The Fat Face Ramble

There are fattening foods and there are foods that instantaneously fill up your face. In fact, before the advent of beer and doughnuts in the latter part of the 20th century, not necessarily in that order, I had no idea that the elasticity of the human face was somewhere between a water balloon and chewing gum. Notice I said chewing gum and not bubble gum. The latter is quite elastic. Way more than said face. Anyway, it appears that it matters not whether the beer is light, ultralight, bantam weight, or horsepiss. You swig a bottle or two and suddenly the jejune mirror in your bathroom becomes a convexo-concave oppressor, you scarce can recognize your mug and it is all too depressing because you know what will have to ensue for re-instating facial flaccidity. There is the skipping of breakfast which is customary. There are those who say that the odd cereal bar or banana at 7.00 AM does you a world of good. However, to me, that would never constitute breakfast. If I cannot have a sausage , a croissant, a baguette generously slothered with butter, 2 fried eggs over-easy (which they are , trust me. They get over very easily), a few strips of bacon and the occasional Mcgriddle sandwich, I can skip this meal altogether. It is never hard. And one does it all the time anyway. So one then has to advance three steps to Old Kent Road, pass Go, collect 200 and do a light lunch. A salad, a sandwich on whole-wheat bread with no cheese or mayonnaise. Maybe some ham. Perhaps some of those garish Italian cold cuts. Ever seen those? If you order the Italian BMT at subway and you are not asleep on the counter, you cannot miss them. There are three distinct sets of mottled discs that adorn your bread. Each is one shade oranger than the next. I wonder if the cold cuts are just painted differently for aesthetics. Or perhaps there is a particular salami that is derived from the entrails of an orange-blooded mammal, if I were to venture a wild guess, an orangutan. Irrespective of the type of salami, I doubt if it could be construed as light food. In these exhibits, the evil fat particles are well distributed all across the disc of meat and manifest themselves as white spots. They show up in excellent contrast against the orange background. There is no missing them unlike in say , the doughnut or the french fry which, for example, is devoid of fatty whitespots altogether. Then, after such a leisurely lunch, or a miserly munch, one is full enough to avoid cravings till about 5.00 pm, upon when one goes berserk. He gets home, drops his laptop bag at the nearest uninhabited spot and makes a dash for the kitchen. Opens the fridge, and peers in. Hmm…it is swarming with weather-beaten leftovers from yore. There is some potato riff-raff. Some rice moth balls. Some repulsive pulses seem to foul the air, need to open the lentilator. A portion of a chicken leg is peeking out the black casserole. It is the the relatively unsubstantial end. The appetizing end with the flesh is, at this moment, sunk in a morass of a jaundiced syrup. This is the other end, i’m afraid, the one that consists of an unsightly ball composed of an all-too-familiar tapestry of laminated chicken skin, cooked in cardamom broth for three centuries.Hmm…. The beer in the corner looks ravishing by comparison. The pizza-hut phone number on the fridge does not hurt the eyes either. The prospect of this grand synergy of pizza and beer calls for the momentous merger and after a couple of hours of hapless swallowing in the backdrop of the evening entertainment on theT.V one is left with a surfeited feeling, some concealed guilt and a fat face.