The Anatomy is a Crime.
Yeah, I'm one of them wankers. Its the new year and I'm doing stuff because of that. Stupid stuff. Giving stuff up. Doing some exercise. Reappraising my life-style on the arbitrary turning of the calendar's leaf.
What a wanker.
How uncool.
I know the gyms will be full of fat people for two weeks, panting and stinking up the seats of the static bikes. The pubs will be denuded of any but the most enthusiastic drinkers. Soy bean salads will be pushed languorously around plates and the pavements will throng with fit-bitted first-timers stretching their spandex to breaking point.
How contemptible these people are, trying to greedily prolong their lives, offsetting their dissipation with sweaty self-harm. Denying themselves luxury like some sack-cloth shrouded penitent. And just because its a new year. What a ridiculous reason: as the world turns you pick a single moment in the arbitrary framework of the Gregorian Calendar. (Its still the 19th of December under the Julian Calendar, you losers).
Nevertheless, if I don't make some sort of Pyrrhic gesture at this point I am going to die. It is true to say that you cannot live as I have lived and not end up as a landfill that someone has painted a smiley face on. And that's exactly what has happened. Well, I'm no longer prepared to go through life looking like Jabba the Hutt's passport photo. Actually that's not true: what I actually look like is Scottish crime author Val McDermid. And as a younger man that was never my intention.
Look, I'm not a mad man. I'm nearly fifty. I'm lazy and poor. To actually properly change the shape of my body at this point I would need a gym, a personal trainer, a nutritionist, a subscription to GOOP magazine and a lot of invasive surgery. I don't really have access to any of these things.
But...I can get off my arse. I can go for walks. I can change my diet. I can do the occasional sit-up. I can dig out my Jayne Middlemiss Yoga DVD. And I can stop throwing so much booze down my neck you'd think Ollie Reed was squatting in my colon and on fire. And maybe, just maybe, I can claw back something. I can go back to being man-shaped rather than resembling something vast and unidentifiable thrown up on a beach after a storm.
So, I'm going dry. Not just for January but for as long as I see fit. I shall be as pale and brittle as a stick of gypsum by March. And by then I should have finished a Scottish crime novel.
What a wanker.
How uncool.
I know the gyms will be full of fat people for two weeks, panting and stinking up the seats of the static bikes. The pubs will be denuded of any but the most enthusiastic drinkers. Soy bean salads will be pushed languorously around plates and the pavements will throng with fit-bitted first-timers stretching their spandex to breaking point.
How contemptible these people are, trying to greedily prolong their lives, offsetting their dissipation with sweaty self-harm. Denying themselves luxury like some sack-cloth shrouded penitent. And just because its a new year. What a ridiculous reason: as the world turns you pick a single moment in the arbitrary framework of the Gregorian Calendar. (Its still the 19th of December under the Julian Calendar, you losers).
Nevertheless, if I don't make some sort of Pyrrhic gesture at this point I am going to die. It is true to say that you cannot live as I have lived and not end up as a landfill that someone has painted a smiley face on. And that's exactly what has happened. Well, I'm no longer prepared to go through life looking like Jabba the Hutt's passport photo. Actually that's not true: what I actually look like is Scottish crime author Val McDermid. And as a younger man that was never my intention.
Look, I'm not a mad man. I'm nearly fifty. I'm lazy and poor. To actually properly change the shape of my body at this point I would need a gym, a personal trainer, a nutritionist, a subscription to GOOP magazine and a lot of invasive surgery. I don't really have access to any of these things.
But...I can get off my arse. I can go for walks. I can change my diet. I can do the occasional sit-up. I can dig out my Jayne Middlemiss Yoga DVD. And I can stop throwing so much booze down my neck you'd think Ollie Reed was squatting in my colon and on fire. And maybe, just maybe, I can claw back something. I can go back to being man-shaped rather than resembling something vast and unidentifiable thrown up on a beach after a storm.
So, I'm going dry. Not just for January but for as long as I see fit. I shall be as pale and brittle as a stick of gypsum by March. And by then I should have finished a Scottish crime novel.
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