Asshole

by Martin Kihn

  I decided to develop my own eating plan—something I called the Asshole Diet.

  THE ASSHOLE DIET™

  Beta males eat junk. Alpha males eat healthy. Assholes eat.

  It’s as simple as that.

  My goal was to create a diet that allowed me to lose weight while not counting calories, not giving up anything I liked, not having to engage in nonviolent exercise unless I was “in the mood,” not having to remember to take supplements or go food shopping, and filled me with a manic energy that would give me an “edge” at work. Also, I wanted immediate results.

  Impossible, you say I’m a dreamer, you say.

  I say: Who asked you?

  The Asshole Diet™ borrows something from Hofmekler’s Warrior Diet, in the sense that both are looked down upon by the so-called medical establishment and both are for warriors. However, my diet is simpler, easier to understand and to put into practice, and produces quicker results.

  How? you ask.

  It uses the body’s own natural response mechanisms of expulsion, chronic nausea, and crippling stomach pain. Through an alarming rise in the acidity of the intestinal lining coupled with skyrocketing rates of such markers of illness as “bad” cholesterol and toxic liver enzymes, The Asshole Diet™ turns the entire GI tract against the very idea of consuming another bite of food.

  The result: pound after pound melts away, and you’re left with rock-hard bone, sinew, and a distinct, generally repulsive odor—three of the core building blocks of the ideal Asshole body type.

  Ready? I thought so.

  Who Needs This Diet? You need to be on this diet if you have any/all of the following symptoms:

  •Bloating

  •Constipation or diarrhea

  •Logorrhea

  •Lazy eye

  •Self-doubt

  •Stubborn abdominal fat

  •Night sweats

  •Yearning

  To start, the simple Dos and Don’ts of The Asshole Diet™ are:

  Don’t

  •Count calories, carbohydrate content, grams of fat—or anything else that requires you to waste time reading labels, doing math, caring, et cetera.

  •Buy organic, free-range, hormone-free, antibiotic-free or otherwise “free” food that is more expensive than it really should be

  •Avoid alcohol, cigarettes, prescription drugs, or anything else that helps you make it through the day

  Do

  •Drink plenty of caffeinated beverages—at least eight full eight-ounce cups of coffee or the equivalent in carbonated energy drinks such as Red Bull every day

  •Rely heavily on artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, sucralose, and saccharine that pretend to be real sugar, and so pretend to give you energy

  •Take over-the-counter decongestants such as Sudafed, Contac, and DayQuil, and diet supplements such as Dexatrim, et cetera—which make you less hungry until that inevitable binge

  •Tell everyone you “feel like shit” because you’re losing weight and consequently need to be left “the fuck alone”

  I’ve divided the diet into three easy-to-follow phases:

  PHASE I—CONTROLLED ANOREXIA

  The first step in Phase I is to forget about what you eat, and when. No matter what it is, it’s too much. The next step is to reprogram your mind so you see yourself as a fat, pathetic slob who is at the mercy of forces beyond your control. You can do this using the techniques of self-condemnation and negativevisualization. Repeat to yourself throughout the day phrases such as “I am really, really fat” and “I’m an obese pig someone would have to be stupid to love.” Tape pictures of fat people on your bathroom mirror, dashboard, and kitchen cabinets. Caption them “ME—THE FATTIE.”

  PHASE II—SCAVENGING

  Once you’ve achieved your goal weight—which should be about 20–25 percent less than what the Establishment recommends—you can move on to Phase II. In keeping with my intention to make this diet as “realistic” as possible for todays fast-paced world, this phase involves not planning ahead, and eating on the run (usually while standing), buying prepared foods for immediate consumption, eating in restaurants and ordering from take-out places, and drinking only carbonated soft drinks, coffee, and alcohol. In other words, going back to what you were doing before Phase I.

