[Quasi-] South Beach Diet - Part II

Introduction

In this follow-up to my last South Beach[-ish] post, I offer reports from the trenches (my brother’s and mine); some arcana about glycemic index and glycemic load; the good news about the cool food you can still eat with this approach; some responses to a commenter on my last post; and the truth about alcohol. (I know that last bit implies that somebody has been lying about alcohol, and really nobody has, but I had to throw that in to bait you. Along those lines I will now include this phrase—what your doctor doesn’t want you to know about losing weight—because that seems a popular way to draw people in as well. Also, this weird little trick that helps you lose half your body weight in 48 hours!)

The trenches

Gosh, what a totally irresponsible metaphor “the trenches” is. Of course this is nothing like battle or real hardship of any kind. Feeling like you ought to lose weight is a real luxury, when almost 800 million people on this planet are malnourished. “I’m just not as svelte as I was in college!” Oh, boo-hoo!

Do you hate me yet? Good, good. Anybody who is doing well on a diet (or better yet, a new eating approach that is realistic for long-term benefit) ought to be hated at least a little. I love this New Yorker cartoon where two women are at the café at their tennis club and one announces, “I’ve only been gluten-free for a week, but I’m already really annoying.” (No, I’m not going to talk about gluten in this post. That’s a whole topic of its own. Suffice to say I myself never met a glutenous mass I didn’t like.)

So far, in the eighteen days I’ve been on this diet, I’ve lost nine pounds. That’s not so bad, especially because I’ve been cheating a bit. If I did Phase 1 (see my previous post if you haven’t already), I’m sure I’d see more results. My brother, in the same time span, has lost about six pounds. He’s not doing Phase 1 either … and in fact, he’s cheating regularly because one of his kids has discovered baking and is thrusting lemon bars, cream puffs, banana bread, and cobbler at him. Believe me, I had a great time ribbing him about that. At least he’s honest with his food log, and is trying to be good (“1.5 small blueberry cobbler pieces … two small cookies … very thin slice fudge…”). Of course this is the time of year when everybody becomes a glutton, but that’s no excuse for eating whatever junk you’re offered. I e-mailed Bryan, “Do we need to get you a sign that says, ‘Please do not feed the human ... when he is given people food, his nutrition is impaired and he loses interest in hunting’?”

It is almost impossible to have dessert and be on a South Beach(-esque) program at the same time. Not entirely impossible, though:

A plum can be nice and sweet, but still good for you.  I think that’s mascarpone and mint leaves below it.

My wife is doing well on quasi-South-Beach, especially in her main goal of keeping me honest. Here is a sample of our joint food journal, from the first day back on the plan:

The first thing you’ll notice is how messy this journal is. My brother’s journal is neatly typed and available online for me to peek at whenever I want, but I’ll bet it’s not quite as complete. A paper journal that lives in the kitchen doesn’t miss a thing. The second thing you’ll notice in the above snapshot is that my wife is using the “smiley face” technique of reinforcing dietary (and exercise) principles. This is probably healthier than my shame-and-fear-based system.

Another quick note: it can be helpful to monitor body fat if your scale supports it, but such measurements are probably not very accurate. That looks a bit like 16.8% above but it actually says 11.8%. Whatever my body fat percentage really is, I expect that number to go down as I continue my South Beach(-esque) effort.

You’ll find a recipe lurking in my entry, for Mexican(-ish) rice. Here’s what you do: glug some olive oil in a pan, dice a whole onion and simmer it a while, then add some cooked, cut-up meat. I used leftover turkey white-meat from Thanksgiving because a) white meat, aka breast meat, is really good for you, and b) I hate it. (My favorite part of the bird is the skin.) Frying up the meat makes it way tastier—it’s worth the oil, I think. I shake a bunch of Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Poultry Magic on there and a bunch of ground cumin, which is like magic. I sear that mixture on high heat, then throw in a can of stewed tomatoes. I simmer that a bit, then throw in cooked rice. I use brown rice because it’s better for you—it has almost six times the fiber of white rice. (White rice is useless. Don’t eat it. I used it with this batch because it was all I could find.)

I have a burrito practically every day made with beans, this rice, cheese (I don’t skimp on this, actually), and really good salsa. Pound for pound I think the salsa I get is more expensive than heroin, but it’s much better for you. These burritos rock. The deal is, when you put rice and beans together, you get a complete protein. (Click here for details.) Also, the fiber in beans, helped out by the cheese and by the bran in the brown rice, help that burrito burn slowly. That’s good because it means you won’t snack.

Also, because a burrito is a modular food, you can control the size and thus your intake. I either use a soft-taco size tortilla or half a regular tortilla. That’s a big enough burrito even for a big guy like me who works out a lot. Of course, the flour tortilla is complete crap, nutritionally. But what good is a diet that makes you want to kill yourself? Whole wheat tortillas should be banned.

Note, in the journal snapshot, my wife’s apple, raisins, and blueberries, and the zucchini, peppers, and cherry tomatoes we both had with dinner. Of course we should have had more vegetables (we were just easing into this South Beach thing). Note also the peanut butter. Sure, it’s pretty caloric (as a commenter on my last post pointed out) but it greatly helps with a feeling of satiety. This is crucial. If you try to cut down on calories without addressing satiety you’re going to be miserable. The point here is to reduce calories while still feeling satisfied. Hard boiled eggs are also good for satiety. I eat one of them then and I’m basically in no mood to eat for many hours.

How can we tell what foods will burn slowly?

Foods burn slowly according to how hard they are to digest. Obviously. Fiber slows down digestion, so it’s great. Meat also burns more slowly. I think cheese does too (and I’m not going to fact-check that because if there’s anything bad about cheese, I don’t want to know). What’s really cool is that slow-burning foods can actually slow down digestion of fast-burning foods consumed in the same meal. So the meat and beans in your burrito make the tortilla burn more slowly. That’s why when you eat a big burrito at a taqueria you don’t need to eat again for like four days. (Damn, I just drooled on my laptop.)

Here is one of my typical burritos. You can see a bit of cilantro creeping out the front. This will keep me going all the way until dinner, even on days that I work out.

There’s a numeric scale that describes how slowly a carbohydrate source will burn. It’s called the glycemic index (click here for details). It goes from 1 to 100. Anything over 50 is bad. Anything over 70 is really bad. You can download charts from the Internet. The digestive process, it turns out, is actually pretty mechanical. Chewy stuff takes longer and delivers its energy more gradually. (This is why I allow myself to eat gristle even when I’m trying to lose weight.)

Interestingly, the glycemic index (GI) of spaghetti is 46 (not very good), but the GI of al dente fettuccine is only 32. This isn’t too bad except that it’s impossible not to overeat with pasta ... a bite or two in, your eyes roll up into the back of your head and you abandon all pretense of self-control. You tell yourself things like “They’re just love handles!” and “Fat people are funnier, like Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill!” and “I would look great in a double-breasted suit!” and “I can do this, I’m an athlete!” And that’s just your average joe. Pasta is especially dangerous if you have “baggage” like I do, such as my teenage tradition of eating all-you-can-eat pasta—usually 5 or 6 plates at a sitting—once a week for years.

But consistency isn’t everything. What makes food choices a bit more complicated is that it can be hard to predict how caloric a food is. Soba noodles, for example, are made of buckwheat flour, which is somehow relatively lo-cal. Buckwheat is not really wheat ... it’s a grass. No, wait, I just fact-checked and it’s not a grass. It’s a “pseudocereal,” related to quinoa, sorrel, knotweed, and rhubarb. (What is knotweed? I don’t know, but it’s probably like knothead, and you are what you eat, so be careful!) One great thing about buckwheat soba noodles is that  they have one calorie per gram, which makes it easy to measure your intake, plus that’s 32% fewer calories than semolina noodles.

The other good news is that the Huffington Post calls buckwheat “one of the healthiest foods you’re not eating.” This statement is arch and snotty, and Hufffpost is hip and modern, so you can see buckwheat has all kinds of cred. The bad news is that buckwheat soba noodles have a glycemic index of 59, which is on the not-so-good end of the spectrum. (Still way better than a baked potato at 111.) You know those so-called “glass” noodles? They’re made of sweet potatoes and have a GI of 39-45. And they confer the same groovy Asian-ness that soba do. So they’re a better choice.

