It Was Nice Knowing You

I fear, gentile reader, that I am not long for this Earth. Is it a terrible disease, gambling debts to shady thugs, lactose intolerance? No, rather my delightful company has seen fit to upgrade our vending machines. That's right, my mortal undoing is going to be triggered by an apparent act of kindness by my employer.

For those of you lucky enough to not know me, let me be very clear about something. I am not a healthy man. Almost everything I do to my body, and put in my body is bad for me. I smoke, I drink, and I eat the kind of food that would make any reputable person in the health care industry beat themselves unconscious with a reflex hammer in a desperate attempt to forget the horrors of what they would see. I react to exercise like mole-people react to sunlight. A friend of mine recently ran the NYC marathon, which made me recall the time I spent six months in college training for a local run before somebody pointed out that sitting on the couch drinking beer, eating pizza, and watching reruns of Fantasy Island wasn't exactly the standard training procedure that one does when preparing for such an event. I was recently encouraged to start taking vitamins, and it took me twenty minutes searching the internet to find out what the hell vitamins even are.

As much as I get a giddy sort of joy from finding new ways to defile my precious bodily temple, I have a line I thought I wouldn't cross. That line is the kind of food that is now contained achingly close to my desk in an elegantly temperature controlled vending machine. Which is to say, absolute and utter crap. You know what I'm talking about. The burrito that doesn't even look good in the slickly produced packaging photo. A Jimmy Dean mini-sausage and cheese breakfastwich that looks more like Gertrude Stein than a human consumable. White Castle hamburgers that look like, well, White Castle hamburgers. Only produced and packaged in 1921 at the original Wichita location.

Vile gustatory items to a one. And you know what?

It's only a matter of time until that line is obliterated and I eat each and every one of those hell spawned "food" items. While at it, I shall I wash all those edifying edibles down with any one of the numerous energy drinks we now have. As somebody who drinks about two pots of coffee a day, let me assure you that adding energy drinks to my current course of liquid Satan is nothing but a bad idea. A very bad idea.

I have looked into a brightly lit, rotating, horror dispensing oracle and seen the way in which I shall pass from this world. I imagine that sometime in mid-January I'll be found, bloated and frozen in place, at my computer like some sort of 21st century mummy. My heart will still be beating in vain from the excessive amount of stimuli still working it way through my system. A heady mixture of cholesterol and industrially created chemicals being pushed through my withering veins with each pump.

Is it possible to live a rich, full life in two months?