  After all, you’ve lost a lot of weight through a process of selfinduced psychic and physical trauma. You deserve to treat your-self, right? What’s a little pizza going to do? A glazed donut or two?

  In no time at all, you’ll find yourself approaching:

  PHASE III—LIPOSUCTION

  Diets always fail. There’s nothing truer than that. Unless you’re willing to commit yourself to a lifelong regimen of careful eating, food preparation, water drinking, and exercise, after virtually any diet you will end up right where you began, and then some.

  So let’s be “realistic” about it. You’re going to need liposuction. It’s fast, not cripplingly painful, not ruinously expensive, and—best of all—rids you of a lot of ugly unwanted fat even faster than a divorce. It is the ultimate Asshole Diet™ tool. But in the words of the great Ori Hofmekler, “It’s best that I stick to the subject of diet and not become a preacher.”

  So I’ll leave you with one thought, and move on.

  Thought: In the end, to a true Asshole it’s not about what you eat—it’s about who you eat.

  STEP SEVEN

  Become the Alpha Dog

  “Dogs remind us how simple life is.”

  —Cesar Millan

  Your dog sees things in black and white—either she’s the bitch, or you are. She has an uncanny grasp of the dynamics of power and dominance. In this Step, you learn the evolutionary basis for the ascendancy of the Asshole in the modern world. Or at least how to get your snarling sidekick to sit. Then you move on to dominating less complex life forms, like co-workers.

  The human kennel is rife with hierarchies, whether we see them or not. Up or down, top or bottom, S or M—it’s a rank-and-file life. To succeed as an Asshole you’ve got to hijack the structures around you and get other people to bend over and assume the position. When you say “Down,” the right response is: “Arf!”

  Speaking of dogs, the Nemesis appeared one night at full moon (or nearly) when I was working late and said, barely disguising his joy, “Did you hear about Lucifer, Marty?”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s a go. Client asked for a detailed proposal from us. It’s a bake-off situation.”

  “When’s it due?”

  He named a date that was all but impossible to meet, at least for human beings on this Earth.

  And he added: “Oh, and they want me to head it up.”

  I looked at him. He wasn’t kidding me. “But—”

  “You’re totally on the team. We’ll talk later—gotta go—”

  He was off, leaving me with the terrible feeling my Asshole had failed before he’d even really begun. It turned out he was wrong; the client put Lucifer back into limbo. But he’d scared me. Again.

  I realize now that I spent so much time on boxing and dieting because I was preparing for the biggest challenge I would face in my quest, one that made taking on the Nemesis for control of Lucifer look like a cool drink of Gatorade.

  That challenge was, of course, my dog.

  I had only to watch The Dog Whisperer for about ten seconds to know Hola was the Alpha Male in our relationship. It didn’t make me feel any better about myself that she wasn’t even male. All the time I was studying dominant behaviors and practicing assertiveness, my four-legged Nemesis was there day and night to remind me I was a complete fraud.

  So it was with a feeling of panic, and some excitement, I looked down one day and decided I was ready. I could take her on. First, I would learn how to command my furry adversary. Succeeding in that, it would be no great challenge to apply the same techniques to my office-mate, the women who worked for me, and others.

  “This is it,” I told Hola, driving
up the Saw Mill Parkway-toward White Plains for her first dose of hard-core obedience training, “the beginning of the end.”

  She smiled and started chewing on the gearshift.

  “Let’s just start at the beginning,” said Gloria.

  There were about ten dog-owner pairs in the class, plus scattered spouses and children, in an empty cinder block ware-house wedged between a recycling plant and a Burger King. The trainer, Mr. German, was a big guy with a floppy manner, like a Saint Bernard, and thick glasses. He had trained police dogs at one time, and he talked like a cop from North Maine.

  “So,” he said that first Saturday, “how many of you know how to sit?”

  I raised my hand. Hola knew how to sit. She’d been to puppy kindergarten. Five times, in fact.

  “Great—the Bernese. What’s her name?”

