LIP UP MATTY

I’m in Portland and I’ve got some time to kill and I’ve already walked around and seen just about all the urban planning one person can see in a single day. So I decide to duck into a movie about smoking and other naughty things.

On the way out, I head towards the bathroom and am confronted by one of those scales that offer you your fortune, winning lottery numbers, and weight. All that for only 25 cents. The local Powerball jackpot is up to about 50 million dollars, so learning the winning numbers is easily worth 25 cents.

I step on the scale, insert a quarter and receive the following information: 06-08-12-31-34-21, your dreams will come true, and 215 pounds.

While it’s always nice to have one’s dreams come true (as long as they’re not the ones where you show up to work naked), it’s that last piece of information that has me stunned. 215 pounds? Me? It hardly seems possible.

To look at me now, you’d likely describe me as a man of average build, sort of like the guy to the right in this photo. Granted, I’ve got a little bit of a gut, but “overweight” is not a word anyone would use to describe me.

But if you’re 6 feet tall (and I am) 215 pounds is about 40 pounds overweight.

My shock is compounded further by the fact that, deep down inside, I still think I’m this guy… the one on the right. The really skinny one. In that photo, I’m 6 feet tall, but I weigh about 130 pounds.

For most of my life, I’ve been the guy who was so skinny that it frightened other people. Now there’s a digital scale in Portland that says I am, as defined by the CDC, obese.

I determine I should get to the bottom of this as soon as possible, before I get so fat I can’t leave the movie theater.

How to determine if I’m really that fat? I had been weighing myself on our bathroom scale for a few years, but it’s about 300 miles away right now. So that’s not a viable option.

After much thought, I determine that I must attack the digital scale logically. It didn’t just tell me I’m obese, it also told me the winning lottery numbers and told me my dreams would come true. The way I see it, it’s all true, or none of it is true. Either I’m an obese man with true dreams and a winning lottery ticket, or I’m not.

I can’t remember any dreams I’ve had lately, so there’s really only one last test I can perform. I march into a 7-11 and buy a lottery ticket with my supposed “winning numbers.”

The next morning, I wake up and discover that my ticket is a complete bust. Not one number matched. It would have been nice to have that 50 million dollars, but it’s a relief to know I’m not fat anymore. Phew!

(A special tip o' the hat to anyone who gets the pun in this post's title.)