Diabetes

19 03 2008

Every black person in America lives with the horrifying truth that everything we love will eventually give us diabetes.

That’s right, buddy. Consider the following…

Fried chicken, fried scallops, fried shrimp, catfish, candied yams, collards, hog maws, chitterlings (ugh), scrapple, biscuits and gravy, peach cobbler, fried apples, sweet potato pie, cranberry sauce, green beans, stuffing, fried turkey, fried potatoes, pig feet, chicken feet (why?), hamburgers, pulled pork sammiches, hot dogs, pork ribs, butter beans, BBQ chicken, chicken and dumplings, corn pudding, rice pudding, red beans and rice, grits, black-eyed peas, devilled eggs, extra cheesy mac and cheese, corn bread, kool aid, southern sweet tea (which peach, if you’re a rich asshole) and above all…the HOT SAUCE.

You’re hungry as fuck now. You know you are. You’re so hungry right now that you wanna run outta the office and make love to someone for the next six hours. And I’m not talking about tender, emotional lovemaking. I’m talking about angry fucking - the kind that leaves you, your significant other, and even the family dog ten pounds lighter and covered in sweat. The kinda sex that, to a passerby, looks more like Capoeira than coitus. Sex that’s so damn good you start swearing at each other. That’s the kind of irresistible fucking hunger I’m talking about.* Yep. Well guess what?

It’s going to kill us all.

soulfood.jpg

Figure 1: Vile Temptress

My grandmother is 96 years old. In her 96 years, I don’t think she’s ever eaten a meal that wasn’t made with at least 6 heaping tablespoons of butter and lard. She eats soul food EVERY MOTHERFUCKING DAY. Yet, she’s about the healthiest 96 year old you will ever meet. Her hearing is spotty and she tends to forget things, but she can walk anywhere, climb stairs without a problem, and had the presence of mind about a month ago to tell me “oh child, siddown and shove it” when I made the rather ludicrous (but empirically true) claim that cats hate black people.

The rest of us are doomed. Soul food is going to go from being a delectable treat to forcing us to take Wilford Brimley seriously instead of laughing at his pronunciation of the word ‘diabetes’ (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2: Will not tolerate Diabeetus

Diabetes is particularly frightening to me, because being both black and native american means that I’m burning both ends of the diabetes candle. Chicken to the right of me, Bannock to the left of me. For all the legions of black people running around out there thinking you have Cherokee ancestry…you better hope you’re wrong.

*I should write trashy romance novels. Or more accurately, I shouldn’t.


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Categories : Health

Bad Hygiene

19 03 2008

Some fucker in the bathroom today took a dump so unbelievably epic that if it had a soundtrack, it would’ve featured ‘O Fortuna‘ as the title track. After prolonged and audible straining, several prayers to Roman, Greek, and Sumerian deities to free the meadow muffins from his colon, enduring the resulting Gastrointestinal Symphony as rendered by the Butt Trumpet Philharmonic, and spending a good ten minutes wiping his ass…

THIS DUDE BOUNCED WITHOUT WASHING HIS HANDS!

It so happened that another black dude and I exited our stalls at about the same time, and the look on his face, which was clearly the result of what he’d just heard (the dump) and not heard (the cleansing sound of water), was that of a freshly raped prison inmate. At this point my memory was suddenly refreshed: black people HATE bad bathroom hygiene.


handshake.jpg

Figure 1: Fuck you.

Black people around the country cringe in anger when we see urine droplets all over the sides of the damn urinals and on the floor*, doo-doo skid marks all around the sides of the toilet, unflushed toilets**, strips of toilet paper all over the damn place, and the lingering scent of excrement in the air because people refuse to courtesy flush. Let two black people meet in a bathroom under these conditions, and knowing looks of disgust will be shared. They will also share a knowing look of relief, because they know that black people rarely leave a public bathroom in foul condition***.

This all, of course, addresses male behavior in the bathroom. But what about the women?

I’ve known women in general to be pretty clean when it comes to doing numbers 1 and 2, but they go through some kind of Kafkaesque hygenic metamorphasis when they decide to jump in the shower. It’s a two part puzzle - 1.) they somehow leave more hair on the floor, sink, and drains than the total amount of hair they’ve ever grown on their heads in their entire lives and 2.) despite the fact that they exit the bathroom covered in robes and towels, there is water EVERYWHRE and the towels are COMPLETELY DRY. This leaves men to wonder 1.) where the fuck is all this hair coming from, and 2.) what are the goddamn towels for?

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Figure 2: Why?

I assume women wear the towels to distract us from the hairy swamp worlds they create in our bathrooms by providing easy access to their naughty bits. After all, I might be willing to overlook the fact that my bathroom looks like someone just went to work on a Yorkie with clippers and a fire hose if sex is within easy reach. As for the hair…I’m simply going to assume that women actually relieve themselves by growing hair out of their asses and shaving it off as they shower - because I really have no proof that any woman has ever taken a dump (in the traditional sense), and no other explanation seems plausible.

*How the FUCK does this happen?
**HOW HARD IS IT TO FLUSH A FUCKING TOILET?!?!?!?
***This is similar to the look of relief black people give each other when we hear on the news that a newly-alleged criminal isn’t black


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Categories : Etiquette