The one “problem” with having a healthy diet is that when you eat crap, bad things happen. A little while ago I was cajoled by my co-workers to skip my lunchtime workout and go for the Chinese food buffet in Crowfoot. They promised me that it was some of the best in the city and I should stop being so damn healthy for a change. I’d been good lately, so I thought, what the hell?

It was a mistake.

I’m not talking about skipping a chance to burn calories in favour of ingesting way too many calories kind of mistake – everyone needs to do that now and then to keep the metabolism guessing and not go insane – but it had been a couple of years since I’d been to a Chinese food buffet, and my digestive system didn’t know what to do with it, so it just decided to convert it all to methane.

It started to kick in on my evening run. I had dropped my son off at his karate class and had an hour to kill, so I ran my usual “karate route” and after a few kilometres I felt like someone had strapped a leaf blower to my ass. It was so intense I almost thought I was getting a little jet propulsion boosting effect from it.

Even though I was outside, I could smell it. Seriously, it was baaaaddddd. You know that green puke stuff from The Exorcist? The vile, hell-spawned projectile vomit? Well, imagine Linda Blair farted instead and that’s what I had.

Good thing I wasn’t on a treadmill in a crowded gym. They would have had to fumigate the place. By the end of my run it seemed like I had blasted out several cubic feet of toxic fumes, but it was still coming.

This is the part where you realize why I will never, ever win a Father-of-the-Year award.

My son came out of his class and we got into the car. He is a willing player in what is known as “The Fart Game.” While at home he will feel one brewing, run up to where I am sitting, let her rip, then run away giggling. All is fair in love, war, and the fart game.

I locked the windows so he couldn’t open them, and expelled a noxious stench so diabolical that even Satan himself would have gagged.

“Ahg! Gah! Daddy! Ah! It smells so bad!” Fumble, fumble. “Daddy! Open the window! Seriously, I’m gonna puke!”

“No way, kiddo! Who is the master of the fart game now?”

“Daddy!” [insert realistic gagging noises here].

I fumbled for the lock release on the power windows while changing lanes and radio stations at the same time. I was too late. The gags were followed by a massive, wet, retching sound.

Puke and fart smell, together at last.

Needless to say, the rest of the drive home was completed with all four windows open. My son was not impressed. My wife was not impressed. I was kind of impressed that one of my farts could make someone puke, but annoyed that the Flames were playing and I had to spend my evening cleaning little boy vomit out my car.

I’ll know better for next time and open the window. Better yet, I’ll just go to the gym and avoid the Chinese food buffet in the first place.

James S. Fell, MA, MBA, is the occasionally gaseous author of Body for Wife: The Family Guy’s Guide to Getting in Shape. He gives free, politically incorrect fitness advice at www.bodyforwife.com.

This post was picked up by IMPACT Magazine so I have removed it from here. Read the story on the IMPACT website.

James S. Fell, MA, MBA, is the author of Body for Wife: The Family Guy’s Guide to Getting in Shape. He gives free, politically incorrect fitness advice at www.bodyforwife.com. Contact him at: james [@] bodyforwife.com.

Twenty-year-old guys think they’re cool. Forty-year-old guys realize that those twenty-year-old guys aren’t cool, they’re idiots. This is called wisdom.

I was a twenty-year-old guy once, and I was an idiot, although I failed to realize it at the time. If you’re a twenty-year-old guy then one day you’ll understand.

Even a forty-year-old guy can become an idiot when alcohol is factored into the equation, but when a twenty-year-old gets drunk he transforms from “idiot” into “brainless invertebrate asshole.”

I provide the following story as proof.

Last summer my family and I were enjoying a hot and sunny day by doing an 11km loop along the Bow River. Both kids were on their bikes, my wife had her rollerblades, and I was running. This is a regular summer ritual for us, finished off with a well-deserved ice cream at the stand at Edworthy Park.

Because it was such a nice day there were many rafters on the river, and a lot of them were quite obviously pissed to the gills. This is the story of one such rafter.

My son took the lead, followed by my daughter who had my lovely wife right behind her. I brought up the rear and struggled to keep up. Fortunately, I had the view of my wife’s beautiful backside to motivate me to run faster.

After about eight kilometres there was an exceptionally curvy section and a train track crossing where I was actually able to pass my wife and ended up right behind my daughter. That’s when I saw the drunken rafter. Actually, I saw much more of him than I wanted to.

Now I understand after beer has been consumed that in short order it needs to vacate the premises. One of the great things about being a guy is that the world is your urinal, but discretion is always favored in such matters. I’ve befouled many a tree in my day, but I’m pretty sure I’ve done this unnoticed, and I’ve made certain never to do so in proximity to children.

