The Rhode Island Diet

I am a self-betraying stooge for a weight loss clinic. I have to note and disclose everything I eat during twelve weeks, and I have to report the daily variations in my weight. Every Sunday evening I make these disclosures on the website of the Oberkommando running the show. This morning, standing in my altogether at the daily weigh-in in my bathroom, I was neither at the same weight as yesterday nor at a lower level. In fact, I was one pound heavier than I had been a week ago. Panic. I had to make those weight disclosures tonight. I knew the culprit. Last night, there was an unfortunate three-way between me, a novel and a bottle of screwtop rosé. The contents of the bottle had somehow insinuated themselves between my lips as I read the novel at my kitchen table, in the vicinity of where I would wake up at about two in the morning. Life is full of such coincidences. As I stepped off the scales I pondered my options. I could lie to the Oberkommando and risk a court-martial. No, too daunting. Or I could count on the workings of intestinal transit to lessen my weight. Yes, good! So, Adam and Eve-like, I took a couple bites of an apple, bounced about a bit to encourage peristalsis and waited for Ma Nature to come calling. She did, and I did – though I will not inflict the details of the operation on posterity, even if posterity is what it was all about. Anyway, I then stepped back on the scales and somehow, impossibly, I was a half-pound heavier. Desperate now, I reached for my helmet. I would delay breakfast, bike like a madman, then weigh myself. The rules stated that you had to weigh yourself before breakfast – they did not specifically say just after you woke up. So I wouldn’t be deceiving anyone, would I? I would take my beloved bike trail. This would be my first time on it this year. Somehow I had developed a vague fear of tire inflation, which had kept me off my bike for months. Conquering this fear, I grabbed the pump and set to work, and soon I was hurtling lancearmstronglike down the familiar stages of the trail: The Ramp That Hugs, The Ramp That Doesn’t, The Hill of Death, Riverside Drive, Redemption Slope, The Fallopian Straightaway, Voldimort’s Cottage, The Lesser Fallopian, Tankerville, Dari Bee, Extramarital Parking State Park, The Bridge of Hungover Fishermen and then at last, to Bristol, Rhode Island, and its seaside Gull Guano Boulevard. Pausing only an instant to take a slug of water, I turned the bike around to head back the fourteen miles to the Center of the Universe (i.e., Providence). I was elated, the sun felt good. As this was the first time I’d been on the trail as a non-smoker, it no longer felt as if I was pedaling uphill all the time. The sensation was novel. And the sights! All the familiar sights came back to me in all their human glory: the tramp stamps and tanktop gullies of the girls, the tattooed biceps and dirty looks of their boyfriends. The archetypes were out in force, too. At Mile 15: The Tottering Grandfather. Later on: The Teeth-Bearing Sprinter. Then, in quick succession: The Immodest Behemoth, The Sullen Virgin, The Unicycle Mime, The Aspirational Jogger, The Aerodynamic Lawyer, the hotties, the fatties, the homeys… trail nuts, all. And I love them. At last I pedaled up The Ramp That Hugs, then went the two blocks home. I was exhausted, but in a good way, as if I had just attended a successful reunion. I stabled my metal steed and headed upstairs to my apartment. The scale lay in wait on the tile floor. I stripped off then stood on it. I had lost three pounds. There would be no court martial.