Gabriel on Performance Enhancing Drugs

Yeah, I’m writing about this topic because my boy A-Rod got caught juicing. But really, was anyone surprised? Anyone who remotely follows baseball could have figured that A-Rod was shooting up the sunny-D. I mean this man is expected to smash the homerun record held by Barry Bonds. And as much as I like Barry, that man was juicing like oranges. If someone gave you a pill and told you that the pill would make you faster, stronger, look better and have the potential to earn more money what would you do? Odds are you would take the pill as soon as you could, not even thinking about the consequences. Of course I mean if the pill wasn’t something that could be classified as steroids or performance enhancing drugs. Because steroids and PEPs are bad, right?

FIGURE 59.1: Stronger, faster, richer, governor….

Wrong! This country places a heavy emphasis on winning and competition and numbers. Baseball emphasizes all of these aspects of American culture more than any other sport. Fans (and other people that don’t even like baseball all that much like me) want players to hit 1000 homeruns in a career, 100 in a season and have 10,000 hits. This tremendous pressure is enough to tempt anyone to do steroids. Add to the fact that Americans love the stats so much that franchises will put very lucrative bonuses into contracts for certain career and season milestones reached by the players. If people want performance enhancers in professional sports to stop, then the overall hive thinking of America needs to change.

Some might think or say “Gabriel, it isn’t America; it’s just these dumb athletes that are the problem. Not Joe Six Pack!” To these fools, I say wrong!!! Some of the most brilliant minds in America take performance enhancing drugs. No, most athletes aren’t that brilliant, but I’m not talking about them. Research was done a few years ago that leads people to believe that a lot of the leading scientists and researchers in the world take mental stimulants to perform at high levels of cognitive thinking and focus that they wouldn’t normally possess even given their high intellect. College students who are supposed to the avant garde of intellectual thought (yeah right…) take adderall and live on mountain dew, coffee and other stimulants so that they can study for 12 hours straight on 2 hours of sleep. But these are the same people that point their fingers in shame.

The same people pointing their fingers are the same ones giving their children food of little, no, or negative nutritional value on a daily basis with no mention of fruits or vegetables. These are the same people smoking five packs of cigarettes in one day and the same people getting little to no physical exercise. All of these things contribute adversely to health but since other people aren’t making a big deal about it (ESPN), it suddenly becomes okay. Americans are dumb.

FIGURE 59.2: Bad for you…just like steroids…

Gabriel on Resolutionists

I’m back from my vacation of Halo 3, the facebook application League of Heroes, and eating mass amounts of things that are bad from me to regail you with a tale of the future. By future, I mean when I get off work in an hour and a half. This will be a tale of the resolutionist. So sit back and enjoy.

When I get off work, I’ll be going to the gym for the first time in about two weeks because of the crappy holiday season that has just passed us. I, like many Americans have neglected nutritional commonplace in order to enjoy the past two weeks, consuming things that I normally don’t consume. I almost never drink carbonated beverages (known as soda or pop, but I will refrain from using either term as it is the subject of a stupid and irrelevant debate), yet I drank a grand total of 4.5 of them over the past two weeks. This almost matches my total for all of 2008 before that. I try to cook at home and eat lots of things that are green (and not green in the way that those eco-hippies have beaten that word into the ground but legitimately green as in the color that possesses a wavelength of approximately 520-570 nanometers) and leafy. However, I substituted this for increasing my daily dosage of v8 to superhuman levels to offset the amount of fried chicken and Chinese food I consumed. All in all, it was not a good time health-wise for Gabriel.

FIGURE 58.1: I feel like this guy exists…

But now that reality has gone back to normal, it’s time for me to get back into my healthy fat man ways instead of my plain fat man ways. To start kick start these habits I will be visiting my old friend the gym. Now, usually I’d go to the gym anyway and just keep up my gross eating habits, but it was closed due to holiday softness. So when I go today I expect to see….*squints*…yes, my psychic powers are enabling me to see large quantities of fat people and skinny disillusioned snowbunnies who think they’re fat from their holiday salads. These douchebags I just mentioned are the resolutionists. Everyone knows the resolutionists. They might be your mother, or sister, or brother, or father, or some distant family member. But everyone knows at least one. Hell…most people are resolutionists. There is nothing wrong with wanting a better body for health reasons or because you’re a superficial jerk (like me!) However, the resolutionists are not these people.