So if glycemic index isn’t everything—due to variances in how caloric one substance is over another—what else do we need to consider? Well, for what it’s worth, there’s a separate scale called glycemic load. This scale, based on some formula the food people have devised, factors in the number of calories. These numbers don’t fall in such a nice range as GI, but suffice to say anything over 20 is bad, and single-digit numbers are the best. (Again, you can download charts online.)

For example, watermelon (as you might guess) has a high GI: 72, to be precise. This would be a good food for somebody with no teeth left. But we can have all we want, because it’s practically bereft of calories. Its glycemic load is just 4. Have at it!

Prunes have a nice low GI (29) but they’re also pretty sweet, so their load is 10 (which is still rather good). Carrots have a load of 3.5, which makes them a great “closer”—that food that is still sitting in a bowl on the table after you’ve eaten your little portion of indulgent goodness and are fantasizing about having seconds. After you munch down a few carrot sticks you might decide you’re not actually that hungry, per se ... maybe you were going to eat out of boredom but now you’re bored of the food itself. Congratulations! You’re going to dream about food all night and wake up ready to go toe-to-toe with that bathroom scale!

Glycemic load isn’t everything, but it does help us put certain foods in perspective. For example, the person who commented on my last post needs to be corrected. She said to avoid nuts because “they’re ‘healthy fat’ but a handful of nuts has, like 800 calories.” I think she was exaggerating for comic effect; it’s actually more like 170 calories. Still a lot, but the glycemic load of peanuts is a mere 1. That’s fricking amazing. No wonder they’re so satisfying. Last Saturday I rode my bike 70 miles, with 6,000 feet of climbing, but (after my modest glycogen window snack, a cup of honey-sweetened yogurt and a weird persimmon cookie), I just wasn’t that hungry so my lunch was just two handfuls of peanuts and 4 or 5 prunes. (When your body isn’t all fouled up by lots of sugary calories, it can burn fat like a motherfrockle. This is why distance athletes—whose bodies get especially good at this—are so freaking thin.)

So, if we don’t want to deprive ourselves of the foods we love, we just need to work on portion control, which is doable if for every part starchy, yummy goodness you make yourself plow through two parts bulky, low-glycemic-load vegetables. Cabbage is great for that. Yeah, it’s not the tastiest stuff, but that’s kind of the point. After eating a bunch of it you’re asking, “Could I be full?” rather than “Could I push past the pain and eat even more?” (Raw cabbage, I’ll concede, is almost inedible, except perhaps on a fish taco. Cabbage is better cooked, and the smell of cooking cabbage helps you lose your appetite—a win/win!)

If we’re going to be realistic here, napa cabbage is more charismatic than regular. It doesn’t have much flavor, but bulks foods out nicely (instead of bulking us out not-nicely). A cup of nappa cabbage has just 13 calories. It’s like the perfect thing to stuff yourself with. Best of all, you can spell it with either one “p” or two ... your choice! (I mixed and matched here, just to be more Google-query-friendly.) I have actually put nappa cabbage in a burrito, just to give it that realistic heft you get at taquerias. You wanna know the glycemic load of cabbage? It’s an infinitesimal 0.58! Amazing!

So ... what can I still eat while South-Beaching it?

The good news is, you can still eat anything with this approach, once you’re in phase 3 ... at least, the way I do it (and it’s working pretty well). But you can’t eat everything. That is, you need to figure out a few indulgent, non-South-Beach foods you just can’t live without, and keep eating them—but only occasionally, as a treat, and in small quantities with gobs of vegetables on the side. Other starchy or sweet foods will just have to go—you gotta choose your battles. So as much as I go on about pasta being too irresistible to mess with, I know I can never totally give it up. But if I’m going to occasionally submit to it, I better be pretty strict about desserts, white bread (like sourdough and baguettes, which I adore), and pretty much all baked goods. Oh, and I barely get to have pizza. Maybe this summer I’ll start riding Mount Diablo every weekend like I used to, and can cheat more.

But drinking ... that’s another matter.

What can I drink?

I’ll make this simple: don’t drink anything that isn’t a) water, or b) a drug delivery mechanism. Juice is all the sugar from fruit and none of the fiber so unless you’re actually trying to get fat, just skip it. If you have a reasonably balanced diet (such as South Beach) you’re getting plenty of vitamins without needing any juice. (“Vitamin water,” meanwhile, is sugar-water for morons.) Soda should be banned, but with a special dispensation for endurance athletes.

A commenter on my last post advised that you can “add splenda to all sorts of liquids and you can guzzle diet sodas.” I totally disagree. Diet soda confuses your body and triggers an insulin response, meanwhile dulling our senses to naturally sweet food, leading to the abuse of other sweets, according to this article and others. Splenda (sucralose) has long been thought safe, but recent studies (click here) link it to changes in intestinal microbes, altered glucose and insulin levels, and possibly cancer. Sure, we could debate the veracity of these studies, but why bother? Why defend chemicals designed to fool Mother Nature, just for the sake of justifying unsophisticated pleasures? If you have a constant craving for sweet drinks, you should try to figure out why. Shouldn’t you have cast off that childish fixation long ago?

Coffee (without cream or sugar) is completely fine. Drink up. Caffeine can even be an appetite suppressant, but be careful ... don’t be tempted to skip meals (which confuses your body, fouls up your energy levels, and creates diet-jeopardizing cravings). I don’t consider coffee a food, because it’s practically calorie-free. I think of it as a drug (and a very safe, useful one).

Alcohol is also, to my mind, also more of a drug than a food. But it’s a whole different deal from coffee because alcoholic beverages are highly caloric, in direct proportion to the amount of alcohol they contain (so don’t bother trying to count the carbs in this or that beer). And calories are only part of the problem. Because alcohol is a toxin, when you drink your body shuts down its normal metabolic processes (like burning fat) until it’s dealt with the alcohol. Meanwhile, mixed drinks often involve sugary mixers or Coke, and drinking lowers your inhibitions so you might lose some of the discipline you’ve been trying to have about your eating. (Click here and here for details.)

(You think it was possible to resist that fourth helping of fries after drinking Belgian beer? It was not, nor was it possible to resist dipping the fries in mayo, Euro-style. But that was a special occasion.)

It kills me that there’s a whole website, Get Drunk Not Fat, dedicated to worrying about the number of carbs or other fillers in alcoholic beverages, when moderation alone is the way forward.

Does all this mean you shouldn’t drink at all when trying to lose weight? I don’t think so. Statistically, moderate drinkers are less likely to be overweight than teetotalers. Meanwhile, alcohol can be a great way to hide from your problems. (That was a joke.) The question of whether or not to drink should certainly involve not gaining weight, but weight is only one component of this bigger lifestyle choice. I think that where this South Beach[-esque] dietary approach is concerned, drinking should be treated like one of those carefully selected indulgences you might decide to allow yourself from time to time. But you better not allow too many of these indulgences, and you better indulge sparingly, if you’re serious about losing weight.

The result so far

Today my wife said to me, “You’re starting to get gaunt. You’re starting to look like a bike racer again.” This isn’t really a compliment. In fact, it’s almost a warning. I think the subtext was something like, “Watch yourself ... don’t do too good a job with this South Beach thing.” I’m happy to report that if things continue on this trend, I’ll be around or below 170 pounds for the hill climb bike race I have planned for January 1. Following that, I might just take my eating habits back in a more northerly direction, secure in the knowledge that I’m not at risk of becoming the next Humpty Dumpty.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

[Quasi-] South Beach Diet for Morons

Introduction

This isn’t actually a post for morons. I thought the title would be funny, and “[Learnable Skill] for Dummies” is copyrighted. This is a shortcut to reading The South Beach Diet, and also a memoir of my weight loss efforts, but mainly a humor piece (because struggling with one’s weight is always funny, right?). Do not come here for an accurate, responsible distillation of the actual South Beach approach (which would be plagiarism and copyright infringement anyway). Call it Sloth Bleach Pseudo-Dieting(-ish). Okay?

Eight years ago in these pages, I wrote about “secondhand dieting”—whereby you end up on your spouse’s diet because he or she is doing the cooking. My goal when I wrote that was to get off the South Beach diet because I was actually perfectly happy with my weight. Well, fast-forward to last July and you’ll see, here, that as middle age has descended upon me, I am no longer happy with my weight—or, more specifically, with my belly. Toward the end of my “Ode on a Belly – Mine” post I declared my intention to do South Beach(-ish) for real, and to blog about the results. Well, here you go.

