Feast your eyes on how fat I’ve gotten:

I have put myself on a diet. Not the “miracle diet,” which was my pet name for anorexia back in freshman year of high school. Back then, I only ate sugar free gummy bears and fruit, drank Diet Coke all day, then at about 1 or 2 AM would go running for a couple miles. Before sleep I would do one hundred sit ups and fifty pull ups. Day in and day out. Believe me, the “miracle diet” worked, to the tune of eighty pounds. Didn’t hurt that I was also going through my growth spurt at the time, but I managed to drop sixty to seventy pounds over summer vacation. When I got back to school, acquaintances didn’t even know who I was.

Not that diet, not now. I occasionally go through brief flurries of physical workouts, don’t get me wrong. Just a few months ago I was running weekly down by the Cambridge reservoir, eventually hitting a high water mark of five miles. My lifestyle in the restaurant industry was the impetus for that routine, and that same lifestyle is probably what ground the gears of my working out to a halt. Now, teetering on the brink of 200 pounds, I wish I had kept it up the whole time, but there’s no way to buy back into the past, even with cash tips from the restaurant. Instead, I am following Jared back to the future.

I dub my new weight loss strategy the “Subway diet,” even though I fully realize there may be trademark issues. This diet and the famous Subway diet are substantially different, however, and I think the suits will respect those differences. Jared was on a very strict regimen, and by God of grinders, if I was getting paid to lose weight I think I could manage that. In an effort, however, to build into my program enough flexibility so that the diet fits comfortably into my restaurant lifestyle, I will be less strict. That means that if I want to go for a twelve inch sub on any given day, then that is alright.

If I want to have a turkey sub from Subway with no cheese, and then go to work and eat a cheeseburger, that is alright. If there are days that I eat constantly throughout the day and then go out at night that is not alright, however. Those are the days that make me want to diet, and in the generous restaurant in which I work, those days are the problem. But I can’t beat myself up too much, because my knowledge of food and alcohol has greatly expanded in tandem with my waist line, and that makes me better at my job. It does not make me more attractive to guys. Certainly it has hurt my appeal in a swimsuit. As my sister recently pointed out. She compared my physique to a baby walrus.

The next step will be to get a gym membership. The only thing that bothers me about gyms is when people don’t rinse off before they get into the hot tub. That turns the hot tub into a tarpit loose with armpit juices, and that makes me want to stay home. I’m not saying that I have to join a gym that has a hot tub. But I am under the impression that all gyms have swimming pools, hot tubs, saunas, and ladies to lay burning hot stones on my feet. Losing weight is a battle, and so I must create myself a comfort zone as well as a warzone. That is the essence of civilization, be it a lie or truth. Its simply how I choose to live my life.

Longtime readers of 3rdarm.biz (aka the I Read You Longtime Club), may remember all the way back on January 3, 2006, I had a post about the Magic Google Eight Ball. For some reason, I was reading the archives… okay, for real, I was just gazing with nostalgia at pictures of myself when I was skinny, thanks… and I thought it might be interesting to share with you readers an updated look into the swirling vortex of the future through the Eight Ball. Here we go:

Googlism for: charles worthington
charles worthington is owner and creative director of one of the uk’s most respected hair and beauty companies
charles worthington is that rare thing in the crowded shampoo
charles worthington is defintely the man for me
charles worthington is a step in the right direction
charles worthington is a must
charles worthington is my brother
charles worthington is the toast of manhattan + model agency portrayed
charles worthington is making a name for himself with a new
charles worthington is one of the top names in the business
charles worthington is a wealthy eccentric
charles worthington is launching a new bodycare range
charles worthington is an internationally published fine art photographer of the male physique

But really I just wanted to see when I was skinny. At least the extra fat volume of my hair is slimming.

With a day off this week I carried out many of the steps planned over the past couple weeks in my mind for the change and renewal of the bathroom in my house. The essentials on my list, as pointed out and compiled by you, the toilet tourists, were: new shower curtain, preferably one without streaks of poop and grime, new bathmat, ditto poop and grime, new toilet seat, and some form of odor solution that deals with the smell of poop. The bathmat was purchased at BJ’s Wholesale Club for five dollars. Everything else cost considerably more and was bought at Bed, Bath and Beyond.

That is the store where the customer has to walk through Bed and Beyond to get to Bath. I barely made it to the aisles I needed for the bathroom because of my personal fascination with the Beyond. For example, I almost spent a hundred dollars on new pillows for the living room that emulated the current pillows we have but in a sturdier brown. I refuse to elaborate. In the bath section my roommates and I picked out a new shower curtain, with monkeys on it, and then a cloth curtain to class things up a bit. The name of the curtain motif is Retro Remix and it is possible to go get matching hand towels, toothbrush holders, trashcans, in that motif. Behold, the power of Beyond.

