The Boy from The Zone
Thursday, 15th June 2000By The Host
Reporting for News of the Stoopid
Sydney, NS [NOTS]
Host here, reporting from the front lines. This entire report I’m dedicating to one valiant warrior of the enemy army; one of the leaders in the fight of Us vs Them; fighting, one might say, on the side of stoopid.
His name is Ian. Not Malcolm, I assure you. Though he does suffer a deplorable excess of personality. That is, defining ‘personality’ as ‘stoopidity.’
Ugh. Where to begin?
For starters, he likes to refer to himself as a gay homosexual. He is not (so he maintains) gay; on the contrary, he believes that ‘gay homosexual’ is a double negative. Which is only true, of course, if you accept the terms ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’ to be negative. . .
Of course, it’s simple redundancy. Or perhaps he’s a happy homosexual? Perhaps so: Ignorance, as they say, is bliss.
And our friend Ian lives up to the term ‘ignorance’ in every possible way. He’s a snobbish fellow, not necessarily because he feels himself superior to those wround him, but because he’s simply not cinvinced anyone outside his upper-income tax bracket exists. With such money to throw around, I suppose he can afford to spend money on such things as The Zone.
The Zone. As far as any of Ian’s peers can tell, it’s a series of expensive books that tell you the secret to healthy eating and weight loss (Not that Ian would need it; ‘Mr. Metabolism’ or ‘The Eighth Wonder of the World,’ as I like to call him, is a veritable bottomless pit when it comes to food) is to eat whatever the hell you want, as long as you carefully measure it, act obnoxiously in restaurants, eat off of everybody else’s plates, and jabber incessantly about The Zone to those around you.
The evidence — When asked, for example, if that double-chocolate doughnut he was eating was part of this cult-like Zone Ian was supposedly in, his response was, ‘You make your own Zone.’
Of course.
Now, here’s the situation: we’re all in a restaurant. The serveroni — erm, waiter — goes around the table asking us what we’d like to order.
‘I’ll have a club sandwich and an iced tea.’
‘Caesar salad and a club soda.’
‘Just a burger and Coke, please.’
‘I’ll have a mandarin orange salad with a light pesto penne, can I have 25mL fetta on the side, great, and chicken tortellini alfredo, but can you limit the alfredo sauce to 20mL and make sure it’s not just on top of the dish but, y’know, spread evenly throughout, okay, and then I’ll have a large clam platter, not too well-done, and can I have a separete plate for the clams? I’ll shuck them myself, thank you. Than I’ll have a virgin strawberry daiquri, that’s one cup, right, yeah, and then. . .’
It continues.
After ordering more food than several third world nations can produce in a year, Ian manages to incredibly make it disappear before anyone notices it’s there. We’re not sure what, exactly, he does with it. I mean, one minute, we see the waiter bring him his meal; then, as we look down at the table, the plates are suddenly empty, and Ian is belching. We assume he ate it — where else could it be? — but we’ve never been entirely certain.
Anyway, and perhaps even more amazingly (assuming Ian has actually eaten what he ordered), he never orders enough. He also never seems to be too anal-retentive to eat our more simply- and sloppily-ordered meals. ‘Are you gonna eat that?’ has become with him as much an identifying catch phrase as, ‘Duh. . .’
He has been known to go so far as to ask if a member of our party, who had gone to the bathroom, was likely to eat her salad. ‘Probably, Ian.’
‘Well, she won’t mind if I have some,’ he says, as he shovels two-thirds of it onto his plate and, again, makes it amazingly disappear before the light from the lettuce has time to reach our eyes.
Once, when he had ordered an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet, he ate the decorative orange slice on my plate while I wasn’t looking. It might have been plastic. I don’t think he minded. That same day, he continued to return to the buffet after he had paid his bill. Go figure.
So that’s The Zone. There’s more, of course: I haven’t even touched on this fool’s self-centeredness. There was the time, for example, he called from our hotel room (trust me, I shared a room with him fully against my will) and left a message on his cousin’s answering machine, with the intent of having his cousin, Liam, call him when he returned home. The message went something like this: ‘Hello, Ian, this is Ian, Ian’s cousin. Have Ian call Ian when Ian gets in.’
That’s the tip of the proverbial iceberg. But it shall have to do for this evening. Perhaps Hippychick can regale you with further tales of his festering madness (such as the time he broke the air conditioning machine in their hotel room by getting his underwear stuck in it). . . Whatever. But, for now, I leave you. I am, as ever, reporting from the trenches on the progress of this epic struggle.
. .
-The Host