The doctor looked down at the chart and then up at the extremely, almost comically fat man with the bushy white beard and said, “You have Type 2 Diabetes… If you don’t change your eating habits now you’re going to die of heart disease… Very very soon… I mean, run through your daily diet with me.”
The man, who was lying on his back on the hospital gurney nodded and took in the diagnosis. “Well, I don’t eat for 364 days out of the year and then every Christmas I eat cookies and drink milk.”
“How many cookies?”
“Let’s see… I visit about a billion homes every year and eat a Christmas Tree-shaped cookie and drink a glass of milk at each one. So about a billion cookies and a billion cups of milk.”
“You know that’s about 200 Billion calories of cookies and 100 Billion calories of milk… I guess that would make sense, you have the strongest bones I’ve ever seen.” He held up an x-ray which lit up the whole hospital room.
“Let’s talk about your workout routine”
“Oh I don’t have one, my job is almost solely at a desk pouring over lists of children, sometimes twice, just to check if they are naughty or nice. I don’t get up that often.”
“You never even walk for 364 days out of the year? That’s incredibly unhealthy. You need to at least… How about you try a nice and easy exercise, like woodworking.”
“Oh no, I can’t woodwork at all. I have thousands of tiny slaves to do that for me.”
“Can you at least get one of those trendy standing desks to work at?”
“Well, I could. But then I’d be putting my chair making slave out of business.”
“Can’t you repurpose him? And I don’t think it’s legal to have slaves.”
“I don’t live within the bounds of the 13th amendment.”
“How? And that still doesn’t make it right.”
“I have an agreement with the UN. I keep their Christian population complacent and they let me keep an entire race enslaved, let me be the dictator of the entire top fifth of the planet, and have almost unencumbered access to the world airspace for 24 hours out of the year. And they don’t mind, they have lodging and food for the whole year, should they meet their production quota.”
“You’re a pretty powerful guy aren’t you?”
“Definitely. I’ve been alive for hundreds of years and people revere me around the world.”
“Well, then you can get one of your bureaucratic slaves to look over your list while you eat a banana and walk around. If you don’t change your eating habits, you will die or at the very least, start losing limbs.”
“I mean, I guess…”
The doctor handed the bushy-bearded man a banana. He looked confused, like he had never seen fruit that wasn’t decoratively placed in a Cornucopia before. He took a bite.
“Now you’ll be able to work through your diabetes and stay healthy if you have one of these a day and walk around for at least three hours… Okay, I have to go see this bunny next door that is laying plastic eggs with chocolate in them.”
The bushy-bearded man sighed and finished the banana. He picked up a candy cane shaped phone and dialed a number.
“Ya honey it’s diabetes, don’t worry about it though. I’ll be fine. I ate a banana… It’s like this curvy yellow fruit… Ya it’s okay… Yes I can get chocolate milk on the way home.”
The man got out of bed and climbed into his sleigh with a handicapped placard hanging over the rearview mirror. He flew out of the building, half eaten banana in hand, ready to make the effort to be healthy and be a good example for the kids around the world.
THE END
–Connor Rigney, Staff Member