the weekend hanging with someone I knew in high school who had become a friend later in life. This was the second year of a Dudes Trip in which we go to a baseball game at a different park. Last year was…
Censorship — September 22, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Shhhh🤐Maria🎶Free Speech🤐 THE DAILY UPDATE As a high school senior, I served as the sports editor of the Fox Lane Forum, the school newspaper of Fox Lane High School. But on the day a kid named Jason flung a chair across the basketball court while play was still going on before…
Planes, Trains & Automobiles— September 20, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Travel Log✈️Maria🎶Free Speech🤐 THE DAILY UPDATE I awoke this morning in an Airbnb in Baltimore, Maryland, a row house in the shadows of Camden Yards. At least … I’m pretty sure that’s where I awoke. I understand there are people out there for whom transcontinental travel is the norm. I am…
The AI Conundrum — September 17, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Making Myself Jobless?💔Voices🎶Good Cancer😕 THE DAILY UPDATE Want to know a secret? I’ve used artificial intelligence to write an article for a client. Not only that, but I didn’t tell my client I wrote the article. Depending on who you are, your reaction is somewhere between “And …?” and “YOU FRAUD!…
San Diego’s Homeless — September 16, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩The Least of These💔Voices🎶Good Cancer😕 THE DAILY UPDATE I’ve been in San Diego since Saturday, hanging out with Wifey Poo for a few days in advance of the Content Marketing World 2025 conference that apparently has brought half the continental United States to learn more about writing and producing stuff. We…
Saying Goodbye — September 12, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Giving Up On Hope❤️Hesitate🎶Eternal Sunshine🌞 THE DAILY UPDATE A few days ago, I wrote about Hope. In understanding that the hope I was holding for change and resolution in a situation that has pretty much defined most of the past six or seven years of my life was causing me a…
Free Speech — September 11, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Charlie Kirk 😔Sludge🎶Claims🤥 THE DAILY UPDATE I’ll be honest: Until he was shot and killed yesterday, Charlie Kirk was not on my radar. If you had asked me, “Who’s Charlie Kirk?” I would have said, “An NFL wide receive who used to play for the Jaguars.” Of course, that’s Christian Kirk,…
An End to Hope — September 10, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Shawshank❤️Shinedown🎶Eternal Sunshine🌞 THE DAILY UPDATE The 1994 film Shawshank Redemption, based on the short story by author/god Stephen King, is about many things but none more so than hope. The concept of hope bubbles up throughout the movie and provides the framework for its conclusion, partly illustrated by the GIF above…
1980s Rom-Coms — September 9, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩The Lloyd In Me❤️Mannequin Song🎶Eternal Sunshine🌞 THE DAILY UPDATE Having done most of my growing up in the 1980s and polishing off my teen years in the 1990s, today confuses the hell out of me when it comes to romance and love. Yesterday, I mentioned Lloyd Dobler from the movie Say…
Love the Niche — September 8, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Sumo/Curling Connection🥌Eyes🎶Danced🕺 THE DAILY UPDATE I grew up in the Lloyd Dobler era, which means I believe deeply in the power of the boombox to overcome all sorts of relationship and cultural differences and in the beauty of niche sports. To quote the wise soothsayer from Say Anything: “What I’ve been…
Fire & Ice — September 7, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Burnin’ n’ Curlin’🥌Live Again🎶Fraud💻 THE DAILY UPDATE Yesterday was a day of temperature extremes for me. I spent the morning burning the second half of a huge pile of limbs and brush I’d cleaned up in the spring. Little known fact: When you move to Missourah, you are issued a huge…
No Hiccups — September 6, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Medical Marvel🩺Black —>Blue🎶Good Cancer?😮 THE DAILY UPDATE Here’s an odd fact about me: I haven’t had a case of the hiccups this millennia. No one — no doctor, no non-doctor, no AI — knows exactly why, but the last time I remember having hiccups is 1999. And the only significant health…
The Ugly Things — September 4, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩A Writing Project🖊️Cold🎶Wildfire🔥 THE DAILY UPDATE Life isn’t pretty. I’m not sure when it was that I learned that, but I know it is true. No stage of my life can be considered anything other than “how the sausage is made,” and for those who haven’t seen sausage made, it is…
Hacked — September 3, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩blinkies-karaoke.com😠Fast Car🎶Fall🍂 THE DAILY UPDATE First, an ear update from yesterday’s plight. Fear not, loyal reader. I am back among the two-eared hearing. What came out of my ear during the ceremonial cleaning ritual I did over my bathroom sink was unholy and the stuff of horror movies. We shall never…
What? — September 2, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Deaf👂Fast Car🎶Sports Wednesday⚾ THE DAILY UPDATE I can’t hear. Or, more specifically, I can’t hear out of my right ear. And it’s making me cranky. As the one regular reader of this drivel (Yo, Kim) knows but probably forgot because who in their right mind would actually commit this to memory…
Sad Anniversaries — September 1, 2025
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Jacob😢Sludge🎶Curling🥌 THE DAILY UPDATE August 30th marked the 25th anniversary of the day my life changed forever. On Aug. 30, 2000, Wifey Poo and I went to what was supposed to be a routine ultrasound for our first child. We were so excited. We were going to get to see our…
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