This guy didn’t have my sense of modesty, I guess, because he stood in the great wide open, facing the bike path, with his prized-possession waving and whizzing all over creation for any innocent bystander to take note of. Considering there were ample trees and bushes nearby I found his judgment lacking.

I ignored him with the hope that my daughter wouldn’t see, but I was not so fortunate. “Ewwww, yuck!” She stopped her bike and pointed.

At that point I decided that making light of the situation would be the best course of action. “Look [daughter], it’s like a penis, only smaller.”

“Yeah,” she said, “and it’s really yucky too.”

Nothing like having your manhood burned by a seven-year-old girl. I bet it ruined his day. I decided to deliver the coup de grâce. “You know, if my dick was that small I’d keep it well hidden.”

Now I feel I should explain that normally I am not so insulting to perfect strangers; I find that it avoids what could turn into an unpleasant confrontation. In this case, however, I felt a little shaming might teach this young man a lesson and perhaps save another little girl further downstream from a repeat performance of such a disturbing visage. What’s more, I wasn’t terribly worried about violence from this guy for a number of reasons:

• He could barely stand
• There was an embankment and a six-foot high fence between us
• I had at least thirty pounds on him
• If he did manage to stagger up the embankment, climb the fence, catch up to me, and then somehow get the better of me, I had backup. My karate-expert wife was bringing up the rear, and she would have given him a few solid rollerblade kicks to the temple and that would have put him down for sure.

As it turns out, the best he could manage was a devastating retort: “Oh… oh, yeah?”

That was good for a laugh. Hopefully he was not so intoxicated that he quickly forgot his public humiliation. I’d hate it if such a righteous burn didn’t have a lasting impact.

James S. Fell, MA, MBA, is the author of Body for Wife: The Family Guy’s Guide to Getting in Shape. He gives free, politically incorrect fitness advice at www.bodyforwife.com. Contact him at: james [@] bodyforwife.com.

My kids are allergic to anything with more than two legs and hair and they frequently bemoan the fact that they can’t have a pet dog or cat. A couple of years ago my son’s science teacher brought her pet corn snake to school and my son thought such a pet would be awesome. My wife wasn’t thrilled simply because it was a snake, but the boy begged and pleaded, so we caved in and got him one for Christmas.

In short, corn snakes make excellent pets. If your have kids with allergies then go for it. The setup costs aren’t small, but after that it is a breeze. You buy frozen mice and thaw one out once a week and feed it to him. If you wiggle the mouse around he’ll grab it and constrict the hell out of it before chomping it down, which is pretty cool to watch. We spend about $10 a month on frozen mice. So, feed him once a week, and he craps about once a week too.

Snakes aren’t slimy either. Their skin is smooth and they don’t mind being handled. My son often walks around the house with the snake around his neck. My wife has warmed up to him as well. I realize that reptiles are barely more intelligent than bugs, but because the snake lives in my son’s room he has come to recognize his scent and is drawn to him. It gives the snake a certain kind of personality.

Fast forward a couple of years. Now daughter is old enough and wants a pet of her own. I was pushing for another snake because we knew how to take care of them and they had proven to be a low maintenance pet. For some reason, however, dear daughter was married to the idea of a bearded dragon. We did a bit of net research and obviously weren’t thorough enough because we came to the mistaken conclusion that a bearded dragon would be an okay pet.

Let me count the ways I hate this thing:

• It’s ugly and not the least bit “petable.” The snake can easily be held, whereas touching this thing is like holding a porcupine.
• He is dumber than a rock. For example, every day when he sees me getting his crickets out to feed him he runs face first into the glass wall of his cage. Every fucking time. You’d think that he’d remember that there was glass there, but he keeps mashing his ugly, retarded face into the glass day after day. Yes, he is one retarded reptile. He’s… he’s a reptard.
• He has to be fed twice a day! The snake involves thawing a mouse out once a week. For the reptard I have to chop veggies in the morning and then feed him live crickets in the evening. Of course, dear daughter is too young to handle such responsibilities herself, so guess who ends up doing it.
• Speaking of having live crickets in the house, they chirp. I keep them under the bathroom sink next to my daughter’s room, but if the bathroom door gets left open then we can hear the chirping through the whole house. Unfortunately, sometimes the little bastards escape and make their way downstairs and start chirping up a storm, at which point I have to send the kids out on a seek and destroy mission.
• Did I mention how much the live crickets cost? No? Well, maybe I didn’t say anything because I’m so embarrassed by the fact that I have been roped into paying fifty fucking dollars a month on stupid live crickets! Can you believe that? Fifty dollars a month to feed some creature that I detest?
• Oh, and unlike the once a week shitting snake, the bearded reptard shits every day. If my daughter can’t handle feeding, you can bet she isn’t capable of cleaning up his shit either.