Resolutionists are people who ate too much holiday ham and were sitting on their couch one day struggling to breathe with their hardened arteries and pork lined intestines and thought they were going to do something about their decades of neglectful obesity with one trip to the nearest gym. These people are violently slapped in the face by reality when 15 minutes go by while they are in the gym and actual exercise gets too hard. They are bewildered by the fact that there is no motivational music playing in the background as they do jump rope and sit ups and the pounds aren’t falling off after three jumping jacks. All they can manage to do at that point and time is to walk around the gym trying different machines and polluting the gum atmosphere with their special brand of barbeque scented sweat. Then humble people who consistently try to go to the gym can’t touch a machine without it smelling like a disgusting amalgam of pork and ball sweat. After thirty added minutes of gym time spent wiping down every machine (not because you fear staph, but because you fear catching the fat) and waiting around for a group of douchebags to realize that they can’t bench 200 lbs (even though they weigh close to 300) because they’ve never touched weights before in their life you decide to go up stairs and do some cardio. But then the cardio upstairs gets taken up by some super skinny white females trying to impress whatever frat douche they hooked up with while they were drunk by spending hours on all the good machines (the ones with iPod charging capabilities) so you go to the elliptical and have to use the machine between two chubby females going 2.0 miles an hour, legitimately thinking that they are actually getting a workout, who also think you’re going to rape them and carve a B into their face just because you’re a large Black man.

FIGURE 58.2: Uses the elliptical…

So yeah…more or less, that’s what will happen when I get off work. I hate resolutionists. There is nothing work with being an idiot when you first go to the gym if you’re trying to get ripped or healthy. But at least have the determination to not give up after three days, which is the average for these stupid resolutionists.

Gabriel on Fat People

Yes. I hath returned from the depths of graduate school applications and debating my future. But, there will be more on that later. I have to knock this post out because it is something that I feel is getting rather ridiculous. Friggin’ fat people! By fat people, I mean morbidly obese fat people. I’m fat (as you may or may not know) but I’m not like the following people I’m about to bash.

A few weeks ago I went to the mall. Seeing as how I live in the south, it is no surprise to see swarms of fat people walking around eating hotdogs and salty pretzels in the mall while they make their way to the Chinese food mall buffets. This is not uncommon. I have no problem with gluttony as long as I don’t have to deal with it (I mean, I deal with gluttony every time I am presented a bag of a random non pork Frito-lay product.) The problem that I encountered at the mall was that my fiscal future was at stake because of cinnabons…friggin cinnabons.

FIGURE 52.1: Why you won’t be able to fund college for your children…

For those of you who are confused, allow me to elaborate. My girlfriend and I were getting a cinnabon or something. This thing might have had 1000 calories in it easy. The amount of frosting they put on one of these things would be enough for a friggin birthday cake. So we split one (still fat, I know, shut up.) While we were waiting in line there was a couple (not sure if it was romantic or related…not ruling out the possibility of both since this is Kentucky) I overheard ordering six cinnabons. Not one so they could split it, not two so that they could be fat and still live to see Barack get inaugurated (hah…I had to work it in), but they got friggin’ six. Upon disbelief of the sheer obesity that it would take to stomach six of these cinnamony-trans fat palm oil laden desserts. I looked at the guy first. He was slender, tall, full head of hair, looked to be in pretty good health overall. Then I turned my attention to the woman he was with. She weighed more than I did and was in a wheelchair. I don’t know what she has been through in her life, and I don’t know how she was placed into the chair, but something tells me that it is obesity related. Normally I would have just left it at that and ignored the mismatched couple but the next exchange between the cashier and the couple was too much to ignore.

Low wage douchebag: Six cinnabuns, that’ll be <what most people who own hummers pay for gas>. Would you like extra frosting for reheating?
Fat woman: Yes.
Tall man: What? Extra frosting?
Fat woman: Yes, for reheating.
Tall man: I know…but extra frosting? Seriously?
Fat woman *now getting belligerent*: Yes! For reheating!

Now what I find funny about that wasn’t that those cinnabons most likely weren’t going to last past the exit doors of the mall, so the truth value of her reheating claim did not exist. It wasn’t that the cinnabon chain had to ask people if they needed extra frosting because they most likely got so many requests for extra frosting that they decided it’d be better just to ask the fatty fats. It was the fact that the man knew the chick was being a fatty fat, but didn’t call her out on it directly (I almost lawled my pants.) He did her a grave injustice. If there was someone around every time I wanted to buy chips that was calling me fat, I wouldn’t buy chips (well…that’s a lie, but I wouldn’t buy nearly as many.)

The example at the mall just represents what America is. Not fat…everyone knows that. But it is a costly nation. It costs so much to buy those stupid cinnabons. Only to give you heart disease, diabetes, and 7 forms of cancer just so that you can go out and waste your money and insurance buying things to help you cope with the sickness you brought on yourself by eating massive amounts of crap. To make it worse is the fact that we most likely will have socialized healthcare by the time I’m making the big bucks. So if something happens, and this fat toaster strudel eating broad can’t afford to pay for her own bills…I’ll have to just because not only can she not exercise in the gym, she can’t exercise self control either, thus effectively reducing the amount of money I can save to send my children to college and or pay for plastic surgery for my mistresses. Sorry if my republicanism came out… stupid fat people… I’m going to the gym after work.