I, a member of the over-fed, exploit every celebrated angle to instantly look ten pounds thinner.  However, those quick fixes last meant something significant when ten pounds overweight meant something significant, which was in the 50s.  Today’s ten pounds have ballooned to thirty.  Black did what it could but it simply cannot make a chocolate cake out of a manure pile. 

When renewing my driver’s license, and anticipating the updated picture, I wore a nice black caftan.  Not only was I miffed when the clerk administering the eye exam asked if I wanted to update any of the data on the license since apparently the information recorded was years’ old (I did not let her intimidate me and I didn’t change one damn thing.  If I was 5’6” tall and weighed one hundred fifteen pounds when I first got my license at age 16 that is what I weigh. Don’t be questioning me.) but the caftan was a big let-down.  I had overlooked the fact that it wouldn’t conceal my full moon face and multiple chins.    In the photo my face looks like it weighs one hundred and fifteen pounds. 

Feeling a responsibility to my dumpy lot, I’m digging around to see if science has kept up with the times.  Since some genius way back when discovered that black is the bullet for looking more like a runway model than a rundown matron surely some enterprising fashion designer has been hard at work discovering a similar, but better, way to hide thirty porky pounds.   

I’m betting on a microfiber of some sort and I am certain that the color is literally out of this world.  It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to discover it is the variegated blue of the Na’vi people of Pandora.  That would explain why it took so long to make the movie Avatar.  Long years exploring outer space yielded not only a very cool indigenous people but a new skinny color, blue with crystals.  The Na’vi are lithe and slender and their color, because it is their skin, encases them from head to toe, just the one up needed to replace dusty black.  Wiggling into a new blue skin means no longer having your concealed butterball body betrayed by your fat face.  

Well, reality, what a weary thing that is.  I perfectly understand why people leave Avatar and become depressed upon realizing that it is only make-believe and we can’t go there – nor can we wear their new skinny color.   I am just not going to go to the negative though.  Who said “If you can imagine it you can make it?”  Somebody did, didn’t they?  That is what I am going to do.  I am going to don my thinking cap and spend vast amounts of time creating the new skinny blue skin for real people just like me.

 It won’t be easy but nothing worthwhile is (I am just full of platitudes today) and it will probably take about as long to develop that skin as it would take me to lose thirty pounds. I might as well do something magnificent for all mankind rather than just something good for me.  Besides I would get filthy rich with an invention like that.  Until then, tata.