AFFotD News Item: Man Consumes Only Beer For Lent

“Dude…I’m too tired to be mad at you.”

~J. Wilson’s Liver

Every so often, our research department comes across an article headline that screams “America.”  We usually look for certain buzz words.  “Alcohol.”  “Punching Animals.”  “Man Causes Forest Fire.”  The typical American-friendly topics.  That’s why, when we stumbled across this article, we saw America pouring out of every letter of the headline.

“Beer-Only Fast Ends With Bacon Smoothie.”

…Sorry, give us a moment, there’s a little bit of America in our eye…we just need to regain our composure…

“I’m just…so…happy…”

Obviously, this was a story that required all the due deference and measured realism that only a staff of zealous Americans with drinking problems and a penchant for dick jokes could truly tackle, so we’ve arrived on the scene to give a  brief summary of these actions that sound so American that they made the skeleton of George Washington just shotgun a beer.

Yes.  This.

As we all know, Lent is a 46 day period that begins on the day where you see a lot of people showing up to the office after lunch with a bunch of ash smudged to their forehead.  You’ll say something like, “Dude, there’s some shit on your forehead,” and they’ll respond, “It’s for Ash Wednesday, it’s to symbolize…” and then you stop listening.

Goddamn it, how’d you get it on your NOSE?

While most Catholics, and non-Catholics who have already fucked up their New Year’s resolutions, tend to use this time to make a sacrifice, usually by giving up something unhealthy that they really enjoy.  Oh and if the massive surge in Filet-O-Fish ads during Lent tells us anything, you’re not allowed to eat meat on Fridays or something as well.  But apparently, some Catholics go hardcore about this thing, and Monks historically used to fast during this entire period.  But since Catholics are surprisingly good at using Religion as an excuse for making really good beer, they used to drink beer during this fasting to ensure they had enough calories to get through the fasting period.

Apparently, this caught the eye of J. Wilson of Iowa, whose response to hearing about this fasting method was, “Hells yeah, this seems like a good idea.”

Oddly enough, the guy with the sunken, famished looking eyes in this picture is NOT the guy who fasted.  J. Wilson happens to be the suspiciously sober looking man on the right.

While many of our staff members have gone on similar diets, ours were for less religious reasons, so it would be pretty easy for us to dismiss this whole thing as an excuse to just get smashed on beer.  In fact, we’re pretty sure we saw a comedy sketch making fun of the very concept.  But, J. Wilson maintained a blog for the whole thing, and he makes it very clear that he’s very serious about the religious beliefs behind the whole thing.  Also, he’s very open about his urination habits.

The religious motivation behind consuming nothing but beer for 46 days has no effect on how badass and American this act is, but it does mean that we can’t really make jokes about the man being an alcoholic, like we do when our staff members go weeks at a time only consuming liquor (One of our accountants is on day 27 of his beer-only regiment currently.  We call it a Singe.  Short for super-binge.  Don’t worry, you can use the term, we won’t stop you.)

We don’t know why trampolines are involved in every Singe we participate in, we just know that there’s no way to prevent it.

J. Wilson didn’t go about this thing half-assed, he’s met with doctors and pastors and has limited himself to five beers a day.  He clearly put more thought into the beer fast than any of our staffers do during Singes, since we normally spend most of our days doing keg stands until we wake up about two weeks later in a hospital bed to find out that the term “feeding tube” is a lot less appetizing than it sounds.

Oh, and one of the members of our legal department just ran in here screaming, “For the love of God, tell everyone that consuming nothing but beer is dangerous and potentially deadly, and should not be done without careful medical supervision, tell them something like that, anything, just don’t say anything stupid like ‘Why don’t you find out how long you can go only drinking beer’!  I’ve got enough law suits to worry about as it is.”

But seriously…don’t you wonder how long you could last?

Anyway, the moral of this story is that… well, shit, we don’t actually know.  We’re still just sort of energized by the fact that a man in America had nothing but beer for 46 days, and decided to break his fast by eating a smoothie made out of bacon.

So here’s to you, J. Wilson.  You beer guzzling, bacon-smoothie-ing American.