I’ve seriously considered Googling “bearded dragon poison” to see if there was some way I could snuff this quadrupedal annoyance and make it look like it was natural causes. I can’t bring myself to do it though, because my daughter loves the little reptard.

Some days, though, I’m tempted to feed him to the snake.

The Bearded Reptard, Part II

Am I wrong to want this thing to die?

Right now wifey is away. As a result, an added duty of mine is to buy new crickets for the bearded reptard to eat. The crickets are one of the major reasons why I hate this thing so much.

Allow me to elaborate:

• Fucking crickets are expensive
• Fucking crickets stink
• Fucking crickets escape
• Fucking crickets chirp really loud

The manager of the pet store was showing me where the crickets are when he asked, “What kind of reptile do you have?”

“A bearded reptard.”

“Hah! That bad, eh?”

“I hate the thing.”

“How old is he?” the manager asked.

“Year and a bit.”

“Then why are you buying him crickets?” He went on to explain that a bearded reptard didn’t need insect protein after reaching a year old. I could just buy these little pellets and mix it in with his veggies.

I wanted to kiss the guy.

I was about to change my purchase to these magic pellets instead of fucking crickets when my husband training kicked in. Surely such a momentous decision as changing the reptard’s diet must be preceded by a discussion with wifey, should it not? I debated this for a moment or two and came to the conclusion that I would be better served to buy a tub of fucking crickets and consult with my significant other about the future diet of the reptard prior to changing the status quo.

I am indeed a wise man.

We had a chat on the phone that night and I expressed my enthusiasm about the possibility of no longer having fucking crickets in our house.

“The vet disagrees with him,” she said. “It’s best for him to still be eating [fucking] crickets.”

Don’t even get me started on the issue of paying a vet to check the little bastard reptard out to ensure that he’s healthy.

The result was that we got into a not so nice discussion about the optimal diet for a bearded reptard.

“He’ll be much healthier if we keep feeding him [fucking] crickets,” she said

“And this is supposed to convince me, how?”

According to the vet, via wifey, the bearded reptard will live another six years or so if we keep feeding it fucking crickets. If we switch to magic pellets then the reptard might only live another four years.

How is this a bad plan? Truthfully, I don’t see a downside. So I ask again, am I wrong to want this thing to die?

The Bearded Reptard, Part III

Something strange is happening to me.

I no longer want the reptard to die. What’s more, I don’t think I should refer to him as “reptard” any further. My seven-year-old daughter overheard me call her pet by that name and got upset. Even though I smoothed things over with her, the look my wife gave me was unpleasant. There is also the fact that the word I bastardized to formulate “reptard” is derogatory. No one would accuse my writing of being politically correct, but perhaps I should apologize for that one.

I’m sorry.

If it matters, I was being reflective and this word usage gnawed at me. Not only is it unkind, but I worried readers would believe I was a complete asshole, rather than only being somewhat of an asshole.

Anyway, back to the reptard.

Fuck. I mean bearded dragon.

His name is Spiky. Don’t get me wrong, he’s still dumber than rock, but I don’t hate him like I used to. My daughter gets him out of his cage sometimes and lets him tear around the living room, which is slightly entertaining to watch. He is also becoming less work.

Although not as good as the magic pellets solution mentioned in the second installment of this reptilian trilogy, we have found an alternative source of bugs for him to eat that we can rotate his diet on with [yes, by now we all know that they are “fucking”] crickets, so I don’t have to have crickets in my house all the time – just half the time. This new bug is a big, fat-ass-looking wormy caterpillar type creature. It beats the shit out of me what you call them.

Compared to crickets, these wormerpillars are like contrasting hanging out with your hot-looking female cousin to being forced to endure the company of your red-headed step-brother (oh, great, now I’ve got the anti-kick-a-ginger battalion on my ass).

