Shock this: The heartbreak of ab-flab fraud

Now the gummint's telling us, in its infinite wisdom, you cain't get washboard abs just if you strap an "electronic exercise belt" around your waste-line – sorry, waist-line – and push a button.

You cain't?

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I was wunderin' myself about thet very same, or similar, thang. I saw it once on the cable teevee. It looked so real! They cain't jes outright lie to us like thet, could they?

Yessem, I do believe our bodies is made outta electricity, see? I do know thet. I watch "Six Feet Under" AND John Edward. Just like that grizzled old queer poet Walt Whitman Bridge once dithyrambed, "I sing the body electric."

Me, I natcherly think of the toaster electric, instead, but, gawrsh, folks're different – real different – and I sure do hope ol' Walt done paid his utility bills or things would be gettin' mighty dim in there right now. Oh, he daid? HOK! Why didn't you say so sooner? I hate playing tha fool.

They gonna pull the plug, thet gummint of ours, on our last chance to get Six-Pack Abs without even working up a sweat?

This outlaw-the-flab-belt thing gonna flush those Bubbas outta tha woodwork? Be nice, boys! Don't get discomboobulated. No threats, hear? Hey, on thissun, I'm with you!

Let me say this hasta be a way-sad time to have a gut, in the history of this great country of ours. Like, if your friends SonnyBoy and BoogerRay haul a case of 3.2 beer into the woods over by the battery factory lake – you know, the place where the water's all foamy and orange and stripey with them fabulous chemicals – on the back of their cycles, or in the trunk of their, er, muscle cars or their, um, SUVs, and sip some and discuss thet there "Meaning of Life," the garage-rock album, I mean.

And with each chug of their conversation, the dudes' beerguts jes' grow and grow. Magic! Aided and abetted, of course, by the infinite variety of that thar beef jerky and porkrinds and tater chips they brung, in those way-big restaurant-size bags. And, you know what: Why does the food what's so bad for you always taste so dadgum good?

I guess thet's why they call it junk.

Like, here in Philly, our mayor eats thet silly health food, works out in his own dadgum office gym at City Hall, and has what some smarter person called "all the charm of a fence post." His genial predecessor – thet means the nicer guy before him in office – who never met a hoagie he didn't like, ran for governor, and won, on the Smorgasbord Ticket? Unlimited portions for all Pennsylvanians, I bet.

Can you get behind thet?

Some diet guy on the teevee always loses me when he starts yammering and ragging on those Sleeper Fat Cells lying in wait like Terrorists in your body. Lurking to make you Fat Again. No escape!

Like that presidential caw-cuss thang? Thet ain't no campaign – thet's purely ... pain. You know! And I know you know!

But back to those electric ab-belts? I mean, what the difference between them and:

• My daddy's brown Barcalounger with those magic fingers – no, not the one with the whoopee cushion, that's the old chair we didn't need to plug in. I'm talkin' bout this was with the plastic leather so when it heats up, smells kinda nasty, like somethin' burning in the skillet?

• The electric chair at the penitentiary frying Uncle Dingleberry to Kingdom Come so's his jail cell become available for the next likely resident, which has a dramatic allergy to prison food, fixing to be ready for instant martyrdom in the blink of an eyelash?

• And that gosh-awful shock treatment, where they strap my angry poor Aunt Hatty in like she's drivin' the Indianapolis 500 fit to raise the ghost of blessed Dale Earnhart sanctified, and then she wiggles and twitches and rolls her eyes way back into her haid and goes into a dumb trance – like teevee when you lose the remote? And then when she wake up a few hours later she forget the names of evvybody in her famly, and be's so sweet and nice for awhile she think they all the Simpsons?

I cain't be sure – don't shoot me for saying this – but all the sudden, like thunder and lightnin', Sonny and Booger sure do look ... buff. What if those feds barking off the wrong shin, er, thigh, I mean, thug?

Something definitely for y'all to gnaw on?