Look. It’s an obsession. But it makes sense.
The human tendency is to grow, right? I can’t have babies. I mean, I could hold a woman down and squeeze a baby into her, but I can’t have that baby. Anyway it won’t be all mine, not ’til I can make little me clones. And clones ain’t really you.
Nah, people want families. People make cities. People beat down a forest and grow farms, bigger and bigger. They want to be huge, and so do I. Just money isn’t enough, and pumping out kids isn’t enough. I want to get BIG. I want to GROW.
So I bodybuild.
I hated it at first.
I used to hate pain. I used to be averse to exertion. I’d sit on my ass as long as I could and smoke pot. I’d smoke pot and hit a buffet. I’d smoke pot and gorge down on a bucket of chicken. I’d crush a 24 pack of Bud and blast pizzas through my guts when I didn’t want to move. I became tremendous. This was a beginning. I grew and I grew, and as I grew I could eat and drink more. I was a bored man, but I hated pain, right? There was inertia to this path, and it seemed a triumph. Each 10lbs gained felt like tics towards a goal. Becoming enormous.
I still get a little nostalgic when I think about it. The weeks spent on the sofa. The summer I terrorized that Golden Corral up Warden Road. A fantastic time to be alive.
I got up to about 600 lbs and it became difficult to get out of bed, or stand up, or move. So, you know, the path continued about a year more, but there was so much pressure in my chest, and my knees felt like they were grinding, like they’d snap. Everything creaked and ached, and hurt. Fuckin’ travesty. Figured if I was gonna hurt no matter what in life, I should be able to hurt how I want.
So I just stopped eating for a while. I lead a solitary lifestyle. I’m a WOLF. I need to move to get shit done. So I just looked shit up on line, got some vitamins, and didn’t eat until I could move good again, but that was a depressing time. You watch all that work melt off of you. All that money, time, that effort you put into your physique, you get sad. Like it was all for nothing.
But you know, I hate being sad. Not eating exacerbated the sad, sure. But when I got down to a reasonable weight, something like 250lbs, I figured it was time to start eating again. That’s when I started getting ideas. Like, look, there’s something lonely about being a tiny person. You feel insubstantial. 250lbs is nothing, it’s dust in the wind. I am not dust in the wind. I’m Goliath. I’m uninhibited. I push past the dull human frame into the Cosmos, man. Nah, I started eating again, and I had the same goal, grow, be huge, but I had a new way to go about it: I was gonna get stacked.
And it worked, obviously. Look at these ARMS!
I hit a gym. I started with a personal trainer, told him my goal. GET HUGE. He understood, initiated me into the mysteries of the gym rat. I’ve been growing ever since.
It’s not just an obsession. That’s a diminishing way to put it. It’s a whole lifestyle. It’s monastic. It’s a self-evident goal. Look, the fat felt right at the time, but it was a mistake of youth. It was holding me down. Fat is like a prison. While the body is gaining lipidinous mass, that mass holds you back. Fat holds you down. So while I thought I was growing me, I was growing fat, an enemy, something exogenous to me, something that gets in the way of my goals. I had to grow through that. That fat was the soil this beautiful flower bloomed from.
You know muscle weighs more than fat? It’s denser stuff. I can fit more into me by growing muscle, and that muscle is pure willpower. When I started going to the gym it felt like punishment without meaning, but when you see your body swell, you realize the difference. The fat is a shackle: the FAT is a masochistic thing to feed. I’m not a masochist. I have a goal. I want to eat the universe, shit the waste, and make the stars flow into my pure, perfect muscle. Muscle, the vehicle of will, a perfect expression of WILL.
My frame has always been large. I was born large, 15 pounds. When I was a kid I loomed over the others, and they used to make fun of me. I was an introvert, and I still am. People mostly get in the way. They distract and detract from your goals. I sequestered myself, sure, and gained mass. It seemed involuntary when I was young, but it became who I am. I love being seen now, but I don’t really want to talk to you. Your words don’t mean anything. There is one goal. Talk about me amongst yourselves.