The good

The good news is, Sloth Bleach really works! When I started it, after my nephew’s wedding (and associated festivities) in late June, I weighed a whopping 193 pounds. I began recording everything I ate, and began eating very carefully, and a month later—just in time for an epic bike ride with my friends —I had lost 12 pounds and was down to 181. Success! I got down to 175 by the beginning of September and held this until the second week of October.

So, yeah … that’s the good news.

The bad

The bad news is, South Beach isn’t really a diet. If it were, it wouldn’t work, because diets never do. Why not? Because they can’t. It’s absurd to think that you could temporarily change your behavior and enjoy permanent benefits.

Let’s look at the logic, or lack thereof, that the dieting concept implies: 

• Premise: I weigh x because for years I have eaten y calories a day, which is z more calories than I need (hence the weight gain that has motivated me to diet).
• Premise: If I eat, say, 0.7y instead of y, I will turn z into a negative number—that is, I will be consuming fewer calories than I need—thus my body will burn a bunch of fat and I will lose weight.
• Premise: Once I have achieved the lower weight that I desired, I can go back to eating y calories a day, which will still be z calories more than I need, and yet I somehow won’t gain back any weight.
• Conclusion: I am a moron.

Look, if you’re eating the way you always have, and yet you’re gaining weight, something has changed. Perhaps you’re not as active. Perhaps this is just part of getting old. Perhaps it only seems like you’re eating the way you always have, but you’re actually fighting the tribulations of middle age, parenting, and/or the working grind by self-medicating with extra booze, extra butter, or extra sloth. Whatever the case, it is impossible to implement a short-term fix to lose the weight (i.e., go on a diet and expect lasting success).

South Beach is not a diet, it’s an approach. It’s a permanent change in the style of eating that you do, that will yield permanent weight loss results if and only if you stick with it for the rest of your life—which notion is, I’ll admit, depressing as hell. But then, so is ongoing weight gain.

In case you’re hoping these caveats are theoretical, they’re not. I fell off the South Beach wagon because I started taking trips to my hometown to take care of my ailing father, then to help with his hospice, and then to spread his ashes. In order to cope, I ate breathtaking amounts of food, Beck’sted copiously, and allowed myself to eschew exercise entirely. The result is that I gained back half the weight I’d lost through South Beach.

(What do I mean by breathtaking amounts of food? Well, for one thing, my brothers and I would eat indulgent meals out such as all-u-can-eat pasta, and for another, we tended—almost without fail—to eat a pint of ice cream apiece, every night. Or to be precise, four quarter-pints.)

So, yeah—my South Beach effort had yielded weight loss results only while I stuck with it. Recently I found myself back up to the mid-180s. Something had to be done, so I resolved recently to sign up for the San Bruno Mountain Hill Climb bike race on January 1, to force me to adopt South Beach again. (Fear of disgrace is a great motivator.)

By the way, you may be aware that for years I’ve professed that the real key to staying skinny is to be a long-distance cyclist. I still hold this to be true, but with two caveats: 1) I can’t exactly advocate that for the lay reader because it takes a lot of time and it’s best to start young, and 2) I myself, despite gobs of muscle memory, don’t have the time and/or opportunity for that anymore.

The ugly

I’ll bet you’re expecting me to say being overweight is ugly. Well, I won’t. It’s being old that’s ugly. No it’s not—I’m just playing with you. This whole thing isn’t about looks. It’s about health. Being healthy and fit happens to look better than being unhealthy and overweight, but that’s incidental. I used the heading “The ugly” above simply because The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I mean, duh!

The buddy system

It’s easier to change your behavior—especially in a way that involves reducing creature comforts—when you have a buddy along. Here’s how the logic of that works. 

• Premise: Misery loves company.
• Premise: I love misery (obviously).
• Conclusion: I love company. (This is according to the Transitive Law, I believe.)

The argument isn’t perfect, because eating the South Beach way isn’t a miserable experience, exactly, but I doubt anybody would deny that having friends involved in your effort will help.

My wife, supportive as ever, agreed to do South Beach(-ish) with me. So did my brother Bryan, who isn’t doing an all-uphill bike race on January 1 but wants to lose weight anyway. This is only partly because I made fun of his belly when we were in Boulder together. “OMG,” you’re thinking, “you actually made fun of somebody because of his weight? What kind of monster are you?” The answer is, a sibling. Bryan made fun of my weight too, decades ago (when, at age 6 or 8, I had an oddly big belly). The chickens have come home to roost! But again, that’s only part of it. Bryan wants to be heathier, and we’re talking about doing a grueling 108-mile bike race, over giant Alpine passes, in a summer or two, so he appreciates my encouragement (even when it takes the form of taunts and jeers).

Where South Beach is concerned, the buddy system consists of sharing snippets of your daily journal, where you record not only what you eat but what you weigh each morning. So it’s not just a matter of providing encouragement, but also holding one another (and yourself) accountable. If a little bit of rivalry finds its way in there, well so be it. After all, that can be motivational, too.

In the case of my brother, the buddy system also means explaining how South Beach works—i.e., what you can and cannot eat. In case you’re intrigued by this miracle weight loss plan (which phrase I use here quite deliberately, to help Google direct people to this blog), I’m going to share my quickie, just-the-gist South Beach(-ish) wisdom with you as well.

How this thing works

South Beach is divided into phases. During Phase 1, you can’t have any fun at all—no bread, no pasta, and in fact no starches at all really, just lots of veggies and maybe some really unappealing whole grains like quinoa or something. The point is to get some immediate results, so as to motivate yourself. (Full disclosure: I don’t have the chutzpah to do Phase 1. If you think you do, maybe you should get the actual South Beach book.)

After a couple weeks on Phase 1, the plan goes, you move to Phase 2, which lets you have a few indulgences, but is still fairly austere. You do that for—what, a couple more weeks?—and then move to the third, final, permanent phase, which is—you guessed it!—phase 3. (Wow, you’re a quick study!) This final phase lasts either forever, or until your resolve flags.

More important than these phases is the emphasis on filling up on veggies instead of starches. The principle, as I understand it, is simple: we didn’t evolve to eat refined stuff like flour and sugar. That stuff is too calorically dense for us, especially since we’re not doing much physical labor anymore. (If this sounds like the Paleo diet, that’s a coincidence, since I know essentially nothing about it except that it’s probably annoying.)

Long story short, you essentially need to serve up all kinds of bulky, low-caloric, simple foods like vegetables, and fill your gaping gut with those instead of the tasty stuff. By “tasty” I mean “foodstuffs that have been manipulated to be more tasty.” (Obviously if we’re talking about all things that taste good, we should include fruit, vegetables, and other naturally tasty things, but the fact is, most people have forever thrown those over for highly manipulated crap like sugary cereal, “chicken” McNuggets, pasta, pizza, fries, etc. and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.)

So South Beach is way to reconcile what our bodies really need with what we feel like we need. We sorry humans have this pathetic need to feel full, because we’re so used to this feeling and because our souls are empty. And it’s actually okay to feel full, but only if it’s because a lot of high-fiber, low-calorie stuff is pushing against the inner wall of our bellies. We leave the table feeling sated, or at least bored of eating, and our overall calorie intake goes down.

In response, our bodies relearn how to burn fat efficiently. Meanwhile, our blood sugar becomes more stable. We snack less, eat better calories, enjoy all the benefits of the vegetables and meats we evolved to draw nourishment from, and become healthier. With our newfound health, we can cheat here and there and enjoy pasta again—because without pasta, life simply isn’t worth living. Obviously.

