Spot Me
Like most people, there are plenty of things I've done in my life of which I am ashamed. I think my time as a Venice Beach street prostitute falls into that category. Not that it was all bad. I mean, I made some decent money and the men were generally very nice to me, but one day you wake up, you're fifteen and your priorities have changed. It was just time to leave that life behind.

What I'm saying is one bad choice shouldn't color the entire rest of your life. But if that were true, life would be fair and no one would have anything to blog about. Besides their kids. Or their cats. Or their love of Thai food. Or politics. Or sex. Or their kids some more.

Jesus, blogs really are about nothing at all, aren't they?

What was I... oh yes. There are things that we do that, no matter what the company or the situation, when found out cause immediate negative reactions. Like the street ho thing from above or if you were to suddenly find out I was, say, a cannibal or a slave trader or a Republican. I recognize that some things are simply too horrible to completely contain.

What all this is leading up to is that on Sunday I did something I swore I would never do and I'm a little freaked out about what people will think of me after they learn it even though I have a perfectly good, very reasonable excuse for doing what I did and, given the circumstances, I would most likely do it again.

This past Sunday, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, irascible old lazy-bones Pops, detester of shallowness, crusader against TV-commercial-inspired body shame...

...joined a health club.

Oh God. Phew. There. I said it outloud. Well, in text, but sort of... you know what I mean.

Give me a chance to explain myself. I didn't want to. I really really didn't. But look, my martial arts class got evicted from...

It occurs to me as I start to write this that "I'm in a martial arts class" is not the best counter-argument to the implied cheese-ball toothy-grinned enthusiasm of a health club membership.

I will tell you that when I signed up, my information was taken by two meat-head weight-lifter type guys "filling in" for the normal reception/office staff. Before either one of them opened their mouths, I hated them immediately.

Then during the quick tour of the facility given by grunty Meat-Head #1, I did get to see another man completely naked during the locker-room portion of our tour. Acres and acres of flabby white flesh all there in glorious technicolor for my unprepared eyes to feast on. I was worried at first that I had stumbled in front of a mirror that lets you see yourself from behind and with no clothes on. Imagine my relief/horror when I realized this was not the case.

I scampered very quickly through the "workout" section of the tour and the group of treadmilling, life-cycling old people trying to outrun death on a machines explicitly designed to keep you stationary. I hated them immediately as well.

Suffice it to say, I didn't sign up just for me, I did it for my children. And no, not because if Daddy's fat ass gets some regular exercise they will have me around for longer... barring any kind of unforseeable man-bus encounter or the inevitable reinstitution of the draft.

No, I did it for them in this sense: if I am able to get out of the house 3-4 hours weekly, mingle with some grown-ups and work out alot of my pent-up aggression and barely-subdued irrational anger issues, their lives are going to be infinitely better for it. You can punch holes in walls and that's fine, but eventually you're going to run out of wall, the dog will run away and who's going to be left to fill the unfillable rage hole?

That's right. I'm doing it for the kids. So two nights a week I will beat on other people and they will beat on me for $45 a month.

And to think what I used to charge for that back on Venice Beach.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 7.7


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 1:54 PM