7 feet and 4 inches of height wasn’t enough though. That’s what I was born with. It’s my need to exceed what I was born with. So I got huge, I filled out the frame. Some +400lbs of raw muscle at the time. I was the heaviest, strongest bastard ever. I was a team of oxen. But it wasn’t enough. I could tell I was coming up on some natural limit.
Nature’s only role in this is to be understood, so her rules can be pushed.
I heard rumors of that old surgery where they break your legs and set your bones a little distant from one another so you can gain an inch or two. Which sounded interesting at the time, imagine I do it to every bone in the body, u’know? I’m not one to skimp on expenses or pain if it brings me success. But it takes time, which means lost gains, it can fuck your bones up. Deformities are possible. Too many complications potentially disrupting a form that would otherwise attain perfection. It gets in the WAY, probably. And beyond all of that, it takes forever, it’s extremely limited. So I had some friends concoct something.
You’ve heard of gigantism, right?
It’s usually this condition caused by a tumor on a person’s pituitary gland. Their body keeps producing growth hormone. Sometimes they can’t keep up with it, their heart strains under the pressure of pumping for an increasingly huge body and fails. I’m an ambitious man, though. If one heart fails, I have some ideas.
So I got some friends to figure out a dosing schedule for this growth hormone, and how to make it work for me. Acromegaly is the real name of the disorder, but this wasn’t gonna be disorder. And it wasn’t disorder. It was beautiful.
Now normally if you’re an adult and pump out too much human growth hormone you just get thick bones. Thick skin. A protruding brow. Your growth plates are closed and there’s no way for your bones to extend, so you thicken instead. None of this sounds bad, but thickening isn’t what I’m after here. I was after genuine human growth, height, thick muscle. I wanted to be the densest, tallest bastard around. So I was a willing participant in this experiment, where they kind of grafted on growth plates made of my own genetic material. I’m not a scientist, don’t ask me specifics. But between that and some node they embedded in my pituitary gland, I could keep growing indefinitely. And I did. Look, obviously.
I fucking lifted. I lifted and lifted and lifted. I got to this point of even growth where I was 8’ 4” but I was having trouble pumping all the blood. My heart wanted to stop. So I had a second heart printed and implanted, a bit lower in me to keep the flow even. It worked better than you’d think. I had a second stomach implanted to make sure I was getting all I could out of my food. I lengthened my intestines, added a liver, grafted a couple extra kidneys. Added a lung. Fantastic stuff. I kept growing. You know, I’m still growing. Adding an organ takes less time than you would think if it’s made of your own genetic stuff.
I eat enormously now. Back when I was only 10 feet I was pounding at least 20,000 calories a day. I would buy whole cows and eat them over the course of months. But I kept growing. Months shrank to one month, to a week. I remember the first time I ate a whole cow in a day. There wasn’t a good way to measure my size by that point. I’d had to move out to the countryside and made my home in an old warehouse just outside a college town with vast farmlands, in a valley. I was hungry, my new shipment wouldn’t come in for another day, and the ranchers around had plenty. I just grabbed a bull by the horns, as they say, tore the thing in half and ate it mostly raw. One of the best meals a man can get, really teaches you about an animal.
At this point I was still lifting, but I could also plough whole fields alone.
Hilarious things happened, too. Once I got voted mayor. I didn’t even run, it was done by universal acclaim. So many people put my name on the ballot that I was voted in. It made sense, anyway. By that point I was the primary economic driver of the county. People drove in, flew in to see me going about my business. Cement mixer overhead presses. Pullups on cliff faces. I’d demolish what buildings needed demolition. My YouTube channel had 500,000,000 subscribers before I stopped paying attention. Documentary series were done on me. I released a memoir and a how-to book, and each were withdrawn from the public after a string of deaths from attempted emulations.
No one is like me. No one could follow me.
Sure, some tried, even came close.
