Ponderous Thunderdomes


 Posted on April 21st, 2009 –

By the time I had thought to look up, it was already too late. My face stopped just shy of the wall of denim that now entirely blocked out everything else.

It took me a moment to realize where I was; having your senses deprived like that tends to disorient you. I pulled my head back a bit to get a better view of the full picture.

The ass that stared back was simply thunderous.

The domes were a foot if they was a mile, I tells ya!

I want to be clear here, I’m not talking a bit of chub in the hub. This thing was the prototype for yo momma so fat jokes. I sit on one end, you sit on the other; plenty of room for Gary in the middle – that kinda big. No one was getting in or out of the subway until the the caboose left the station.

I was now stuck between a rear and a crowd and the only thing to do was wait and ponder the ponderous. As I stood there on the steps, straining to twist my head around to focus on something else, I wondered why I had never noticed this before. I mean, surely I would’ve noticed such a beast before if for no other reason than the traffic jam it would’ve caused.

In fact, most of the people in the crowd I spotted around me were pretty normal-sized. Not too many extremes in either direction.I fit into that  generic mid-ground too, though I used to carry a few more pounds  Recently I had noticed that my clothes were a bit baggier and I was using a new hole on my belt. Not much, but I did notice.

The funny thing is, my diet hasn’t improved much since I started living in the city (it arguably got worse), so how to account for this?

When I lived in the sticks, I was driving just about everywhere. Now I walk.

The nearest store was a ten-minute drive. Now, it’s a ten-minute walk. It used to take me an hour and a half to drive to work. Now it’s a fifteen minute stroll to the streetcar. It used to take me another hour and a half to get back home. Now it’s an hour-long walk. Sometimes. When I feel like it. On the weekends I hop over to Chew Chew’s. Groceries; thirty-minutes south at a relaxed pace. If I get the munchies, you guessed it, doin’ a snack run on foot.

It’s really not much, but I guess it must add up. With a full Brazilian I still wouldn’t be ready for bikini season, but it’s nice to see that urban life has advantages other than convenience. Well, that and a few other things.

Toronto missed the fattest cities list a while back so it can’t be doing that bad. It’s not that people here are any less able to put on weight, it’s just that they’re missing the one ingredient that weightier suburbs have: the car. I know, lots of people here own them, but it’s such a pain in the ass to get the car out of that narrow little lane behind the house when you could just walk to wherever you need.

Plus, it’s a lot more interesting. Half of this blog wouldn’t exist without me tripping over unusual people on the street. But really, they don’t need to be that big, I can see just fine.

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