Some rules of thumb 

• Try to avoid refined starches
• If you have bread, make sure it’s whole grain (my family gets this Alvarado bead that has no flour, just wheat berries), and eat as little as possible of it (i.e., open-faced sandwiches only, and go for that really thin heel)
• Sometimes I just have a big spoon of PB & J instead of a sandwich
• Rule of thumb: if you have to butter it, you should just stop eating it
• No pasta, unfortunately, except as a treat ... it is the hardest thing to eat in moderation
• No pizza except as a treat (it’s a controlled substance in my household)
• No alcohol ... sorry!  (Obviously you can cheat here, but alcohol is truly fattening, in all its forms including low-carb beer.)
• If starchy stuff is served, try to eat a ton of vegetables along with it, like spinach or broccoli
• Try to have brown rice instead of white whenever possible (it’s actually pretty good, not like whole wheat pasta, which is inedible)
• The greener and more cruciferous your veggies, the better
• Chard, broccoli, broccolini, and—yes—kale are all good
• Cabbage is cheap and good and helps you lose your appetite
• Eggplant is cool—slice it and put salt all over it for a while to chase out the bad-tasting liquid
• Squash, zucchini, green beans, asparagus, celery, peppers are all great
• Corn is barely a vegetable—almost more like a starch—so don’t eat it often
• I think peas aren’t actually much better than corn
• Asian veggies like daikon and bok choy are good choices and also make you super sophisticated
• Fruit is okay, especially apples and other fiber-rich stuff
• No juice ever, no soda ever, no freaking vitamin water for crying out loud, just water and tea and coffee
• Record all your snacks, if you must snack
• Watch the condiments! Lots of calories hiding there!
• Salsa is great
• Step up and start drinking your coffee black, with no sugar!
• Black tea has to have milk but that won’t kill you
• I guess milk in your coffee isn’t the end of the world, but half-and-half or cream? Really?
• Hard boiled eggs are great ... very filling and they’re not fried in butter etc.
• Burritos are great if you do them right:
• Make your burritos with beans, brown rice, and either a soft-taco-size tortilla or half a regular tortilla (no, I’m not going to say a whole wheat tortilla because that’s just cruel)
• You can still stuff that bad boy pretty full, so that the tortilla may not even totally wrap it up—more like a covered wagon
• Shove other stuff in your burrito like a few cooked cabbage leaves, or some mushrooms, or grilled peppers, anything to flesh it out without being too caloric
• Dice some onions real fine and throw them in ... it’s yummy and keeps you in the habit of messing about with vegetables at every opportunity
• Throw some avocado slices on there when they’re in season because life is too short not to
• Skip the sour cream ... it’s an indulgence and exactly the kind of empty calorie that fattens you up (that’s right, carbs aren’t the only evil)
• Sometimes we have chips around but then come to our senses
• If people are eating yummy caloric stuff around you, what a perfect time to show off your absurd discipline and imperviousness to temptation
• Write down everything you eat, even if it’s like 1 chip
• “Nobody can eat just one”? I can!
• Maybe if it gets to be too much hassle writing everything down you’ll snack less!
• Smiley faces in the margins of your journal are a nice little zero-calorie reward!

So how’s it working out?

My brother e-mailed me a few days into our SB effort and said, “Thanks for the good tips! I'm inspired, truly. I started a food log of my own, and you’re right, Dana, just writing down what I had for dinner last night filled me with shame.” See? It’s working!

Just like I didn’t want to overwhelm my brother with arcane nutritional lore in our first few days of Sloth Bleach, I think it’s time to let you come up for air. Go watch a really dippy romantic comedy now, or wash your hair, or drink a beer, or whatever it is you do to release the viselike grip my relentless text has surely had on your poor head. And tune in next week for more inspiration; delicious, gossip-like updates on my brother’s and my progress (or frustration); and more useful information, including quick and easy lo-cal recipes like Mexican(-ish) rice and roasted Ewok!

Part II is here.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - Radio Station Poetry

Introduction

It’s a slow news day at albertnet so here’s another poem from my archives, complete with all-new footnotes. This one goes way back to spring 1988, after high school but during my year off before starting college. I was working as a receptionist at a radio station in San Luis Obispo, which was a really easy job ... most of the time.

Radio Poetry – Spring 1988

OPERATOR ERROR

I went to print a lame computer file,

A task that rarely causes any strain.                                 2

But this time it’s become a real trial

Because my finger has betrayed my brain.

I pushed the wrong damn key, or so it seems,

Which set disaster into motion quick.                              6

Deleting files hurts my self-esteem;

And I’ve just done it, with one finger flick.

Of course a backup file isn’t there:

Erasing it, another of my feats.                                        10

And my mistake caught everybody’s glare;

I botched the job by trying to be neat.

     I’m glad my job seems still to be intact;

     But that move wasn’t helpful, that’s a fact!               14

Footnotes and commentary

Letterhead: Class FM

Yes, this radio station was actually called “Class FM.” As you can see, the call letters were KLZZ, which was the manager’s second choice because he couldn’t get KLAS. (Maybe KLAS breaks some arcane FCC rule.) As receptionist I was required to answer the phone, “Good evening, you’ve got Class!” The deejays gave me a hard time about that. In fact, one of them was bored once and swooped by my desk to snatch up the ringing phone before I could, and answered, “Good evening, you’ve got gas! I mean Class!”

The competing radio station in our moldy oldies genre, US 98, had the slogan “Rocking the Central Coast with hits, we’re US 98!” There was a standing dare among our deejays to actually say, on the air, “Hitting the Central Coast with rocks, we’re Class FM!”

Line 1: went to print

Though this is obviously a pretty lousy poem, I like the internal rhyme in the phrase “went to print.” I wish the rest of the poem matched this strong start.

Line 1: lame computer file

Of course a computer file can’t be lame, exactly, but I was a teenager, so “lame” was naturally one of my favorite words. (I’ve just checked in with one of my resident teenagers and she says “lame” isn’t used that often nowadays ... it’s reserved for special cases because “it’s like the ultimate insult.”)

Computers weren’t quite so ubiquitous back then. I think there were only one or two of them in the whole radio station. This was long before most teenagers (outside of a few nerds) did anything on a computer, so the station manager assumed I would be unable to operate ours. He was  astonished to learn that I not only knew WordStar, but could even type fast. I’m not saying he was impressed, exactly, but I think he found my rare skills kind of cute.

Line 2: causes any strain

Word processors didn’t do a whole lot back then, so using them was a breeze. The hard part of my job was keeping busy. The only reason I even had the job is that this radio station was located inside a mall, and the mall rules required that all businesses be open and staffed during mall hours, which ended at 9:00 p.m. My shift therefore started when the daytime office manager’s shift ended at 5 p.m. On those days that the main staff left on time, I could relax, but when they were milling around I had to look busy. This was a challenge because there was almost nothing for me to do there. There was barely enough work for the office staff. It was a new station and just finding its footing.

You know what did cause strain? When the station president got drunk. He had a sizeable wine collection in his office (which the deejays said was highly unusual, alcohol being traditionally banned from radio stations for obvious reasons). This guy had serious personal issues, and when he got drunk  he got mean. His favorite drunken activity was to chew my head off for “abusing the position” by “studying on the job.” My standard defense—“Sir, I’m not even a student!”—fell on deaf ears. Once the deejay rescued me by calling me into the broadcast room: “Dana, come in here, we’re about to do a contest!” This ruse amazingly did work; the president failed to grasp that I ran the contests (i.e., took the ninth caller) right from my desk.

Speaking of strain, those contests really were pretty  tricky. The deejay would announce the contest, my phone would light up, and I’d have to blow off the first eight callers very quickly to have the ninth caller queued up in time to transfer him or her to the deejay’s phone, so this lucky winner could be on the air receiving the prize. Sometimes I’d get flustered and accidently disconnect the winner, meaning I’d have to take the next (i.e., tenth) caller to transfer in to the deejay. In this case both the ninth and tenth callers would get the prize, but the ninth caller would be furious about missing that little bit of radio fame.

The other problem was if too few people called in, and I’d be anxiously willing the phone to ring again so we’d actually have a winner. It’s embarrassing to recall how long it took me to figure out that callers had no way of knowing where their call actually fell in the onslaught, meaning I could say whatever I wanted. I could tell the first caller, “Congratulations, you’re the ninth caller!” and transfer him or her into the deejay, then get rid of all the other callers, perhaps telling each and every one of them, “Sorry, you’re the eighth caller.”

Line 3: it’s become

Glaring verb tense mismatch here. Heaven will take note.

Line 4: my finger

I’m not sure which finger this would have been. To save and exit from a WordStar document you typed Control-K and then X. To exit without saving changes you typed Control-K and then Q. So really, two fingers betrayed my brain: my ring finger that failed to type X, and my pinkie that typed Q. But neither of these would actually delete the file unless I hadn’t saved it at all. Who knows how I screwed this up. How lame is that: in a sprawling 14-line poem I failed to properly document the failure mode so as to learn from my mistake.