The Chinese, the Russians, the Germans, the Koreans. Each began secret programs to recreate and exceed my success. But I was filled in by the State Department, who deployed me in each nation to fix this problem of encroachment. It was pathetic, actually. I still remember the misshapen German behemoth, 1/3 of my size by the time I got to him. Considerable, given he was the height of the Eiffel Tower, but hideous. The state’d taken short cuts, grafted sacs of organs, accelerated growth insanely. They fed him some off-brand Soylent nonsense. The German state couldn’t get enough good, wholesome meat to grow this petit-Atlas. I tore it limb from limb. Then I ate the fucker. I did the same with each subsequent behemoth. It would have been a waste of good protein to simply let that meat rot. I never saw them, but I heard the CIA recorded the fights by drone and sold the videos to LiveLeak. Sounds like good propaganda. Whatever, it didn’t matter at that point.
After this, each nation began accelerated growth programs to compete with me. Even my own good ol’ USA began to deem me a threat. This was no matter. Each fight was a chance to prove myself over all. Each fight provided more calories I needed to get to where I am. At one point I expect one of these fool nations attempted to murder me. While I was well-within the borders of Texas munching cows after my daily thousands of pushups I saw in the great distance a mushroom cloud. Well beyond being capable of reading or hearing any human voice not amplified to an excess of 100 decibels, I went to check what had happened myself. From a distance I saw what was clearly a nuclear detonation over where Dallas had been. A specialized helicopter with enormous speakers approached informing me the United States had just largely repelled a nuclear apocalypse by first strike, however a couple missiles had penetrated the nation’s defenses. It advised I remain where I was, and I did.
And I lived on that ranch for years.
It’s beautiful, actually, to live under the stars and sun, alone, in a silence no one can penetrate without extreme effort. I began to wonder where other humans had gone though; usually people stopped by to gawk at me, and ranchers made an effort to keep me fed. I guess I was some form of money farm to them. Everything dried up, though. The cows stopped showing up. And as I was about to leave to figure out what in hell was happening in the world, a brace of small giants approached.
A funny thing about this level of acromegaly: the vocal chords grow to a point where they vibrate at frequencies too low to be heard. By some strange miracle my inner ears grew with my body, but in most cases these giants become deaf. A population of enormous deaf-mutes. I’d later learn many communicate by sign. It really didn’t matter in this case. These creatures attacked me without attempting communication. I tore them to pieces and ate them, it’d been days since I’d a proper meal. If I started to shrink at this point, I’d die, you know? It was them or me, and given that choice I will always choose me. Don’t think a man can be faulted for such a decision.
So I roamed outward trying to figure out what the fuck that was all about. Didn’t bode well for conventional civilization. And as expected, I couldn’t find little men anywhere. As I ranged, I found little giants, no one approaching my size. Occasionally these petit-Atlases tried signing to me, but I didn’t know their language. Plus, I could no longer speak. I tried writing in geoglyphic English, but they could not read. Invariably attempts at communication broke down and I was attacked. At some point I became tired of the meaningless interactions and started attacking outright. Maybe I was bored. I’m sure I could’ve made more effort to communicate with these hapless sods. I just stopped caring. It was the first real fun I’d had in years. And the further I ranged, the larger beasts I found. No one ever matched my size, though, not even up to 3/4 my height. And my musculature is always vastly superior, honed, unlike these rough-hewn megalith goblins.
They grow fast, too. I have no idea where they come from, or what they all eat, but I eat them. I build structures out of their bones to alleviate boredom. I clothe myself in their skin and sinew. As I age I only grow stronger, better at harvest. I’m massive, miles tall now. You know this. If you are reading this you retained some knowledge of English, so some of you are still out there.
The pages of this book are written on the skin of the weak, and the words are written in their blood.
Where I am now is a place you’ll never find. It’s well beyond you. If you try to follow, I will find you. I will eat you. There are worse deaths. Humans once appreciated becoming the meal of a God. You’ll do well to stay tiny, and out of my way. When you grow enormous, things look different. They feel different, and they taste different. Becoming this is becoming inhuman. Metahuman. Better than human. It’s eliminating limits. Anyway, you’ll never catch up to this. And when you try, I’ll be waiting.
While you’re building your cities, your cities feed me. I am the apex. Generations flow through my veins and pump up my muscle.
I’ll be seeing you.
