Take This Floss and Shove It

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have flossed my teeth in my life. But the calculator on my phone does not have enough digits to count the number of times my dentists have told me to floss in my life.

Now, there appears to be proof, according to a study, that flossing does a person who has teeth in his head very little good if any at all. Meanwhile, the $2 billion floss industry has spent decades making me feel guilty about not sticking a bunch of string in my mouth and flailing away at my gums till they bleed.

I have only this remarkably intelligent comment to make:

“Yay!”

This is one small step for man, one giant leap for lazy oafs.

So I am going to draw up a list of all the other things I am supposed to do but often refuse to do, and check all these things off as future studies debunk them too.

This is my partial list so far.

  1. Eight glasses of water a day. I have tried that once or twice and my tiny bladder practically exploded. I had pee coming out of my wherever.
  2. Skim milk. I once blindfolded myself and did a taste test. One glass held skim milk, the other, chilled rabbit piss. I am not a stupid man, but I could not tell the difference. (As an aside, do you have any idea how long it takes your rabbit to fill a glass with its urine? Me neither. I buy mine at the farmers’ market.)
  3. Walk your ass off every day. No, seriously. Walk until your ass falls off. Those of you who own a large ass will be glad for what will be a longer time with your ass than the skinny ones will have.
  4. Eat chicken. Then some more chicken. The next day, chicken. On the weekends, treat yourself to chicken. A tasty bedtime snack: chicken on a cracker. If this gets boring, eat fish, but only if you can find a way to prepare it so it tastes like chicken.
  5. Enjoy life more. While flossing, eating chicken, drinking rabbit piss, walking your ass off and swallowing a full barrel of water every day.

Further updates to the list as more examples of soon-to-be debunked recommended health practices occur to me.

©2016 Jim Hagarty

Author: Jim Hagarty

I am a 72-year-old retired journalist, busy recovering from a lifelong career as an unretired journalist. This year marks a half century of my scratching out little fables about life. My interests include genealogy, humour and music. I live in a little blue shack in Canada and spend most of my time trying to stay out of trouble. I am not that good at it. I also spent years teaching journalism. Poor state of journalism today: My fault. I have a family I don't deserve, a dog that adores me, and two cars the junk yard refuses to accept. My prized possessions include my old guitar and a razor my Dad gave me when I was 14 and which I still use when I bother to shave. Oh, and my great-great-grandfather's blackthorn stick he brought from Ireland in the 1850s. I have only one opinion but it is a good one: People take too many showers.