Line 6: set disaster into motion quick

It’s a good thing I was hired on as a receptionist, not a poet. This line is just plain embarrassing. Deleting the file was almost instantaneous. There was no disaster to “set into motion.” One second the file existed, and the next it didn’t. And a “disaster”? Please. It’s not like I had done a bunch of research or composed a precious manuscript. Whatever that file was, it could just be retyped. Sure, this might take time, but as I said, I had gobs of time. Nothing but time.

Line 7: self-esteem

Now this is just plain laziness. I needed a word that rhymed with “seems,” and blithely landed on “self-esteem” without any concern for accuracy. I was not some emo kid, let me assure you. Hell, emo hadn’t even been invented yet. I cannot fathom why I even bothered to write this sonnet if I wasn’t going to even try to make it good. In fact, I’ll bet in the next ten seconds I could write a better line. “I turned my day into a dreadful dream.” That’s better. Of course, the original eighth line no longer follows so I’ll have to rewrite it, too: “I screwed the pooch with just one finger flick.” There.

Line 10: Erasing it, another of my feats

I half-wish I could say I made up  this part solely to add a line or two to the sonnet. But in fact, I actually had deleted the backup file. Unless you’re an old guy like me, you probably won’t remember a time when disk space was considered valuable and something worth conserving. The 5¼-inch floppy disks we used back then held precious little data: 160 KB, which is 1/25000th the capacity of the 4-GB micro-SD cards that I happen to have a whole Ziploc baggie of. (Imagine a stack of 25,000 of those 5¼-inch floppies, holding the same amount of data as a thumbnail-sized card!) I filled up more than a dozen of those big-ass floppy disks during college, with nothing but text. Saving file space in those days was as sacred an act as saving trees.

Line 11: caught everybody’s glare

Okay, this part is just pure fiction. I doubt anyone in that office paid any attention to anything I did. Well, okay, that’s not entirely true. The bulk of my “work” was chatting with the deejay, to keep him or her from being bored. Most of the time the deejay during my shift was Beverly Hayes (her broadcast name), and we had these long, rambling conversations interrupted periodically by her required on-air utterances (e.g., “That was Neil Diamond with ‘Forever in Blue Jeans, and you’re listening to Class FM, 101.3”). Occasionally we sang along with the music, really belting it out. Sometimes I would have the strange experience of hearing two versions of Bev simultaneously: one talking in real-time about, say, the La Brea tar pits, and the other an on-air playback of an ad she’d recorded for the station: “Not elevator music, not hard rock ... just smooth, easy-listening favorites from the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s!”

Needless to say, my file deletion wouldn’t have caught the deejay’s glare. Who, then, was even watching? It could be that as a teenager I felt so self-conscious, I naturally believed that everybody automatically noticed my blunder. Perhaps the office manager did, if she was waiting for me to finish typing the document. But she wouldn’t have cared. She was a pretty cool gal, in her twenties, with a blond perm, a stick-thin figure, and a fondness for stiletto heels. She drove me somewhere in her Jeep once (I can’t remember where or why) and as soon as she turned the key in the ignition this MegaDeth song came on at party volume. Shoot, what was her name? I remember her walking through the station singing along to Peter, Paul, & Mary’s “Where have all the flowers gone?” but changing up the lyrics a bit: “We rolled them up and smoked them, every one!”

Line 12: trying to be neat

Isn’t it odd how much the act of using a personal computer involves aesthetics? Try turning down the screen resolution on your PC and you’ll immediately find that something is seriously amiss. Back in 1988, of course, all monitors were monochrome and every character was highly pixelated.  (And mere characters were almost all there was, graphics being a long way away for most applications.) About all we could do to improve things aesthetically was to shorten the list of filenames that would zoom by when you typed “dir” and hit Enter.

Line 13: job seems still to be intact

Could I really have been worried about losing my job? Well, perhaps, since it seemed too good to be true that they would pay me the princely sum of $5.50 an hour just to sit around yakking with a dejay (and, yes, occasionally putting up with a chaotic contest or a drunken tirade from the big boss).

Now, $5.50 an hour might not seem like a lot to you, or to Eminem, who rapped, “I’m tired of jobs startin’ off at five fifty an hour/ And then this boss wonders why I’m smartin’ off/ I’m tired of being fired every time I fart and cough.” But he wrote that in 1999. Adjusted for inflation, my pay in 1999 would have been $7.73 an hour. Hmmm. That still seems like not very much. In today’s dollars, though, it would be $11.59 an hour. That’s pretty good, actually. My daughter says she’d take it. (How did I calculate all this? Click here!) 

I was supporting myself on that receptionist job, plus my day job as a bike mechanic, so I’d have hated to get fired for deleting a file, farting, or coughing. I don’t recall ever farting or coughing at that job. I did, once, sneeze spectacularly. This was far enough along in my receptionist career that Bev had gotten tired of walking out to my desk from the broadcast room every time she was done talking on-air and had started another song. So she invited me to roll my chair into the broadcast room next to hers, and we’d just keep the conversation running right up until the current song was ending. Then she’d flip on the mike, the “ON AIR” light would go on, and I’d know to shut up. But one time, a sneeze took me by surprise—in fact it took us both by surprise—and was totally picked up by the mic. After a short, awkward silence Bev said her bit, flipped off the mic, turned to me and said, “Congratulations, you just sneezed all over the Central Coast.”

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Is This Pinarello Nytro Ad Sexist?

Introduction

In this post I tackle the question of whether this bicycle ad  is sexist.

The ad in question, from Pinarello hawking their new Nytro electric-motor-assisted racing bike, caused quite a stir on social media. In case you’re viewing this on a smart watch, or hastily while driving (that was a joke, please don’t), the caption on the ad says, “I’ve always wanted to go cycling with my [dickhead] boyfriend, but it seemed impossible. Soon everything will become possible.”

(I added “dickhead” because even if this boyfriend is stronger, he should be happy to slow down a bit to ride with his girlfriend. I am a former and occasional racer but I love riding with my wife and daughters no matter what kind of workout this gives me.)

Christine Majerus, a female pro cyclist, responded (via Twitter), “The only thing highly possible is that I am going to drop every single Pinarello rider from now on, even @chrisfroome if needed #PinarellNO.” The husband of the women’s WorldTour champ Megan Guarnier tweeted, “I’ve always wanted to cycle with my wife, @MeganGuarnier , but she drops me like a rock so I follow in the car. Soon everything will be possible. #pinarellNO.” Another pro, a Frenchwoman, wrote, “C’est quoi ce bordel?!” which I roughly translate, “What the hell is this?!”

I was particularly tickled by this suggested improvement on the ad campaign:

So, is the ad sexist?

To start off, I think it’s dangerous to position myself as an authority on sexism, particularly since I’m a guy. It’s a little easier to brush off somebody’s misconduct when you’re not the victim of it. The results of a Metro magazine poll about the above ad support this idea:

Granted, this is just one poll, but its conclusion is dramatic: women are twice as likely as men to think the ad was sexist. Clearly, women are still the hysterical, emotionally fragile drama queens they’ve always been. KIDDING! Fear not, I’m as grossed out by this statistic as you ought to be. In fact, the visceral reaction I had to the poll made it difficult not to reduce this post to a single word: “yes.”

Obviously, that wouldn’t be a very persuasive blog post, and moreover, there were lots of comments below the cyclingnews article that ought to be addressed. Not because they’re thoughtful statements made by reasonable people, of course; most of them, needless to say, are not. But in this modern era where all kinds of people automatically take umbrage at the very idea of political correctness, those of us who had to look up the terms “snowflake” and “SJW” ought to stick up for ourselves.

(What is a “snowflake?” Urbandictionary defines it as either “A hypersensitive, irrational person who can’t stand to have their world views challenged, or be offended in any perceived or even slightest of ways,” or “Referring to someone, usually the Alt-Right, Yiannopoulos, and Nazi Sympathizers (A.K.A. ARYANS), whose immense white fragility causes a meltdown when confronted with the most minute deviation from orthodox White Supremacy.” Meanwhile, “SJW” stands for “social justice warrior” and is used pejoratively. Both these terms seem to be favorites among the Internet whiners who whine about other people’s whining.)