Here’s why:

• Unlike crickets, wormerpillars do not escape
• Unlike crickets, wormerpillars do not stink (very much)
• Unlike crickets, wormerpillars do not chirp
• Like crickets, wormerpillars are expensive. However, they are big, juicy bastards and one does the work of two crickets. Additionally, wormerpillars have a much higher constitution than crickets. About a third of the crickets die in the box before they get chomped down in Spiky’s gaping maw (it makes a crunching noise). Spiky won’t eat dead crickets, but wormerpillars always seem to be alive and squirming when he starts scarfing them down like Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh going through a shared plate of chicken wings.
• One bad thing about the wormerpillars is that the little pricks bite, but a pair of tweezers solved that problem. Just FYI, the tweezers are now dedicated to fulltime wormerpillar wrangling duty.

Even better is the fact that Spiky is full grown now, so we only feed him bugs every other day. He is shitting less frequently as well.

Man, my life must be really boring if I can prattle on endlessly about the digestive system of a stupid reptile. What does this entire tale have to do with fitness? Answer: absolutely nothing. It has everything to do with being a dad, however.

Anyway, my daughter loves the little guy. By default, I think that means that I need to at least tolerate him.

James S. Fell, MA, MBA, is the author of Body for Wife: The Family Guy’s Guide to Getting in Shape. He gives free, politically incorrect fitness advice at www.bodyforwife.com. Email him at james [@] bodyforwife.com.

Last March I was in Germany for a tradeshow called CeBIT, which is like no North American tradeshow I’ve ever seen. It lasts six days and the days are long. Beer flows like water: good German beer. There are over twenty halls with massive booths and there are extravagant parties every night with booth babes all over the place. At the end of each day my colleagues and I would wander back towards the giant beer hall, making our way through the various tradeshow halls to crash parties, drink free beer and mooch free food. By the time we reached the beer hall we’d be pretty tuned up. Then factor in a couple thigh-sized pints and you are good and blasted.

One of the things we learned from previous years of attending this show is that Hannover, Germany is a pretty wet place in March, and we needed to trudge through a muddy field each night to get back to the house where we were staying. We didn’t want our dress shoes getting mucky, but we didn’t want to look like dorks with suits and running shoes either, so we came up with the perfect western compromise: we took our cowboy boots to Germany. It is a natural fact that just about everyone in my city owns a pair of cowboy boots even if most of us hate Country and Western music. It’s a cultural thing that I’d rather not get in to.

Anyway, the boots look pretty good with a suit, stand up well to the muddy field, and draw a bit of female attention to boot (lame-ass pun intended). I tell you all this because the boots sort of factor into the whole fence jumping debacle that should have killed my boss.

Moving right along, after a couple of mega pints it was closing time and we staggered out of the beer hall and wandered through the now very dark fair grounds and missed the exit. We ended up in the corner faced with a staggering backtrack to get out of the fair when I spotted a utility box next to the six-foot-high fence. The fence was covered with spiky things about a foot long. The spiky things were about every three inches sticking straight up from the top of the fence. The spiky things were supposed to stop stupid people from trying to climb the fence. Most of the time, I think the spiky things do a good job of that.

Most of the time. This was not one such time.

The utility box (Was it a power box? I don’t remember. I was wasted) was about four feet high. I took one look and knew that I could easily hop over the fence because I’m good shape and quite agile. So, this is pretty much verbatim what I said to my colleagues: “I’m not sure if you guys should do this, but I know I can jump that fence no problem.” Then I climbed up on the box, carefully put one hand on the top of the fence (avoiding the spiky things) and easily hopped over, doing a clean landing on the other side. Now if I had a brain, I would have realized that I had just thrown down the gauntlet. Instead of getting the message that my colleagues should walk around, I essentially said I bet you drunken fuckers can’t do that!

So, accepting the challenge to his drunken manhood, my younger colleague went next. He cleared the fence and landed on his feet, but then promptly fell on his expensively suited ass into the mud. In walks random drunk guy. Random drunk guy appears from nowhere and seems to think we’ve got a great thing going here. Random drunk guy goes over the fence too, except the first thing to hit the ground for random drunk guy isn’t his feet, it’s his ass. I bet that hurt the next day. Random drunk guy takes off. Goodbye, random drunk guy. Your part in this tale is over.

Then my boss climbs up. My boss is eight years older than me and not the most athletic of people. Not only that, but he doesn’t have the right idea of how to “vault” or “hop” this fence. He decides to climb over it. Climbing over something covered with spiky things is what we call a bad idea, boys and girls. I run up and grab the bottom of his boot and start to push him back as soon as I see him straddling the fence. “No, no, no!” I protested. “Not that way!”

“Just hold my foot,” came the drunken reply. So I did. Then his boot that was still on the other side slipped on the utility box.

