Last night I sat in front of the television for the first time in a long time. I don’t know if I just hate American television or if I have a short attention span…look! A shiny nickel!!

Well, I started flipping through the stations. I didn’t want to watch network tv because, to be honest, it blows my ass. Instead I went hunting something more intellectually stimulating; something which would engage my interest. As luck would have it I wound up on Discovery Network’s ‘The Learning Channel’. I’m sure you’re saying that I probably parked myself in front of ‘History at Sea’ or something educational. Instead I wound up on ‘The 750lb Man’.

The story is of John Keitz of Dundalk, Maryland. I won’t get a lot of the story. If you want to read about him, look up this article in the washington Post, Large Heart Fails 750-Pound Man. There are other articles in the Post about him, too, but I digress. There were two items that just got stuck in my head:

• The man had snacks in the facility where he was supposed to be losing weight. When shown on tv, the snacks were in a closet. He was on his bed. He was so large that he couldn’t move off the bed. Somehow he still managed to get his snacks: Ho-hos, Sun Chips, Lifesavers, Twinkies and other food stuffs. At one point a nurse was complaining that he kept snacking the night before. Ok, sure. But how did he get his snacks?! Someone would have had to physically open his closet for him and give him all that stuff because he was confined to his bed.
• John Keitz died and was cremated.  They had shown his wife at the funeral parlor picking up his ashes. I started obsessing over this. Here we have a 750 lb. man who has been cremated and when they gave his wife, Gina, the box with his remains it was no bigger than the box that Angela and I got when we had our cat, Tia, cremated.  According to wikipedia, your remains after cremation come in at about 3.5% of your total mass when you were alive. Taking in that figure, they should have given Gina Keitz a box that weigh 26 pounds. Instead she got something that was about as big as a Whitman’s Sampler box.

Angela kept trying to beat it into my head that the vaporization of his body probably left only enough remains to fill the box. I don’t know. It still doesn’t seem possible. And then I felt bad watching this show while eating my Archway oatmeal cookies with the icing on them.

As a side note, please spread my ashes over Heidi Klum after I die.