  “Hola.”

  “So bring Hola out here and show us how to sit.”

  I hadn’t counted on this. An in-class demonstration. My experience of those included the time when Hola broke a “down” command in order to show the instructor how to do the bossa nova. We were not called on again.

  Hola pulled me out, and Mr. German slipped me a tiny piece of hotdog.

  “Have her sit,” he said.

  “Sit!”

  Hola stood taller, staring at Mr. German.

  I squared my shoulders.

  “Sit! Hola! Sit!”

  A look of incomprehension crossed her eyeballs, like I was speaking a word she’d never heard before. Momentarily distracted by my embarrassment, I dropped the hand holding the hotdog fragment. This was a mistake. Hola was the master of seizing opportunity. She leapt for my hand, snatched the piece of meat, and darted between my legs doing a happy dance. Then—as I scrambled to pull on the leather leash, which I held in my hands—she showed a speed enhanced by her protein snack as she started running around and around me, three or four times, wrapping my legs in a tight leather ligature.

  I stumbled backward—felt like I was going to fall over—when Mr. German said, not very loud but incredibly clearly: “Hola, sit!”

  Immediately, Hola stopped running and sat, looking up at Mr. German like he was a choirmaster. Gloria looked pained.

  I was unraveling my feet from the binding as Mr. German observed, “She does know ‘sit.’”

  “Of course,” I sniffed, unable to look either at him or my dog.

  “Just not when you say it.”

  There is nothing more cruel on this earth than a canine obedience instructor passing judgment. Especially when he’s right.

  “Not when I say it,” I mumbled.

  Mr. German never asked me and Hola to demonstrate again, but my pooch did make some progress. Sometimes she’d sit when I asked her. Sometimes she’d down. The stay was an impossibility. I began to think she was genetically at fault. Perhaps she had some form of canine ADHD no one had diagnosed. Perhaps she really was, as Gloria said to me on the way home after one of our classes, a “special needs dog.”

  One Saturday I asked Mr. German about my theory.

  “Do you think she might have an Attention Deficit Disorder?” I asked.

  “I’m sure she does.”

  “Really?”

  “We see it in here all the time.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “It’s called being a dog.”

  “Dogs are pack animals,” Mr. German explained to us one morning when Gloria had decided to stay home, where it was safer. “You know what that means?”

  He favored the Socratic method of instruction, which involves a lot of questions—or rather, in my long educational experience, a lot of awkward silences followed by the teacher telling us the answer.

  “They have to know who’s boss,” he answered himself. “They need a leader in the wild to organize their system. The Alpha Dogs the one that makes decisions, others follow him—it’s always a male, sorry. If other males started doing what they wanted what do you think happens?”

  Silence.

  My ears had perked up at the mention of the Alpha Dog. It was the mall at the Time Warner Center all over again, except it smelled much worse.

  “That’s right, chaos,” continued Mr. German. “To stay alive they need a boss. It’s literally life and death in the wild. Doesn’t matter if they’re the boss or not—what’s important is they know their role. They need a place in the pack. It’s genetic—they’re born with this. So with us, the owners, they’re the same. One of you is the Alpha, that’s a given. The dog looks to you to tell him who’s in charge. And what happens a lot of times, you don’t even know it but you’ve told him, ‘You’re the boss.’ Am I right? You’re smiling, Randy…”

  As our classmate Randy went on about something while both his surgically perfected bleach-blond wife and his Rottie, Sugar, listened attentively, I was frantically trying to get Hola to stay in a sit. She seemed to prefer practicing her routines for Cirque du Soleil—at least the one where she rears up on her two back legs and bicycles her paws at the woman standing next to me while I desperately try to pull her front end to the ground.

  “What other animal’s a pack animal by nature?” Mr. German asked us.

  “Sheep,” people guessed, and “horses,” “geese?”

  “Humans,” he said. “So does that mean, you take a group of people, we want to know who’s in charge?”

