Eat, Eat, Eat, Drink, Eat, Chat, Drink, Eat, Eat . . .

I dreamed one night that I was drowning in a sea of whipped cream, sucked struggling and screaming into its deadly sweetness. Then suddenly Wolfgang Puck threw me a life preserver but, as I was reaching for it, an ahi tuna laced with a delicate butter sauce snapped me up and dragged me under.

And then I woke up and it wasn’t a dream.

Ever since Thanksgiving, I have been drowning in all of the sweets, sauces and gravies that characterize this season of unbridled gluttony.

In addition to them, I have also ingested herds of beef in various presentations, flocks of birds in spicy glazes and schools of those damned ahi tunas on their clever little beds of garlicky mashed potatoes.

“What’s the matter?” Cinelli asked, as I awoke gasping for air.

“I think I’m dying,” I said.

“There, there,” she replied soothingly, “it was just a bad dream. Probably caused by a bit of undigested beef.”

Even in a crisis, she manages to be literary, quoting what Scrooge said in dismissing Marley’s ghost: “You might be an undigested bit of beef, a piece of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.”

“More likely it was that cheese blintz at Jerry’s Deli,” I said, moaning. We stopped at Jerry’s after seeing “Hansel and Gretel” at the Music Center. It’s the story of a witch who turns children into gingerbread cookies and eats them.

There’s no escaping good food in L.A. around Christmas time.

*

I am suffering from a post-traumatic eating syndrome. I read once that only dogs and humans overeat. Even bears can turn away from a feast of grubs and leave a little in the tree trunk for next time.

But humans, especially Americans, scarf up whatever’s shoved in their face as though not to do so would violate some kind of holy destiny that involved eating everything that walks, crawls, swims or flies.

The result of my holiday gulosity impacted upon me one night at a Santa Monica restaurant called Rix. The owner had stopped by to chat and was discussing a live jellyfish he planned on placing in a tank as part of the restaurant’s decor.

I was in a comatose state and when I heard jellyfish I said, “Sure, I’ll try it, just a small bite.”

Fortunately he didn’t hear me and it was only later that Cinelli informed me that the man was not offering me a bite of jellyfish, he was discussing decor.

My brain was melting to the consistency of bearnaise sauce due to overeating, especially at restaurants. Rix, Nic’s, Lucques, Pinot Bistro, Off Vine, Les Sanglier, the Grill on the Alley, Chaparral, Gaetano’s, the Lobster, Otto’s, Il Fornaio. . . . I have been to them all and I have eaten everything but the artificial flowers.

Eat, eat, eat, eat, eat.

*

I consulted Betty Nowlin, a nutritionist for the American Dietetic Assn. She is one of those whispery, empathetic people who, like Clinton feeling our pain, understands our weaknesses. Sometimes that’s annoying as hell.

Probably her most compelling advice was, “Don’t sit near the buffet table.”

This was meant to apply when one is at a party or at someone’s home. In addition to not sitting near the food, one is further advised to avoid hors d’oeuvres of nuts and cheese and to go for carrot sticks dipped in hummus or something equally lacking in taste or substance.

“Also,” Nowlin adds, “socialize. When you’re talking to someone you’re not eating as much.” Unless you’re from, say, Wichita, where it’s possible to do both simultaneously.

I’d rather die than chit-chat and I’ll be damned if I’ll eat hummus, both of which leaves me without the crutch that Nowlin offers.

My only hope is to adopt the Burbank Diet. It was proposed in a book by one Lola Peters some years ago and incorporates a strategy known as “noxious combining.”

The idea is to make food so unpalatable that even catsup won’t save it. For instance, the fish split: a whole cooked fish lying between mounds of ice cream. The fish has a cherry in its mouth and whipped cream along its unscaled back.

If that doesn’t turn me off to eating, I’m a lost cause. I may be anyhow. So bring on the pork chops, the pigs’ knuckles, the kippered salmon, the salmagundi salad, the littleneck clams, the frappes, the braunschweiger, the duckling and every one of Santa’s fat little juicy reindeer.

You might even throw in Hansel, and squirt a little whipped cream on Gretel.

Al Martinez’s column appears on Sunday and Wednesday. He can be reached online when he isn’t eating at al.martinez@latimes.com.