I’m very honored to have a guest blogger today. I wonder if this is how Arianna Huffington started the Huffington Post. I’ve had guest writers before. Of course there’s Andy, who does an incredible job with recipes. The most famous professional writer before Dean was my nephew Mike, who writes in Louisiana. But having the likes of Dean Lorey, who’s known in television and film and is a best selling author, is truly humbling. Are we becoming the Huffington Post? – Vinnie
Jesus. I had no idea Vinnie was going to call me out on his fucking blog and say I “sucked as a client.” But I guess I did. I hated working out. Still do. I never thought I was in terrible shape, but I’ll tell you a quick story. Vinnie was going through a horrendous medical crisis and there was a real chance that he might die. He can tell you about that some time if he wants. Maybe he already has, I don’t know. So we were walking during one training session and I suggested that, after he died, Daniel Day Lewis should play him in the movie version of his life. Daniel Day Lewis — great actor, great looking guy, and don’t tell me how insensitive this suggestion was to a sick guy because… eh, you’d just have to know Vinnie to understand. It turns out that Vinnie didn’t like that idea because he thought it should be someone “better looking.”
As I tried to puzzle through that horseshit, Vinnie suggested that he had a good actor who could play me as his buddy in the film — Paul Giamatti. “Fuck you,” I said. “You reject Daniel Day Lewis and I get stuck with fucking Paul Giamatti.”
Great actor, yeah, but still… But I guess he was right. I was pretty out of shape. And I stayed that way for a lot of years, even after Vinnie stopped training me. By the way, in the blog he says he “quit training” me. I remember it as I stopped paying him and he stopped coming to my house, but whatever. Somehow we became friends. I’m not sure how that happened. I hated looking at him, all skinny and healthy. It just made me feel stupid. But I liked the guy. So sue me. So… years pass… somehow he doesn’t die from his ailment (again, he can tell you about that)… and a couple things happen that make me want to make some changes in my own life. First, I have some heart problems. MRI’s that have doctors shaking their heads sadly and angiograms filled with dicey news will wake you up in a hurry. Second, I see a picture of Bill Clinton. He looks thin — almost creepy thin. Now, to be honest, even though I’ve grown to really like him, I didn’t vote for him as president. Why? Two words: Tipper Gore. Al Gore was his VP and Tipper was his wife and I absolutely couldn’t stand this piece of shit when I was a kid. She was in the news constantly wanting to censor EVERYTHING. Music, movies — Tipper was of the opinion that she was the moral compass of the nation and everyone else should just do whatever the fuck she said. Well, I hated everything she stood for as a kid and I hated it even more as an almost grown man and so I didn’t vote for Clinton for that reason. Sound judgement? Eh, who cares. He still won and I ended up thinking, in retrospect, that he was a great president. So when I saw him all thin like that, I thought “either this guy has really found a great diet or he’s about to die.” I investigated. He’d had a bunch of heart problems himself — surgeries and so forth — and he decided he needed to make a change in his eating habits. So he did some research and finally decided that the answer to his problems was… vegetarianism. Jesus Christ. No one, and I mean NO ONE, hated the concept of vegetarianism more than me. I can give you a lot of reasons why, and I probably will at some point, but I couldn’t deny that it worked for him. And if it worked for him, then maybe it could work for… Anyway, I’d finish this whole stupid blog thing but Vinnie has a strict word count on them and he also has this sick fixation on keeping them all to one big bloated ridiculous paragraph — I have no idea why — so I think I’m at the end of what I can say right now. But, if he lets me, I’ll continue this some time soon to explain how my non-vegetarianism helped me lose a bunch of weight and get healthy. And I’ll also mention what the holidays, specifically Thanksgiving through Christmas, had to do with it all. I don’t know if “America’s Trainer” will give me another shot at a blog spot, but he publicly said that I “sucked as a client” so I figure he owes me. That fucking guy…