Some other opinions

Since I don’t feel I can be a standalone authority on whether the ad is sexist, I asked my teenage daughters and my wife. My wife replied, “What? Huh? Oh ... I haven’t been listening.” (I made the mistake of starting my question with a little background, which included the word “bicycle.” It’s been a long marriage. Especially for her.) My younger daughter replied, “Seriously? Uh ... yeah!” (She did not actually use the word “duh,” but it was strongly implied by her tone.) My older daughter said, “Give me a second. I’m deciding whether the ad is heteronormative. I don’t think it is. Definitely sexist, though.”

To get the perspective of an older generation, I showed the ad to my mom and asked what she thought. Mom didn’t have an automatic problem with the idea that the electric bike could help a slower woman keep up, but she bristled at the wording of the ad: “I’ve always wanted to go cycling with my boyfriend but it seemed impossible.” The word “impossible” she took particular issue with—it struck her as defeatist that a woman would assume there was no way she could ever match the fitness of her boyfriend. Men may tend, on average, to have greater God-given strength, but surely the gap isn’t insurmountable. (I have personal experience with this as an assistant coach of my daughter’s high school mountain bike team. Lots of girls routinely drop lots of guys, and the guys have been very cool about not roaring a terrible macho roar, making stupid BS excuses, or quitting in a huff.)

What’s particularly interesting is that both the ad agency that created the ad, and Pinarello, who paid for it and ran it, didn’t seem to think this ad was sexist—until this was pointed out to them all over the place and they issued an apology.

I don’t buy the idea, suggested by numerous Internet commentators, that this flap was all contrived in advance for free publicity. These wannabe pundits cited the old adage, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Yeah, right. Just ask the guys who promoted the Ford Edsel, or, more recently, the ignoramuses behind the racist Dove ad that backfired. I can’t imagine any company runs an ad that it hopes to have to apologize for.

So how did Pinarello get this so completely wrong? Probably a lot of men at the ad agency thought there was nothing wrong with implying that a man might need an electric motor because he has “no time to work out during the week” (the text from their ad featuring a male) whereas a woman needs a motor just because she’s a woman. And when a bunch of men at Pinarello looked at the ad they didn’t see anything wrong with this disparity either. Why? Because they’re men. Stupid ones. (Okay, it’s possible that sexist women were involved, but the poll I cited earlier suggests this is only half as likely.)

There’s a big difference between these clueless types and the angry males making comments such as “Never apologize! That’s when the feminazis think they’ve won,” and “I doubt if the young gals can afford the 6,000 euros without the help of their boyfriends.” But the non-aggressive, passively clueless types are a big part of the problem. They’re controlling budgets and influencing public perception (not to mention creating situations that inflame outspoken misogynists) without realizing that they’re harboring antiquated, unfair attitudes toward women. They apparently never got the memo that women don’t want to be patronized or coddled.

Why none of this matters

Of course sexism matters. It should be fought on every  front. But the Pinarello Nytro doesn’t matter whatsoever. It’s a completely stupid bike, and here’s why.

First of all, the Nytro is not going to help riders of differing abilities to enjoy riding together. Its motor puts out up to 400 watts, which is enough to drop a pretty decent club racer on a long climb without even pedaling. But the motor cuts out when the bike reaches 25 km per hour (about 15.5 mph), which is a lower speed than the club racer can easily sustain on the flats. So on climbs, the weaker rider on the Nytro will crush the stronger one on the regular bike, and then on the flats the stronger rider on the regular bike will exact revenge. In the case of a couple, this looks like a recipe for disaster. (I’d love to watch this play out, actually.)

Second, almost anybody serious enough about cycling to drop $7,000 on a racing bike is going to want to earn the glory of dropping people, rather than claim the empty victory of “beating” somebody through a totally unfair equipment advantage. (The existing differences from a basic bike to a top-end bike are not anywhere in the ballpark of 400 watts.) Real cyclists want to improve, not outsource their ability to a motor. Naturally there are filthy rich douchebags who might love the idea of this bike, but they’ll surely sour on it when real cyclists crush them on the flats.

Where Pinarello ought to put their R&D money is into motor-assisted commuting bikes. Think of all the people who don’t commute by bicycle because they don’t want to get to work all hot and sweaty, and/or don’t want to tackle that one big hill on the way home. Giving an electric boost to a basic bicycle—or, if you prefer, putting out a new kind of electric scooter that you can easily carry up the stairs to your apartment, and/or bring on the train—is a great way to get more people commuting by bike. According to this article, there are already 200 million e-bikes in China. Why would Pinarello go after the impossibly small niche of shameless rich douchebags who want electric racing bikes, instead of serving a legitimate societal need?

More food for thought

I hope that I’ve made a strong case for Pinarello and their ad agency being sexist. But here’s a thornier question: is it sexist if a guy on a bike team, upon seeing his male teammate roll up on a Nytro, calls him a “little bitch”? I will leave this question for the reader to ponder.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Famous Last Words - Part II

NOTE: This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

If you haven’t read last week’s post, I recommend you click here and do so now. In that essay I explored the phenomenon of a dying person’s last words, and was all set to tell you my father’s last words—but then ran out of room. Well, not room, exactly, but I had gone on long enough and didn’t want to bore you. So today you get to find out what my father’s last words actually were.

 Picture above courtesy of Philip V. Allingham.

My father’s last words

My father, just before he died, said … well, wait. Before I get to that, I should give you a bit of background, so that you can fully appreciate just how funny, unexpected, and yet apropos my father’s last words truly were.

To start, my father always fancied himself a gentleman. He never cussed. I mean, ever. It was weird. This is a guy who never even said “fart.” I think he said “damn” here and there, but less frequently even than my daughters, who aren’t officially even allowed say this. When my dad needed emphasis, he either resorted to volume or other means.

For example, he was once a passenger in my 1984 Volvo when I had a mishap. I was parking in front of my house and came in a little too close to a broken curb outcropping, which caught the edge of my car’s trim and zipped it right off the side of the car. This made a terrible, loud noise like the car was shrieking in pain. When my dad got out he was shocked—almost disappointed, it seemed—that my comeuppance involved so little damage. I zipped the trim right back on to the car, good as new, and my dad said, “You are real lucky you didn’t do more damage.”  For him to use the adjective “real,” where the adverb “really” is called for, was tantamount to profanity, given his normally precise, professorial syntax.

Even when my dad was clearly angry, he didn’t resort to strong language. Once, on a beautiful summer evening, just before dusk, my dad was driving my brothers and me up Flagstaff Road, just for the pleasure of it, when we encountered an encampment of drunken college kids whooping it up. I can’t remember what they were saying but it was vulgar and far louder than necessary. They were being loud, it seemed, just to disturb the peace, and to flaunt their youth and irresponsibility and drunkenness. (I even seem to recall a soiled prophylactic sailing through the air, but perhaps this is the embroidery of memory.) My dad did not yell, “Shut up, you bastards!” like any normal person. What he yelled was, “Hush up!” Who says “Hush up”? Nobody, that’s who. (Oddly, this caught the drunks so off-guard they were momentarily speechless as their soused brains attempted to parse this utterance.)

My dad’s uncannily clean mouth wasn’t due to any moral or religious airs. He just had this profound sense of decorum. Surely he was aware that a certain amount of profanity is common among adults. In fact, on one occasion, a year or so ago, he even alluded to this. He remarked, “I encountered recently a rather humorous website cataloguing all the ways the F-word can be used. The F-word turns out to be highly elastic, and can be used as almost any part of speech … as a noun, as a verb, and so forth.” I was so eager to encourage this exploration that I probably overstepped a bit. I replied, “Oh, yes, I’ve seen that website and it’s pretty funny. But you know, it’s incomplete. The guy compiling the list missed one: ‘fuck’ as gerund adverb, as in, ‘Are you fucking shitting me?!” This seemed to catch my dad completely off guard, and just like that the conversation was over. He responded as though I’d been verbally abusive. I realized this may have been the first time he’d heard me use such language. (I just shrugged it off, like, “You started it, dude.”)

Notwithstanding my dad’s lifelong avoidance of profanity and other tough talk, I knew toward the end of his life that, as far as last words go, anything was possible. Perhaps a new experience like dying of cancer would unleash an entirely new lexicon. This was the case with a former President of Bolivia, Antonio José de Sucre, who was known to be a gentleman who had never cursed in his life. Upon being shot twice in the head (but before a third shot, to the heart, killed him) he cried out, “¡Carajo, un balazo!” [“Fuck, a bullet!”]. So he had that word in him but had just never been upset enough to deploy it.