In hindsight, thinking about the way he was positioned, one of them spiky things could easily have gone right through his inner thigh. There is a thing in your inner thigh called a femoral artery. This is something you don’t want spiky things to go through. If they do, well, bad things happen. Things like tremendous blood loss that causes death inside of five minutes, which probably would have put a damper on my drinking and partying for the rest of the tradeshow. I would imagine that the police report would include words like “Death by misadventure.” The general public would just vote him a Darwin Award.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen. What did happen was he flailed his leg over, just barely missing the spiky things, and planted his ass squarely in my face. It even left a butt print on my glasses. We both went down into the mud, but at least no one was hurt.

I’ve tried to manage my career by not being a kiss-ass to the boss, but that night I failed miserably.

James S. Fell, MA, MBA, is the author of Body for Wife: The Family Guy’s Guide to Getting in Shape. He gives free, politically incorrect fitness advice at www.bodyforwife.com. Email him at james [@] bodyforwife.com.

I know my limits. I know I can handle two kids, and I also know that three would break me. Two kids are four times the work of one, so who knows what kind of screwed up exponential increase in parental slaving is required when a third child enters the picture. I’d learned how to work the parental “man-to-man defense,” but the idea of being outnumbered and switching to a zone defense scared the crap out of me.

It took me a while before I could effectively communicate this concern to my lovely wife.

When trying to convince my wife that two kids was plenty I took the wrong tack. See, I have this spending gene I inherited from my mother. Money used to burn a hole in my pocket, but my wife beat it out of me. Well, she didn’t “beat it,” she convinced me in nicer ways. Anyway, I’m a pretty frugal guy now, and I learned from the master of home financial management.

That’s why when discussions about adding a third trouser trophy to the Fell household came up I started quoting all sorts of financial statistics about how we’d need to buy a mini van, buy a bigger house, pay more for education savings plans, pay more for other child-rearing costs, pay more for vacations, more for childcare… it’s a really long friggin’ list of shit you need to shell out for to raise a kid these days. It’s not like a couple of centuries ago when you booted a five-year-old out the door every morning to go work in the fields and care for the livestock. Back then kids actually came in handy rather than just pointing at the plastic crap in a toy commercial and saying, “I want that.”

I thought the financial approach was a winning argument. I was wrong.

When it comes to squeezing out a human being women get kind of weird. I thought my financial analysis of the situation would be sobering and convince her that two was good. We’ve got a boy and girl – the million dollar family (still waiting for the check) – so why screw with our perfect little arrangement by sucking money out of our savings account in exchange for another two-and-half years of toxic-sludge-filled diapers, sleepless nights, and puke?

She didn’t buy it. Deaf ears. Totally.

Fuck.

I’m not one for giving up easily. I wracked my brain and came up with a new argument.

“Honey, I love our family. We have a perfect family and I feel like I can be a great dad to two kids. With just [boy] and [girl] I’ve got enough time and energy to raise them properly and teach them things and play with them and all the other stuff that good dads do, but I just don’t think I could do all that if we had a third child. If there was a third one then I’d be stretched too thin. I’d go from being a good dad to a maintenance dad. I don’t want to do that to the two wonderful kids we have.”

She bought it. I booked my vasectomy the next day.

It took months to get in to see the guy because my wife wanted me to use “the best guy in the city.” To be honest, I wanted to have the best too. We’re talking about my nutsack here, and I didn’t want some drunken, twitchy hack surgeon who graduated at the bottom of his class from the University of Fuckupistan taking a sharp instrument to my primary reason for being.

Sometimes I wonder if vasectomy docs only get their hands dirty on Fridays, because I’ve never heard of a guy that didn’t have one done at the end of the work week. The drill is: get it done Friday, spend the weekend moaning and feeling sorry for yourself, then finally suck it up and go back to work on Monday.

Now comes the part where I try to make this “getting in shape” related. In order to see the nominal degree of abdominal (rhyming unintentional) definition I do have it requires rather careful monitoring of my dietary intake. However, there are regular exceptions, which is another word for “binging.” For example, I’m always gluttonous on ski days because I go so hard that my total energy burn for the day approaches 5,000 Calories, so my metabolism can handle buckets of greasy food and several beers.

Well, I wasn’t going to be burning too many Calories this time, but I figured a guy doesn’t get his vas deferens severed and cauterized every day so I was going to make it epic. I saw no reason to look at the procedure as a melancholy experience, so the day before I made three stops:

• Liquor store: Duh.
• Video store: Six movies all containing acts of unspeakable violence, including sharp implements severing various appendages, bullets ripping through soft tissue, repeated punches to the face, other general mayhem, and shit getting blow’d up.
• The grocery store: This one takes some ‘splainin’.

