Weight Loss, Pro and Con

Jon Carroll claims to be on an um.... interesting diet.

Every week, I get a dietetic shampoo administered by a trained shampoo-ologist, which clears the pores and allows the fat to escape through my head. I also eat nothing but grasshoppers and dandelion greens, which so frightens the extra pounds that they make straight for my scalp. Also, there is counseling. There'd better be, right?

He's getting results,and seeing benefits.

.......I have now lost a 5-year-old child. Not a real child, you understand; merely human tissue that could become a 5-year-old child had it not been excreted through my scalp.

All of a sudden, shirts and pants that had pined away for years in drawers unopened since the first Bush administration are brought forward to the light of day and, fashion being what it is, discovered to be perfectly appropriate for a modern gathering. At the same time, one finds good-as-new belts that had long before been discarded as inadequate to the task at hand. It's a whole new wardrobe, free for nothing.

However, a downside emerged at a party.

I am an apple-shaped person, and I was losing my apple, so to speak, and nature did not provide me with any other protuberances upon which a belt could rest. At my ideal weight, I am essentially cylindrical.

As a result.....

I am dancing around the room, laughing with my head thrown back, my hands firmly grasped by others, and my pants are slowly falling down, down past rap-star fashionable, down past misdemeanor-appropriate, down - they had to be stopped. I broke the grip of my jolly neighbors, and, pretending to be both invisible and graceful, I pulled my pants back up.