DAYTON, OH-- While trying on clothes at the Banana Republic, area resident Josh Gries, 34, thought, "I need to find a shirt that doesn't show my burgeoning man-tits," and has since had these words stuck in his head.

	Above: Josh Gries, Skinny And Fat At The Same Time

Gries has passed out of post-adolescent scrawniness and into early-middle-aged doughiness without even a brief transitional period of being well-proportioned.

"It sucks to be me," Gries commented to himself, as he tried to find a shirt that accentuated neither his thickening middle nor his skinny arms, before finally settling on a loose fitting black sweater.

"It's kind of warm for sweaters, but fuck it," he thought, heading for the cash register, "at least it hides my burgeoning man tits."

The phrase that began as a grim private joke soon spiraled out of Gries' control, insinuating itself into his synapses, never to be dislodged.

While wearing the sweater at work, he found himself making multiple trips to the men's room where, after pretending to urinate, he would surreptitiously check himself out in the mirror. "Gotta make sure my burgeoning man-tits are hidden from view," he thought, while cursing the words that sprang constantly to his mind.

Gries is unable to gauge the reaction of sexual partners to his change in body type as he has not succeeded in obtaining sex since leaving behind his former skinny self. Indeed, the subject of sex only deepens Gries's sense of despondency, and calls forth further internal choruses of the dreaded phrase.

"Skinny guys get laid sometimes, and so do fat guys," runs Gries's line of thought, "but with my scrawny arms and burgeoning man-tits, I'm skinny and fat at the same time, and I will therefore never get to have sex again. I'm a doomed skinny-fat man with burgeoning man-tits."

Even if his body type turned out to not be an obstacle to obtaining sex, Gries is certain he will never again be capable of carrying on a conversation with a potential sexual partner while the "burgeoning man-tits" phrase resonates in his tortured mind.

Gries's only source of comfort, the thought that his plight might become light-hearted fodder for the readers of The Onion, and that he might thereby gain a healthier perspective, turned out to be a non-starter.

While his story uses The Onion's familiar technique of presenting an interior monologue as news, the humor newspaper's close-minded attitude toward outside contributions ensures that Gries's story will go untold in their pages.