So it was with my dad, not long before he died, when in the middle of the night I heard him yell out, “Shit!” I had literally never heard him utter this word before. Of course, he didn’t have an audience—or at least, he didn’t realize he did, being alone in his bedroom—so maybe this wasn’t eligible to be his last word. On the other hand, he yelled it quite loudly, and was well aware that a crack team of his sons was assembled in the living room on cots and mattresses, taking turns attending to him during his hospice. Novel as this word choice was, though, I can’t say I was surprised. Something about having an ostomy bag burst open would surely loosen anyone’s tongue. (If it had been me in there bursting my ostomy bag, I’d have woven a tapestry of profanities that would make Eminem blush.)

Still, cursing to an empty room in the dark is a long way from challenging somebody verbally, in broad daylight, face to face. Throughout his life my father avoided pointed statements and direct challenges whenever possible. If you said something that upset him, he would either fold up completely—the conversational equivalent of going limp or playing possum—or he would quietly explain that you were upsetting him.

He had a special way of reacting if you were boring him or about to hold forth on a topic he didn’t want to hear about. His protocol in this scenario was even more efficient than a teenager’s “Whatever dude” or “Like I care.” He would essentially cut you off with the simple word, “Good.” For example, I once said to him, “I just started a pretty cool project at work.” For some reason he didn’t want to hear it. Maybe his brain was tired, or maybe he was afraid he’d be out of his depth with this topic (which would have been ironic, as my brothers and I grew up hearing all about his work in the field of rocket science). Whatever the reason, he just said, “Good.” It’s impossible to capture, with mere text, the peculiar inflection he employed to convey the utterly dismissive intent of this utterance, but his meaning was impossible to miss. Dad’s “good” meant “All right, good for you … but I don’t give a rat’s ass, so shut up already.” So often did he employ this “good,” it became a running family joke. Even my kids have become expert at mimicking it. So I’ll say, for example, “Girls, I want to talk to you about Internet security,” and they’ll reply, with perfect Grandpa inflection, “Good”—and then disappear.

Okay, great … so what were his last words?

My father’s last words were … well, first let me paint the picture for you, of this deathbed scene. My dad had reached the phase where lucidity was a huge struggle. If somebody visited with whom he really wanted to connect, he dug deep, made eye contact, swallowed, cleared his throat, and then asked (with a gesture or a croak) for a drink of water, which would cause a coughing fit right after he swallowed it, and then he would utter a sentence clearly tailored for maximum brevity. The effort would exhaust him, and then he would slump back on the pillow, and his eyelids would half close, and his eyes would roll up toward the top of his head. For long spells between these verbal efforts—which became progressively rarer—he would just lie there in a partial doze.

My brothers and I learned that our dad seemed to appreciate our presence even if he couldn’t communicate (verbally or through eye contact). So we’d sit by the bed and hold his hand. He’d acknowledge this, sometimes, with a brief hand squeeze. (And if our presence didn’t always register with him, the gesture meant something to us, anyway.) And so, sometime in the last hour of our dad’s life, my brother Geoff and I just sat with him, across the bed from each other, each holding one of his hands. We sat there quietly, looking upon him, knowing full well that we wouldn’t be looking upon him for much longer, and then never again.

What a sight he was. He hadn’t gotten around to getting a haircut or trimming his beard before a big surgery in mid-August, and the ensuing complications and follow-on surgeries—one crisis after another, each advancing him toward this early death—meant he never got around to these petty sartorial matters, so now his hair was long and wild, his beard long past the professorial stage into well into hipster territory. From the neck up, he was like some crazy old man from a Faulkner novel. But below the neck, his body was just wasted away—nothing but skin and bones. His rib cage was so prominent we couldn’t help but think of E.T. His arms and legs were so spindly, so utterly devoid of flesh, he was like an honest-to-God prisoner of war. His remaining skeletal frame was birdlike—like Poe’s “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore.” In short, our dad’s physical presence was nothing short of heartbreaking to look upon.

And yet his hands, amazingly, remained unchanged. Sure, they were old person’s hands—mottled, red, sun-ravaged—but still large and strong. His grip was surprisingly good. Looking from the wrist down, you might have said this guy had gotten too much sun—but not that he was clearly a terminal patient heading down the home stretch of a wasting death. Geoff and I sat there holding his hands for a long time and then Geoff said exactly what I’d been thinking: “His hands are still the same as ever.”

So we sat there, gripping his hands, managing to find something to admire in this broken, wasted man. “Think of all the cool stuff he built with these hands,” Geoff said. It was true. Our dad was always building things, his whole life long. He made custom roof racks to put his bikes on his car. He built world class telescope tripods from old hockey sticks. He once built a prototype of some kind of aerospace stabilizer out of crap he found in the basement, including an old car tire that was suspended over the floor horizontally; as I stared at it, wondering what the point could possibly be, Dad invited me to give it a kick. This I did with gusto, and to my amazement there was a sudden whizzing and whirring of servos and the swinging of the tire was stopped in an instant, like magic.

“Think of all the knots these hands have tied,” I said. My dad knew all the sailors’ knots. He could do a clove hitch, a half hitch, a bowline, a sheepshank—all of these in his sleep, in the dark. Geoff replied, “Yeah—” but was suddenly cut off because:

“Shup,” our dad said. Huh? Shup?

I looked into his eyes, and he looked back. “You mean, ‘shut up’?” I asked. He nodded. And that was it. The last words he ever spoke. Shut up.

Now, this may not seem momentous to you, but remember everything I said above. This man had surely never, in his life, told anybody to shut up—certainly not us. That really says something, because we were four very boisterous boys—I can still hear our mom yelling, “Stop all that yammering!”—but our dad had never, ever told us to shut up.

So Geoff and I shut right up, believe me. And we looked at each other in astonishment. What was our dad reacting to? I guess it must have been painful for him to be talked about like that, right in front of him, almost in the past tense, and without being part of the conversation. Maybe the allusion to his wasted body was hard to take; to hear the statement “His hands are still the same as ever” was part and parcel of the bigger point—that the rest of his body was ruined. Or maybe he just couldn’t handle the casual ease with which we expressed ourselves, when he was barely able to speak.

Or maybe, just maybe, after a lifetime of decorum and politesse, and now facing imminent death, he decided there was no reason not to finally say those simple words—“shut up”—that he’d been waiting his whole life to be able to say.

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Famous Last Words

NOTE: This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

I had the unfortunate opportunity recently to hear somebody’s last words. As in, on his deathbed. I suspect that few people’s last words are memorable, or at least get remembered. However, I came well prepared for my opportunity as witness, which gratified my longtime fascination with dying words. In this post I’ll explore that fascination with you.

Famous last words

My brother Max and I have discussed this at length. We want to go out saying something impressive. Max declared, “I wouldn’t want to go into death unprepared. I want to have something rehearsed.” Like what? “Well, something like, ‘Stay gold, Ponyboy … stay gold.’” Of course he was joking, as that’s been taken. Myself, I’ve always kept the following quote handy, ready to rattle off whenever I don’t know what else to say: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” Those are Vladimir Nabokov’s words, but not his last. His last words were, “A certain butterfly is already on the wing.”

Pretty glib, eh? Almost too perfect. And that’s the challenge: to have something queued up in advance, and then to have the lucidity and presence of mind to recall it in your last moment. Adding to the difficulty is that you may not know which moment will be your last. As I’ve discussed with Max, there’s always the Little Big Man scenario: you think the time has come to die, and you make a big speech and everything, and then you unexpectedly go on living for quite some time, making this “final” thing you said a bit of an embarrassment.

There’s also the scenario where you give a nice little speech, thinking it’s the end, but then you live just long enough to spoil it with some other random utterance. This happened to the famous writer Roald Dahl, who had his family gathered around him and said, “You know, I’m not frightened. It’s just that I’ll miss you all so much.” Pretty nice sentiment, but then, as he seemed to lose consciousness, his nurse decided to give him a morphine injection to ease his transition—whereupon Dahl cried out, “Ow, fuck!” And then died. Ow, fuck … famous last words.

Convicted murderers, right before being executed, have a great opportunity to say something memorable. In my extensive study of last words (i.e., reading the entire Wikiquotes entry), I found murderers to be the best represented. They can predict the moment of death beforehand, and they’ve had some time on death row to think of something. James French, just before getting the electric chair, yelled to the assembled press, “Hey fellas! How about this for a headline … ‘French fries!’” Thomas Grasso declared, “I did not get my Spaghetti-O’s; I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this.” Of course, even murderers can screw this moment up. Shannon Charles Thomas gave some long formal statement, but then forgot to shut up afterward. His actual last words: “Is the mic still on?”