I’m the grocery shopper in the family and I know my way around the local market. I also know all the hot checkout girls. I’m a dirty old man and so, all things being equal, I always choose the aisle of the hotter chick who is paying her way through university rather than Rosanne Barr incarnate with the disposition of a saltwater crocodile coming off a meth bender.

I’ve been shopping there for over a decade so everyone knows me pretty well. They also know that I am a health nut and the vast majority of my purchases reflect this. However, the day before Mr. Happy’s next door neighbors were scheduled to get sliced was not a typical trip to the grocery store.

My basket included:

• Nacho cheese Doritos
• Ms. Vicky’s salt and vinegar potato chips
• Two pints of Cookie Dough Dynamo Hagen Daaz (I only needed one, but I didn’t want my wife bogarting my supply so I got one for her too. Oh, and it was the kind with “extra” cookie dough, of course.)
• A box of fudgesicles
• Donuts

I was heading for the checkout when I realized that I didn’t want to ruin my reputation with the hot checkout girls, if you consider “dirty old man who buys lots of fruits and vegetables” a reputation worth preserving.

I headed for Attila the cashier instead.

Damn, too late. Someone with a cart full of crap beat me to the old hag. Then probably the hottest checkout girl of them all waved me over. “I’ve got room here.”

What a bitch.

I hung my head in shame and start putting my purchases on the conveyor, hoping she wouldn’t take note. No such luck. “Uh, this isn’t usually the sort of stuff you buy, is it?”

“I… I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“Hmmm… okay.” Great. Now she thinks I’m premenstrual or something. James is NOT having a happy period. I hauled Homer Simpson’s grocery bags out to my car and went home, feeling pensive.

Let’s fast forward to after the main event. Suffice to say that it was no fun and I almost chickened out.

I got my prescription and penquin-walked down to the pharmacy to get my much deserved Tylenol 3. It was a small corner store affair, and it was also empty. “This will take about 20 minutes,” the pharmacist said.

Twenty minutes? I’ve got a date with a bag of frozen peas and I want to wash those pills down with a half dozen beer. Seriously, did the guy feel a big crap coming on or something? Why was it going to take 20 minutes?

Maybe aggravated fidgeting would hurry things up. News flash: it didn’t. The bastard took over twenty minutes and I started to think he knew that any middle-aged guy who waddled into his store on a Friday morning was post-vasectomy (the doc was just up the stairs) and Jonesing hard for some narcotics. I bet he was a sadistic bugger who got a good laugh out of making guys like me wait. Jerk.

I’d probably do the same thing if I were him. I can see how it would be pretty entertaining when you’re not the guy who feels like he just got neutered by a wolverine.

When I bought the drugs I also got a $1.75 can of Diet Coke from the pharmacy to wash it down. A buck seventy-five? I told you the guy was an jerk. I went to the car and was grateful that I had recently sold my five-speed Acura to buy an automatic Infiniti because the thought of clutching wasn’t overly appealing at the moment.

I made it home just as I was starting to feel a little mellow from the pills, cracked a beer, grabbed a bag of chips and some frozen peas, popped in some high definition violence and glued my ass to the couch for the next several hours. The wife had even trained the kids to wait on me for the day. If I’d had a piss jug I never even would have had to leave the couch. All in all it was a pretty good day, as long as you skip over the scalpel to the balls part.

The next day I felt almost 100%. However, my wife had already made plans to take the kids somewhere to give me another day of lazy codeine, beer and junk-food fuelled luxuriating in an expression of gratitude for electing to be the one to go under the knife. Unfortunately, I got bored after an hour; I could only handle so many movies and I started to get a little antsy.

Our kids were a fair bit younger than they are now, so of course the house looked like Mötley Crüe’s hotel room. Therefore, to occupy myself I decided to crank the tunes and do some tidying. Before I knew it three hours had passed and I had cleaned almost the entire house. When my wife got home she thought I was superman. She even wanted to reward me, but I wasn’t quite feeling up to that. I blame the codeine.

The next day I was not 100%.

The next day my balls hurt like a mofo.

The next day I was miserable and beer and codeine didn’t help. The next day was Sunday and the doctor was not in. My physician wife examined things in an exceedingly clinical manner and asserted that everything looked fine and she couldn’t understand why it hurt. There was no swelling or signs of infection, so it was a mystery. I should note that she doesn’t perform vasectomies.

The following Monday things were no better, so I arrived at the doctor’s office upon opening and bitched up a storm. Being that I didn’t have an appointment the nurse made me wait for a while, but eventually the doctor saw me and pronounced everything as “perfectly normal.”

