I’d like to thank the asshole who responded to my last post by sending me a hate-filled screed in which she insulted my weight, intelligence, and included some incoherent manifesto about a class-action suit against the makers of Phen-Fen, or Fen-Phen, or “the weight loss drug that doesn’t require you to exercise or eat right and can therefore be counted upon to exact its price by making you bleed internally or cause your heart to explode.”

No. Really. You made my day you insipidly self-righteous rhinoceros.

So, because the lack of ethics among those in the weight-loss industry and inherent stupidity of consumers who blindly slurp up their products is a pet peeve of mine, let me just write a catch-all post for those individuals who, unlike my regular readers, have the IQ of a carrot and found my blog using search strings like “I’m borderline retarded and have a difficult time pronouncing vowels” or “Magical paths to weight loss that don’t include any effort on my part”.

(…and does anyone know when a punctuation mark should go on the outside of the quotations? Because there are occasions when I see it inside, and occasions when the period is left outside. Is this a style issue? Should I buy an MLA handbook that is dated sometime after the invention of papyrus? Where are the grammar police when you need them to explain these things to you?)

Anyway. So this walrus sends me a lengthy e-mail that is so riddled with name-calling, misspellings, hyperbole, and grammatical fouls that I’m going to save her the embarrassment of posting it here. Instead, I will summarize her electronic correspondence by saying that she took exception to my last post and what she perceived to be a slight on overweight people.

Then she called me fat. And opined that I was simply jealous that these women had found a weight loss solution that worked for them. Then, inexplicably, went on to describe how she had been part of a class-action settlement against some purveyor of Phen-Fen, or Fen-Phen. After which she recanted her original assertion that I was fat by closing with the sentence “cuz you skinny girls dont now how hard it is to lose weight.”

I’m going to leave the first slight about my weight alone seeing as how I live in a hyper image-conscious state where “thin” is measured in degrees relative to those who were liberated from Dachau. Around here, one woman’s “fat jeans” are another woman’s toothpick warmers. So let’s just say that I eat right, exercise, and that I am immensely satisfied with my size.

I am not, however, going to leave her defense of the “carb free lifestyle” as a healthy road to weight loss alone. Especially when it is followed up by the wholesale vilification of the makers of a formerly popular weight loss drug.

Let’s get real folks, if you are fool enough to believe that “carb free” is any healthier than a drug like Phen-Fen or Fen-Phen or whatever, you are either sticking your head in the sand or are dumber than a box of rocks. Here’s the thing; despite whatever psychological assignations that people draw to food and their eating habits, the physiological aspect of the damned thing is fairly simple. Are you ready? Here it is:

Weight = Calories consumed – Calories burned

See how I did that? I just cut through all the trigonometric equations involving the bending of time and space to include rose quartz, “herbal supplements” and ridiculous cabbage soup recipes to arrive at what should be a very simple formula for anyone with half a brain and a rudimentary understanding of metabolism. Which, in theory, should be 90% of the United States but is probably more like the 13% Americans who can locate the Pacific Ocean on a map.

Therefore, if you are following a “weight loss” regimen that promises results without limiting your caloric intake or increasing your activity level, you are probably doing something to your body that will take years off your life and have serious consequences down the road. That’s a simple fact and sending angry e-mails to me trying to argue otherwise isn’t going to change it. After all, I’m not the one who breathed life into a pile of dirt and called it Adam.

Oh, and don’t assume that just because I have an opinion on the sheer idiocy of most “weight loss programs” that I hate overweight people. Because honestly? I don’t care. Are you a good person? Do you pay your taxes? Stay out of trouble? Then I really don’t have an opinion about your weight one way or the other. You’re an adult. Live your life the way you see fit. Plus, I figure the rest of the world is unkind enough without me being an ass about something that doesn’t affect me. Except on airplanes. That is one time that I will get pissed because dammit, at six feet and one hundred and sixty five pounds I need every inch of seat I can get and it’s a given that the jackass in front of me is already going to decrease my personal space by shoving his seat into my knees. Damn I hate flying.

So, in closing I would like to say that if you:

1) …are one of these fools who takes a pill instead of eating a salad and stepping out for a walk, don’t send me angry e-mails.

2) …proudly sport an irreversible heart condition caused by a drug which should have been obviously dangerous even before some scum-sucking mass torts attorney got a hold of your litigious ass, don’t send me e-mails.

3) …think that cutting carbs out of your diet is a sound weight loss plan and ignore the fact that you are damaging your liver, heart, and kidneys, don’t send me e-mails.

3) …want to insult my weight, don’t counter that insult with its polar opposite in closing because it makes you look like a dumbass with the attention span of a flea. (Fleas have short attention spans right?)

Post script re: The Michigan/Appalachian State Game – Ouch. That’s gonna take a few blowjobs to get over.

There was another one that was quite remarkable in which my head was photo shopped onto some stripper which I will not be posting because fuck people! This is a family blog!

So! I promised to dust off a few of the hate mails I’ve received, and here they are. I feel it pertinent to let my readers know that unlike my old blog, I won’t be posting the sender’s e-mail address or real name. Not because I’m nice, but because I get such a kick out of renaming people.

#1 – Some guy read this post and decided to play Let’s Split Hairs:

I hate to tell you this but im from fresno and drive to sacramento all the time for work and there is no way that you would take i5 from salida to sacramento. plus it doesn take over an hour to get there so 90 minutes is to much.