Perhaps murderers aren’t whom to look to for the crème de la crème of last words, as these people don’t tend to be well educated and/or or deep thinkers. I’ve found wittier quotes from those executed in the name of politics. Consider Pedro Munoz Seca, a playwright executed during the Spanish Civil War, whose last words, facing a firing squad, were, “I am starting to believe you are not intending to count me amongst your friends.” George Jacques Danton, a French revolutionary famous for his physical ugliness, said just before being beheaded, “Show my head to the people. It is well worth seeing.” But my favorite line comes from James Scott, First Duke of Monmouth, a British nobleman executed on Tower Hill. It was customary in those days to tip the executioner in advance (as a way to ensure good—i.e., swift—service), but Scott refused. Perhaps for that reason, the first blow of the axe landed on his shoulder. He looked up at the executioner and said, “Sir, if you miss like that again, I cannot guarantee that I shall remain still.”

Of course, anybody whose life ends like this has the benefit of an audience which knows it is witnessing somebody’s demise. This audience is prepared in advance to register what is said and may naturally suppose the words will be remarkable—so they’re paying attention. But the death doesn’t need to be deliberate, if there are enough people in attendance. There is very little doubt as to the authenticity of the final words of Mark Sandman, the lead singer of Morphine. Addressing a stadium full of fans at a concert in Palestrina, Italy, he said, “Thank you Palestrina. It’s a wonderful evening, it’s great to be here and I wanna dedicate you a super sexy song.” And then he collapsed of a fatal heart attack.

In contrast, when a famous person dies but not many are around to hear his or her last words, there’s certainly room for error—especially when posterity so badly wants to glorify the memory of the deceased. Perhaps this is how history has recorded so many conflicting (and thus inaccurate) accounts. For example, Groucho Marx is said to have parted with, “This is no way to live!”—but his last utterance is also reported as, “Die, my dear? Why, that's the last thing I'll do!” So which account is correct? At most one, and quite possibly neither. Humphrey Bogart supposedly said, “I should never have switched from scotch to martinis.” But other sources have him leaving off by telling his wife, “Goodbye, kid. Hurry back.” Maybe the thing about martinis was merely toward  the end? Who knows.

Dylan Thomas either said, at the last, “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies … I think that’s the record,” or, “Roses plural or Rose’s with an apostrophe?” The second report, spoken to his girlfriend, strikes me as more authentic (for being less pitch-perfect), but again we can’t really know. Elvis Presley is purported to have made his final utterance, “I’m going to the bathroom to read,” but the more believable account is that he said, “Okay, I won’t,” which gives the more interesting utterance to his fiancée, who (as he headed for the john) warned him,  “Don’t fall asleep in there.”

One apocryphal final utterance that I’m guilty of repeating is that of Tom Simpson, a cyclist who died of a drug overdose during a Tour de France stage. He supposedly said, “Put me back on my bike.” What he actually said was, “Up … up….” Of course that doesn’t make as good a story. Pancho Villa left us a nice touch of irony along these lines, saying at the end, “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.” Very witty and “meta,” except that, alas, this quote too is apocryphal … nobody knows what his last words actually were.

Other last words can perhaps be better trusted, not because of who was around to remember them, but because they’re memorable without being uttered by a famous person burdened with the responsibility of saying something bright. For example, Louise-Marie-Thérèse de Saint Maurice, Comtesse de Vercellis, reportedly said, “Good. A woman who can fart is not dead.” This was, yes, after letting one rip. That’s just too good to be made up (and if it was untrue, people would surely have spoken up). Another utterance that seems too apropos to have been apocryphal is the final utterance of the surgeon Joseph Henry Green who, upon checking his own pulse, spoke just one word: “Stopped.”

Then we have the case of Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, whose last words were, “God bless, God damn!” According to Wikiquotes, “He was known to spend many long hours trying to decide what his last words would be; one can only speculate if this is what he had intended to say.” I guess there are worse final proclamations; after all, “God bless, God damn!” was reportedly good enough for James Thurber, a noted wordsmith. (Perhaps Thurber was quoting Santa Anna?)

Where last words are concerned, accurate recall is a two-way street: anybody who might be in the room with the dying could be the only one to hear these words, and may or may not care to commit them to memory, especially if they’re humdrum things. Freddy Mercury, on his deathbed and weak from AIDS, probably didn’t realize his humble and necessarily concise request for help getting to the restroom—“Pee pee”—would be the last thing he ever said. But was it, really? Unless he literally died moments later while getting this assistance, he might have died half an hour or so later, and do we really know he didn’t say some other similarly bland thing during that time?

My father’s last words

Many of my dad’s utterances, toward the end, seemed like candidates for his last words. In these final days, I struggled to remember not only every single thing my dad said, from the profound to the truly banal, but also the sequence in which he said them. After all, I wanted to get this right. There’s a world of difference, to me, between something said toward the end versus the very last thing a person ever said.

When people are gravely ill and thus not of a reliably lucid mind, or even when they’re just bummed out about being terminal, they run the risk of leaving off with something less than totally profound. Agnieszka Osiecka, the Polish writer, said to her children on her deathbed, “Do Dupy,” which translates, “This sucks.” Perhaps she didn’t intend these to be the last words she ever spoke. Similarly, I doubt my dad intended his last word to be “Integers!” which he said quite loudly and emphatically, but apparently to nobody; my brother and I heard it from the next room. But he also said, “Urinal,” because he needed to pee. It vexed me at the time that I could not recall which came first. What if he never said another thing? What if I wouldn’t be able to know his last words for certain?

Hanging on my dad’s every word during those final days seemed a fool’s errand, because nobody could know how long he would last. It seemed he could die any minute, or in the next few hours, or maybe not for days, and possibly a week or more. How long could I go on committing his every verbal output to memory?

There was also the risk that If I didn’t nail down my father’s last words, I might unknowingly invent something. I’m not talking about putting words in his mouth, but about conveniently seizing on something profound, and later recalling it, inaccurately (though inadvertently) as the last thing he said. For example, he did gather my three brothers and me around him toward the end to bid farewell. “Okay boys,” he said, and then paused. So far he was off to a great start. How many times had he addressed us that way? I was almost crying already. 

Then, working to summon the breath needed to continue, our dad cleared his throat and said, “This is the last time I’ll have an audience.” This, because it came from a man who had always enjoyed an audience, was profound. But now he was truly running out of breath, and mental clarity, and only managed to finish up with: “Bye-bye.” And this could have been it, and though it’s not a total zinger, it does have a nice sense of closure, perhaps not worthy of My Dinner with Andre, but more than good enough.

But I knew this might not be his final utterance. I stayed focused, because if I didn’t catch whatever he said next, I’d forget that next thing, and fall back on the last thing I did remember—i.e., the “bye-bye” speech. And that wouldn’t be fair to my dad. Make no mistake about it: the last words should be remembered exactly—not for the benefit of the audience, but for the benefit of the dead.

A bit later our dad said some very nice things to Max, that I could probably remember pretty much verbatim if I thought hard (and which deserve to committed to memory, I suppose), but I know for a fact these weren’t my dad’s last words. He was going to go around and give a final benediction to each of us, and you’d better believe I’d have paid close attention and made sure to immortalize whatever he said specifically to me—but he never got to it. He ran out of steam. And the really crazy part is that I can’t even remember if this was the very day he died, or the day before. That’s how quickly these memories get warped.

But you know what? In the end, I managed it. I know unequivocally what my dad’s last utterance was, and what’s more I have a witness. Two of us heard him, distinctly. And this was in the last hour of his life, and we were with him the rest of the way, and he never said another thing. And what he said was totally unexpected, completely lucid, and—in its way, coming from the mouth it did—totally profound. It was also pretty funny. What he said was this:

Wait, hold on. About the only feedback I ever get on this blog is that my posts are too long. And look at this, I’m at like 2,300 words already! So I’m going to just snip this off right here so you can get back to binge-watching House of Thrones or Game of Cards, or tweeting or snapchatting or whatever I dragged you away from. Tune in next week for the thrilling conclusion (I originally typed it “confusion”) of albertnet’s Famous Last Words!

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