“Then what’s with all the pain?”

“My guess is that you overdid it with the housework and got some minor internal inflammation which is pinching a nerve. It isn’t serious, but it can be painful. Ibuprofen will help with the inflammation which will reduce the pain.”

The lesson here is that housework is bad for your nutsack.

Feel free to quote me.

James S. Fell, MA, MBA, is the author of Body for Wife: The Family Guy’s Guide to Getting in Shape. He gives free, politically incorrect fitness advice at www.bodyforwife.com. Email him at james [@] bodyforwife.com.

His friends laughed at him. He told his mother he’s not eating the soup in it. My wife wasn’t that sympathetic.

He’s pissed.

I’m laughing as I type this. I can’t help it. I feel bad. Poor kid.

Seriously, I do feel bad. I know what it’s like to be a ten-year-old boy and shit like that can scar you. A mom can make a mistake like that, but a guy never should. I can screw up packing the wrong frilly girl shoes that don’t match whatever pink shirt for my daughter, but I should know better than to give my son something with flowers on it in his lunch.

I’m a bad parent. I should buy him some ice cream on the way home.

In my defense, my daughter’s thermos is blue and my son’s thermos is orange (his has dinosaurs on it). Conversely, the boy’s lunch box is blue and the girl’s lunch box is orange. You can see how a pre-coffee father can make a mistake like that, can’t you?

I still feel bad. My little guy can’t eat his yummy soup because the thermos has flowers on it. My son is going hungry today and it’s all my fault.

I hope this doesn’t turn him into a serial killer.

My next father’s day card is going to say, “Daddy, you suck.”

I’m still laughing.

Poor kid.

James S. Fell, MA, MBA, is the author of Body for Wife: The Family Guy’s Guide to Getting in Shape. He gives free, politically incorrect fitness advice at www.bodyforwife.com. Contact him at: james [@] bodyforwife.com.

Seriously, the place just makes me angry because I write for a shit-filled genre. The fitness, health and weight loss industry is full of assholes: authors who make false promises, gurus who are pushing the next fad diet, and scammers who take your money and give you nothing of value.

I represent the real facts about getting in shape based on the weight of scientific evidence, and if you can’t handle it then you can just go be fat somewhere else. Yeah, I can be an asshole too. At least I’m an honest one.

I’m also an asshole who cares. You should read my book because I care about being right. I care about my readers getting results because it makes me look good. I care about people buying my books and then telling all their friends because it actually works for them. I care, really I do.

Anyway, back to the other assholes.

Not all of them are really assholes, but I can’t believe some of the crap I see on the shelves in the diet-book section. I don’t want to name names. In fact, I didn’t even want to blog this at all because I think criticising one’s competitors is what someone does when they have no confidence in their own work. Criticising is easy, whereas creating is hard. I guess I do both.

I’ve got plenty of confidence in my own work, but when someone who’s had a gastric bypass writes a diet book then I’ve got to say something. I didn’t read the book. I didn’t even pick it up off the shelf. I just recognized the guy on the cover and knew he’d had a gastric bypass because it was covered in the media, so my what-the-fuck-o-meter went into the red zone. Maybe his book is actually good. Maybe it talks about his bypass and his struggles and all that. Actually, now I’m starting to think his book might be okay for people who are considering weight loss surgery. Okay, scratch that example. I don’t write about surgical options because I’m targeting guys that need to lose less than about 70 pounds.

Still, it doesn’t change the fact that there is a lot of crap on the shelves. I saw one book with a guy on the cover who had a weasely-looking, used-car-salesman vibe about him (except in a nicer suit) with a title promising that he could make people thin. Guess what, I can make you thin too. I can chain you to a treadmill and stand behind you with a cattle prod while only feeding you a Calorie-restricted diet of healthy food. I guarantee that would make you thin, but neither of us would like the process.

The only person who can say with even a modicum of authority that he or she can make you thin is a surgeon who performs things like liposuction or gastric bypass. Without surgery or incarceration involving forced labor the only person who can make you thin is YOU. I looked at the used car salesman’s book and it didn’t have that many pages, the type was large and so were the spaces between lines. The few sentences I read looked pretty fluffy too. There just didn’t seem to be much to it. Probably just another asshole.

I scanned a few more titles and I can’t even begin to describe the bullshit. Everyone has some new angle about how to lose weight. Hype the latest gimmick or trick to sell books is all they care about. I’d say about half the books are crap. Yes, I know that I was judging books by their covers. Don’t pretend like you’ve never done it.