Alright Poindexter, I’m all about honesty (except when it gets in the way of a good story) so here’s the lowdown dirty rub: I do take I-5 to get home. But since you expended your time, energy and overextended your ability to spell, I’ll provide you with instructions.

- Take Salida Boulevard to the Highway 99 north ramp
- Turn left onto the on-ramp and merge onto Highway 99
- In Stockton, take the Highway 4 exit west (Crosstown Freeway)
- Bear right where Highway 4 terminates at I-5 and merge onto I-5 north
- Take the Hood-Franklin exit off of I-5 and turn right to arrive in Elk Grove

Total drive time is 50-60 minutes. Then you have to add another half hour because I was angrily throwing an adult temper tantrum and drove around until I had calmed down.

I know. It’s like magic isn’t it?

#2 – This was another reader who, like the guy mentioned beforehand, heartily disliked my recent post about a squabble I had with my husband and felt it necessary to set me on the straight and narrow path of feminine obedience. For the sake of brevity I will not post the e-mail in its entirety, but I found it quite interesting that he felt the need to copy and paste just about every verse in the Bible about “a woman’s place” and seemed particularly smitten with the apostle Paul (why is it that every misogynist jerk has a hard-on for Paul? I mean really. If I tell any future bible thumpers who might read this blog that I’m familiar with Cornithians and accompany that claim with a book report will you closet cases leave me alone?)

Anyway, here’s the money shot from Yahweh The Angry E-mailer who would very much like to smite me:

The bible is clear about the fact that our father in heaven made woman from the rib of man and man in God’s image. You are not made in Gods image but your husband is. Humble yourself and remember to behave as that.

Wow! And this guy lives in the States. As in NOT Taliban-occupied Afghanistan.

Well let’s move along then because all this throwing around of biblical verses really gets under my skin because people? I’m Catholic. We consider it a point of pride that none of us reads the Bible unless someone has stuffed cash between the pages. We have people in Rome who do that for us.

(I wonder if there is some humorless Catholic out there who will read that and not get the joke and spend the next week wanting to kick my ass.)

#3 – This e-mail arrived in my inbox shortly after Anita Creamer’s column about my decision to pursue mortuary school (and write about it) appeared in the Sacramento Bee:

Just read your blog and I’m sorry but your just lame. Maybe you just watched too much “Six Feet Under” or maybe your just weird but whatever. Your blog is lame.

What I found the most remarkable about this e-mail was that it wasn’t the only one of its kind. After that column ran I received this same e-mail several times from several different e-mail addresses over the course of about six weeks and it had nearly identical wording EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Accident? I think not.

#4 – This is the last one that I am going to post because, dammit, I can’t find anymore. This one was sent to me last winter:

why dont you grow up? you write like your seventeen years old.

Huh? Ok, I have to admit that I was a little puzzled by this one because there was nothing specific referenced and then the author of this tidbit had the temerity to follow up her insult with an invitation to read her blog. So I did, and guess what? The grammar, punctuation, and spelling were every bit as bad as one would expect them to be coming from someone who wrote the e-mail above. Also, the posts were mostly about getting drunk with her girlfriends and some guy she got “boogies” from, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.

At any rate, I was confused (and may I mention a little amused)(I’m a poet but don’t know it!)(But my feet show it!)(They’re Longfellows)(Alright, I’ll stop) So I took the liberty of responding to the e-mail with this:

Hey, thanks for the feedback. I’m always looking for constructive criticism in order to expand my readership. What specifically did you find objectionable or immature about my posts?

Surprise! She never responded. So I took the liberty of extrapolating the true message of her original e-mail and have copied it below in a format that I believe best represents the original meaning:

Dear Abby,

I guess you could say that I’m not the brightest knife in the toolshed. However, I really do like to be center of everybody’s universe and it makes me cry when someone else does something that I like to do and gets more attention than me.

Do you think I can drink this problem away?Sign Me… Lashing Out In Lansing

So there you have it! A sampling of the hate mail I’ve received over the past eighteen months or so. You’re welcome.

So thank you Jay, once again you have inspired a post. What would I do without you? Probably laundry.

The only thing standing in my way is my astounding incompetence and lack of organizational skills which, while I hate to brag, are truly extraordinary. So, while I cull through three e-mail accounts and try to figure out where I saved some of my favorite hate mail, why don’t you check out some of these other offerings that people send me?

(I know, I know, trim it down to one e-mail address will I? No. Because that would make things easy and what would I do if suddenly I didn’t have several e-mail accounts to field e-mails in? I might actually have to put down the laptop and spend time with my kids and nobody wants that. Especially the kids, who have just discovered Mommy and Daddy’s Naughty Drawer and are trying on “elephant masks”.)

This first item came from Lori, the kick ass Make-A-Wish maven with a sense of humor so dry most people don’t realize they’ve been zinged before she’s five miles down the road. She e-mailed this photo with the message “You know you’re in Santa Cruz when…”

Yes. We know we’re in Santa Cruz when we see banana slugs kickin’ it sod-style.

This next one comes from Ed in San Diego, who is truly a man after my own heart. After The King and his elephant briefs, of course.

Here is a photo of the Farallones, taken from the air by someone flying back into SFO from Hawaii. This is where I plan on shark diving next winter. The waters surrounding these islands are considered the most great white infested of the world.

The next two are offerings by my loyal reader Mr. Bud, whose ability to photoshop my head into weird shit scares me a little.

Ok. A lot.

Well I’m off to dodge lightning bolts. Hate mail on Friday!