I went to the gym today, after various missions to buy pet medicine and hunt down some Hallmark ornament The Wife wanted. I had hoped, coming in during the hours that the lonely housewives usually do, that I'd be surrounded by hot, sexy women in spandex. Unfortunately, this being between Christmas and New Years, it wasn't to be. Oh, there were 3 or 4 high school aged girls who weren't ugly. And one of the gym employees was pretty and kept rolling past me with a cart for picking up all the sweaty used towels around the place. But for the most part it was just the usual sort of people and me.
I honestly didn't have a mission when I got there. It helps to know exactly what you plan to do before you arrive, but today I wasn't sure. I've been doing the same 2 workouts for too long and it's time to mix it up again. So I did.
I started with abs and back. I just kept doing them over and over until they didn't work anymore. I don't know how many sets it was, but a lot of people wanted the equipment by the time I was done. I looked in the mirror to see if all my work had produced a fine six-pack. No six-pack. I still had the one-pack I came in with, dammit.
I stood around looking for my next inspiration. I found it right next to the lat pulldown machine I had just bogarted along with the ab machine. I put the curl bar on the machine and alternated upright rows with bicep curls. While I was doing this some huge steroid customers .. I mean, some really big guys came over and started wearing out the lat pulldown machine. They kept looking at me for some reason, but they never said anything. I have no idea what the hell could be so interesting about me sweating like Richard Simmons chasing a naked 12-year-old boy with a donut, but apparently something about me was distracting them.
No, I wasn't grunting.
After I had pumped up my huge, enormous, Arnold-like biceps and shoulders to their usual epic proportions I did more abs, only this time I went to the other side of the gym and used an exercise ball. The exercise balls are all located right outside the door to the women's locker room. So while I was laid out on my back pushing my chest and groin upwards in a repeated thrusting motion various girls kept walking by giving me sideways glances.
OK, mostly they were just ignoring me, but you know how high school girls have that bionic peripheral vision, right? So anyway, they COULD have been checking me out.
Each time I bobbed up I saw the line of TV sets on the wall showing everything from Maury Povich to Soccer to some really hot models who I couldn't figure out what they were doing, but they sure did attract my attention.
I did various other exercises until I discovered a weird cable machine I hadn't ever used before that was intended for overhead presses. It had two small handles, one for each hand and allowed me to work each arm independently. I think the guy next to me had wanted to use it just as I got on it because he seemed to be looking over at what I was doing, but not in a gay way and not in a "what the fuck are you doing" way either. I think I did a million sets of this, gradually dropping the weight rack all the way down until I was basically just lifting the handles and sweating all over the machine.
"There, now you can have it."
No, only kidding. I wiped it down when I was done. I needed some excuse to talk to the Towel Girl, right? I had a towel.
I did one last set of abs on the ball, only to notice a not unattractive girl all sprawled out on the floor in front of me. She was stretching. I was crunching. She was looking at me sideways, but mostly in a "are you checking me out, you perv" kind of way. I wasn't. My abs were shot and I wanted her to go away so I could do this ab thing I learned from FitTV where you turn your body sideways and prop yourself up on one arm while staying stiff and then switch over to the other side. It looks goofy, but it strengthens your sides and helps your overall core strength. Anyway, she didn't leave so I went to the treadmill and started running.
On the wall in front of the mile of treadmills are several TV sets, all tuned to different shows. Clemson football was on. So was Oprah. I was trying really hard to ignore Oprah, but the sound was up for her show and not for football. Sandra Bullock was on and so were several black male actors whose names I can't recall. Oprah and Sandra Bullock were complaining about men referring to women as 'bitches and hos' as if this were some new development that hasn't been going on in the black community since before most of us were born. Oprah said it is harmful and threatening to ALL women. Sandra Bullock added that it is harmful and threatening to ALL women everywhere anytime ANY woman is called a "ho" or a "bitch" for ANY reason. She said it endangers them. She said something to the effect that it was the biggest crisis facing American feminists today. And she was being completely serious.
I couldn't help but think to myself, "Hey, aren't you the ho bitch who made a movie in which you broke a guy's nose and then hit him in the balls on a stage in front of thousands of people for absolutely no fucking reason at all? And didn't you do it as a gag where you wanted everyone to laugh at what you had just done to the man, as if it were somehow cute and harmless to beat the shit out of a man and then sexually assault him for your personal entertainment? Yes, I do believe that was you, so shut the fuck up and go fuck yourself!"
Yes, Miss Congeniality thinks that both men and women calling girls 'ho' or 'bitch' is a huge massive crisis, but sexually assaulting men or boys for personal entertainment is no problem. In fact, she thought it was so great that I hear she did it again in the sequel, only this time instead of suckering her supposed love-interest into being abused and assaulted she did it to Regis Philbin. I guess if it's funny to do to a man who loves you and did nothing but try to help you then it must be a riot to do to an elderly man who also did absolutely nothing to you, too. Right?
Meanwhile, as Oprah and Sandra were lamenting this horrific holocaust of hos and bitches, the famous black men onstage with them were all nodding and agreeing that it is horrible and dangerous to the world and must be stopped. Then they started talking to some woman in the audience who wanted to know if she was a racist because she once used the phrase "Jew the price down" and felt really guilty about it. I believe they assured her that she was indeed a big fat racist pig, but by this point my treadmill took my attention away.
I had started off with the intention of running 3 miles, but ended up running 5 miles because the Oprah thing pissed me off so much. Well, actually it wasn't just because of Oprah. I just wanted to run and I didn't really feel like stopping.
Besides, the football game was still on. Anyway, just as I crossed the 5 mile mark the machine slowed way down and flashed "cool down mode" at me. "What?! Cool down? I'm not done, you motherfucker!"
Yes, I thought these words in my head and somehow they managed to make their way down to my mouth and slip out.
"Goddamn it, I'm not fucking done! I'll decide when I'm done, not you!"
Yes, this too made it's way from the silent recesses of my mind down to my tongue and out into the Oprah Winfried air. Luckily Oprah and her muppet friends were so overwhelmingly annoying that no one seemed to notice what I'd said. But having said "goddammit" so close to Christmas did make me a bit fearful of a lightning bolt, even so.
Anyway, the machine I was running on apparently decided to save me from the deluge of Oprah and finish my workout for me. To be fair I wasn't really sure how much further I wanted to run anyway, but it would have been nice to decide that for myself.
I stretched and toweled off and then went looking for the cute Towel Girl to give her a present.
"Here you go, a lovely stinky towel that smells like ass. I hope you'll think kindly of me because I think you're a cutie, but I'm not going to tell you because I don't want you to shove me into that smelly bin of towels and kill me. Besides, it clearly does not matter what I think. Just ask Oprah."
Then I made my way into the locker room to change. Inside were two guys talking about how many grams of chicken they had eaten and whether or not the bread counted against them and fascinating crap like that. I was mesmerized by the depth of their boringness and quickly put on my clothes so that I could flee home and blog about it.
So, now I'm home and I forgot to blog it until just now, after 4 a.m. Aren't you just overjoyed that I didn't forget entirely? Otherwise you might never have known about my fabulous workout.
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