  Seemed like an easy question, so I said, “Yes.”

  “Wrong,” he surprised me, “we don’t want to know who’s in charge.” Dramatic pause. “We need to know it. Even if we think we’re too smart for that stuff.”

  I was beginning to see where I’d strayed, so many years ago. In some fundamental way I’d overestimated the complexity of Man.

  Another time we were struggling with the down-stay command (go down, stay there for ten seconds, get treat; repeat), and Mr. German noticed Hola’s repeated jumps up after, oh, two or three seconds.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked him. “What am I doing wrong?”

  He hesitated. I knew from experience this was not a good sign.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said. “You’re a really nice guy. I like you a lot. But Hola’s got no respect for you. She just does her own thing, whatever she wants. It’s like she’s a teenager, totally into herself.”

  And there it was again, the dreaded phrase: “really nice guy” I’d made no progress at all. Hola was proving it. “How do I get her to—to respect me?”

  “That’s easy,” he said. “Very simple. All you have to do is—”

  At this point there was a yelp! from a Shih Tzu and a woman screamed, and he ran over. This was disappointing. I was about to learn The Secret. Although that “nice guy” comment had momentarily hurt my feelings, I had decided to be assertive, follow Mr. German, and demand an answer.

  The only problem, of course, was Hola. She decided at that exact moment it would be a funny joke to untie my shoelaces and somehow knit them into her tail in a jungle floral pattern. I was always amazed at her ability to accomplish these feats of dexterity without opposable thumbs.

  While I was untangling my shoelaces, Mr. German came back. “What was I saying?” he asked me.

  “The Secret of dog training?”

  “Oh, right,” he said. “It’s simple. The way to success with any dog is a chain of command. Don’t get all sentimental about it.”

  That same class he laid out more rules of dog training. As I adapted them for my own use, they were:

  DOG TRAINING BASICS FOR ASSHOLES

  1.Somebody is the Alpha Dog. Make sure it’s not the dog.

  2.A dog is not man’s best friend. Man’s best friend is his best friend.

  3.Never allow the dog to make a decision about anything that isn’t bathroom-related.

  4.Grooming = Beta.

  5.Dog yoga (doga), pet therapists = Beta-minus.

  6.Bark your orders. And I mean bark.

  7.Make sure your motorcycle is always in front of your dog’s; go through any doorway first.
Eat dinner first. Vote first.

  8.Practice the basic commands fifteen minutes every day. These are: Sit, Down, Sit-Stay,. Down-Stay, Come, Drop It, Roll Over, Vacuum, File Taxes, Double-Your-Money, and Poop.

  A few weeks later, Mr. German came up to Hola and me while we were practicing walking on a slack lead. By this time Gloria had officially decided I was welcome to try this quixotic dogtraining thing on my own. “Maybe it’ll help you get tougher at work,” she said with her usual insight. “How’s our promotion coming along, anyway?”

  “It’s coming,” I said.

  Mr. German reiterated to us that the key was making sure the dog doesn’t get in front of you, and Hola was proving him right by standing about two yards in front of me and pulling on the leash like I was a milk cart.

  “I’ve been watching you guys,” he said.

  “Uh oh.”

  “She’s got a thing for you.” At first I thought he was talking about our special bond of love, how Hola for all her bad behavior really seemed to glow with an inner joy when she saw me—but no, he wasn’t. “She’s a smart kid,” he continued, putting Hola into a perfect down with an invisible command. “She can do all this stuff. Just with you, she doesn’t do it. Why is that?”

  “I’m—I’m not dominant?”

  He nodded. “It’s confidence,” he said. “She doesn’t get it from you. You work for yourself, right? You’re not the boss anywhere?”

  “Well, no. I am a boss. Three people are working for—”

  “Oh,” he said, mystified as to how corporate machinery could commit such a blunder. “And how’re you at work? Laid back, right?”