Triple-Super-Size This Guy

At one time in human history, actually not that long ago, someone who resembled a human blimp might have been placed on show in a travelling circus, as a curiosity, a freak of nature, an living object of horror and fascination. People would line up and gawk, not quite believing their eyes. Like the overly-hirsute man labeled the "wolf man", like the giant of a man labeled just that, and the woman who grew a beard, then took it off at night, or the inordinately tall man whose head grazed the clouds, the dwarf; all human abnormalities; aberrations of nature.

We're rather more sophisticated now, and more compassionate as well, and no longer line up, pay the price and range ourselves around a stage to silently gaze on these sad accidents of humanity. On the other hand, these travesties of human life still surround us, and they are becoming legion. Not necessarily those whom an accident of birth or nature has destined to play out their lives hidden from public view for the sake of their own dignity and shame, but those who have been given normal opportunities through chance or fate and choose instead grotesqueness.

Emerging grotesques surround us, everywhere we look. Abnormally-weighted people who subliminally consider themselves normal, are incapable of disciplining themselves to behave normally. Is it normal to eat oneself to death? Is it normal to consume food to the point where normal human activity and movements are denied one? Is it normal to destroy one's inner organs by imposing upon them the sheer weight of a body slowly and surely smothering life out of the human organism that is a person?

What's normal about not being able to walk a city block? Or living with a combination of deadly diseases, offshoots of morbid obesity - like heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, all of which lead to other, equally debilitating conditions, and finally the total collapse of the human being through sheer inadequacy of the body to persevere through severe physical health adversity. We could ask, for example, a man weighing 317 kilograms at age 38.

Correction: we might have been able to, before he died, poor man. Is there anything dignified about having to be removed from one's bedroom where one has been confined for years, by firefighters, through the window? Too large and heavy to be placed on a stretcher; too awkward, heavy and huge to be carried through a hallway, down a flight of stairs. When he died, cremation wasn't possible, the cremation oven was too small to take the bulk of the corpse.

The immense casket, 2.3 metres long, 1.3 metres wide and 0.7 metres deep had to be transported on a horse-drawn platform. Pity the horse. The casket couldn't fit into an ordinary hearse.