#FridayFlash The Brain is the Brawn is the Brain

The Brain is the Brawn is the Brain
By Harry Markov

To say Pete Homes thought his life unsatisfactory would be correct, it would probably also be considered an understatement well deserving of an award. Pete would agree and then he would most certainly present you with a 84 page-long thesis to illustrate why that is. You see, Pete thought and he did it a lot.

Pete thought all the time, even when he touched himself at night [during those times he'd theorize as to why there was no one to do it for him]. It goes without saying that Pete's 'friends' mocked him. They would call him The Thinker, which Pete thought was better than the classic Lard-Ass.

"Hey Thinker, did you find out why we exist?"

or

"Thinker, tell me now, why did the chicken cross the road?"

Then most naturally they would commence laughing.

Pete, the 'Thinker', Homes understood how the world worked - for he'd thought about it a lot - and his conclusion: money did not rule the world, muscles did. He'd analyzed every possibility with or without muscles and deduced that if he had muscles - big, sculpted beauties -, then he'd be happy.

Nobody messed with people, who had muscles. If he had muscles, Peter thought, then he'd be the alpha male, while the others would remain inferior gammas. Women would swoon over him, driven by their prehistoric instinct to seek protection and copulation with a suitable male. It was all obvious to the Thinker. Simple, if one thought about it.

And Pete did, because Pete thought a lot. All the time, a stream of thoughts as long as the Nile, as consuming as a flood and as pummeling as the waters of the Niagara Falls. Among overthinking everything that crossed his line of sight, Pete indulged a lot of his brain cells in his personal project called Portrait of Misery, in which he thought about his shortcomings as a human being, all resulting from the unfortunate circumstance that was his Jabba-the-Hut physique.

Now, Pete had attempted to adopt muscles. He had tried going to the gym, but he found he did not like it there. The smell of feet, pits and crotches, his unsurprising non-existent tolerance for pain and residual sweat on the equipment re-routed his energy to chewing. Because Pete - the sad, sad cliché that he was - entertained an emotion-based eating disorder.

If Pete was a movie character, he'd be the fat, miserable nerd, ranked lower than the homo BFF. Just background... no, the background to that background.

To say that Pete was fed up would be correct. However, there was another entity, which was just as disgruntled. That entity was Pete Homes’ brain, which unsurprisingly called itself Spock.

Spock had had enough [fuck this shit, in his words] and decided to give Pete what he wanted and shut him up once and for all. Being in control of Pete’s medical-mystery-of-a-body, Spock diverged Pete’s thinking energy into his muscles.

BEHOLD, Pete Homes lost weight.

Pete was dumbfounded as to this peculiar phenomenon... His mind was thoughtless in the face of this conundrum. For one Spock could use some silence.

The pounds fell from Pete like leaves in a picturesque autumn scene. ‘Friends’ became ‘friends’, who were interested in the miraculous weight loss. Pete, however, didn’t get the hint to stop with the thinking and soon after all the fat, body odor and greasy skin had been exorcised, muscles began to form on his current wire-hanger, boyish frame.

It was around the time, when Pete had a swimmer’s body, when a woman decided to touch him down below, decided she liked it and then did a lot more. Pete Homes, voted most likely to die alone in high school, had a sex life and a brand new frontier of thought for his cognitive gymnastics. He’d never been happy and he thought how he’d been correct about the singular significance of muscles as a prerequisite for satisfaction, how much better his life was and how it would be better with more muscles.

Who would have thought that Pete Homes would win Mr. Olympia? Then again how could he not with bowling balls for biceps, baseballs for triceps, barrels for pectorals and a buffalo’s romp.

All the while Pete grew and grew, thinking how much more he would win. Subsequently, he did learn after growing some more.

When his pectorals rose so high that he couldn’t see beyond them, the doctors came. Pete had graduated to being a medical mystery again, no longer invisible to the world, but the world invisible to him. Around that time Spock reconsidered his plan as a bad idea in the first place, but what had started could not be reversed for Pete thought more than ever, quick bursts of frightened and erratic thoughts, which fed his muscles.

The last Pete heard was that he had grown so large that he had developed a gravitational field stronger than that of the Earth. Then silence.

Pete wondered whether he would orbit around the sun as a planet. Spock groaned.