We didn’t do any of that matchy matchy stuff. The new toilet seat is black, but you won’t know it from the pictures here. That is because the poop and grime have joined forces to invent the opposite of WD-40, thus preventing any movement on the screws that latch on the old toilet seat. I wish I had some pictures of my head really, really deep down next to the toilet, trying to get the screws off, because my head was really down there deep. Man it was right there. Right down there. Luckily that perspective came in handy in terms of removing the poop and grime from the filth stained toilet bowl that my head and prize-winning hair were right next to. Right. Down. There.

So let’s see. I cleaned and scrubbed the toilet bowl and the shower stall and that helped with the bad smell. One item I did buy in Beyond was a Yankee electric candle system. Appropriately for the season, the scent I picked out for our new odor system is Autumn Leaves. One roommate has already said that the smell is too strong, that it gives him odor-induced migraines. I say, if you can get used to the daily smell of old poop then Autumn Leaves shouldn’t be so bad. And if mankind didn’t have bathrooms, Autumn Leaves is also the method one would use to wipe ass. If I had to endure the previous smell of the bathroom much longer, some serious sessions of aroma-therapy would be in order.

Same roommate actually purchased a dual shower head, which installed makes a big difference in how clean the pooping area is, which helps. It has the robot arm extender thing that makes douching simple. Its also got some kind of Moen-effect where it gets all misty, Gorillas in the Mist-style. Its like a jungle in a temperate climate zone, with the Autumn Leaves. Very confusing, but also very Beyond.

So come on over some time for a good ol’ poop. I think you’ll like it, especially if we ever get that new toilet seat on.

My new koh-captain of brunch, Ms. Koh, gave me elastics on Sunday. In my hair they went. In Tokyo, underground, you can pay big money to “pork your pork.” I prefer this style of pigtail:

Fossil evidence indicates that lemurs made the journey to the island of Madagascar thousands of years after it broke away from the continent of Africa. There, they lived in peace, with some species getting as large as gorillas. Only the crocodile preyed upon them in the water, but there was a bit more competition on the land itself… The main mammalian carnivore on the island of Madagascar is the evil, insidious, sneaking fossa. It looks like a cat but is not in fact a cat, nor is it related to the disturbing, feral jungle cat that has been roaming the woods of Connecticut these past months.

The fossa is more closely related to the mongoose. And while its young are born blind and toothless, within a few years they grow wicked and reckless. As a matter of fact, they are closely related to Kurt Russell’s evil deathcar driving character in Deathproof, Stuntman Mike. That shit is right there in the DNA. Lemurs climbed trees to escape the fossa, but with their retractable claws for grip, elongated bodies and tails providing balance, the bad fossa followed them right up. This lead me to believe that only weapons could have saved the lemurs against these oily, snakeless mongeese.

When the story broke about the mystery wildcat in Connecticut, even the whisper of autumnal breeze through dying yellow leaves set me on edge. All I could see was the darting, slithering, whining fossa on the approach, my ringtail a big fat target. So I got out my weapons, Converse Weapons, to be specific, and climbed a tree. And crouched on a rock. And kept my eyes wide, wide open for the beast in the forest. Golden purple limited edition 1988 Converse Weapons should keep the wicked marmot away.

To those who say I did not give enough coverage of the Allstar first year party, I say go into the sandwich shop and ask to see the official pictures. I am not in them, but they are vivid portraits of the team in celebration mode. Tonight I am in celebration mode because I don’t have to work at East Coast. The Mondays have been bumming me out. Instead I kicked back and watched the season 4 closer of Entourage on demand, after a few hours of U.S. Open tennis, with a steak tip, mashed potato, arugula feta salad dinner thrown in for good measure. And a liberal amount of time watching my roommate play Bioshock on Xbox 360. Save the little sisters!

Not to sound like I’m gloating, but the queue is very low. My laundry is fresh and clean. The house is too. I polished my wood floors today. The white whip is parked directly in front of my house. Autumn is my favorite season, and though it doesn’t start this week, it does start this month and I can feel that. Next Tuesday Kanye and 50 go head to head. I’m going to use my music service to listen to both albums, as I have done with the (beefless) Aesop / Talib simultaneous releases, but I’m thinking I’ll be down with Kanye. His song “Good Life” appeared on Entourage, and it was making me want to get polished up, maybe eat some oysters. Plus he gave the boys a ride on his jumbo jet to Cannes, come on.

Autumn is the time of year when Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill sounds awesome. But I digress, I haven’t even gotten to the best part of my day off: I got to hang with El and C today. They came over and checked out my new apartment (hence the doing of the wood floors, they didn’t notice) and then we went ball shopping at Target, where I ran into Chef Eric buying dog food and such, wearing his Jamaica - No Problem green and yellow cap. I love that cap. The three of us then drove to a park on Broadway in Somerville and played some round robin tennis. King of the Court was going on, and I was briefly king. Yup, King Arthur for a minute. Actually, my serve was as good as its ever been today. Of course that meant that I couldn’t hit forehand or backhand for shit, but it felt good. Media!

Watch me get screwed on the return.