Don’t get me wrong, there are good books too, but when you’re in your car you don’t notice the good drivers, you notice the assholes. I’m not a Nazi and would never advocate the burning of books, but if I was locked in a bookstore during a Day After Tomorrow moment I know which ones would go on the bonfire first.

I then walked over to the exercise book section, where there are far fewer assholes. There is the odd one, but I feel like I’m in better company here. Some of these books are about just exercise, while others are about a mix of exercise and nutrition. Most qualify as not bad or pretty good, although a lot of them flog supplements that I think are unnecessary. They advocate hard work and they teach a variety of exercises, which are good things in my opinion. Still, I think I’ve got a good niche to carve out of this group. Most of them are targeted at people who already exercise regularly. There isn’t much on the shelves about beginners getting started and taking them to a high level of fitness and nutritional health. What’s more, there is very little in the way of true lifestyle planning and motivational information. Finally, the writing for most part bores me. It’s either some warm and fuzzy group hug writing style, or testosterone-fueled chest thumping. Ack and double ack. Didn’t anyone ever tell these people that exercise is supposed to be fun?

At that point in my musings / competitive analysis my daughter came up and poked me in the kidney. “Daddy, I want this book.” She held in her hand the latest copy of Dear Dumb Diary. Now there is a book I can relate to.

James S. Fell, MA, MBA, is the author of Body for Wife: The Family Guy’s Guide to Getting in Shape. He gives free, politically incorrect fitness advice at www.bodyforwife.com. Contact him at: james [@] bodyforwife.com.

Skiing today was epic. Tons of fresh snow, bright blue sky, beer, and balls to the wall. With the wife / kids / job scenario getting up to the hill for a day can be challenging, so when I do make it I don’t screw around.

The view from 9,200 feet:

One of the benefits of being in good shape is that I can do open to close and go hard all day. I stepped off the gondola at 9:00am right when the chairs starting moving and skied up to my car at 4:15pm. Minus lunchtime that was over 6 hours of intense skiing. Because it was a weekday there were hardly any line ups, which made for even more runs. I like leaving everything on the hill, with all the short and fast-twitch muscles fibers in my legs completely vaporized.

My brain damaged buddy was supposed to join me, but he’d been on call until 8:00am that morning and although usually his on-call nights for being a paramedic are quiet, people were being inconsiderate of his forthcoming ski day and he spent much of the night doing paramedic-type shit. Speaking of shit, one of the things he had to do was transport some guy with a bowel obstruction to the city. Yuck.

As a result, my friend had to catch some sleep and we didn’t meet up until lunch. He was holding back a bit because, according to my wife, he shouldn’t have been skiing at all due to the fact that his concussion was less than a month old. I only did a couple of runs through the terrain park because the snow was so awesome, but there is one cliff that offers about twelve foot vertical drop if you really nail it.

My friend and I have done this cliff a number of times in the past and we pulled up to see a bunch of young snowboarders hanging out there. Three were above and one was down below taking pictures. One kid went off the jump and it was pretty lame, he barely got any speed and only dropped about five feet because he barely cleared the lip.

It was time for the old guy to show the whipper-snappers how it’s done.

If I’d been alone I would have hit it pretty hard, but I love an audience and showing up the young fellas, so I went flying off the cliff at top speed and sailed a long ways through the air before finally making contact with the snow again. The drop must have been fifteen feet and even landing in a bunch of soft powder I felt my knees and spine compress. I still landed it though. It’s good to be tough.

The kid taking the pictures gave me a thumbs up and said, “Live fast and die awesome, man. That was sick.”

A 40-year old guy did something a teenager thought was sick. I guess that’s a good thing. His comments did get me thinking, and I really wouldn’t mind “dying awesome.” However, I need to amend his maxim to: live fast, live long, die awesome. That’s what I want.

I try not to take stupid risks because I’d really rather not die young. The fact that I landed the cliff shows that I had the skills to do it. If it had been a 25 foot drop I wouldn’t have touched it. I’m a far cry from Warren Miller material, no matter how good I think I am.

I would imagine that eventually I’m going to have to slow down, but not yet. My knees are holding up just fine and the low back isn’t doing too badly either. Maybe I’ll still be skiing when I’m in my nineties. Maybe I’ll have a “senior moment” and accidentally ski off a really big cliff.

Maybe I’ll die awesome.

James S. Fell, MA, MBA, is the author of Body for Wife: The Family Guy’s Guide to Getting in Shape. He gives free, politically incorrect fitness advice at www.bodyforwife.com. Contact him at: james [@] bodyforwife.com.