A Brief Summary: the editor expresses grievance at Sunday morn gym phenomena.
Most Sundays (in optimal conditions) I take the train into downtown Chicago and attend a mass at St. James Episcopal Cathedral. Now I'll skip out on doing that in circumstances where potential recent public exposures may have occurred or when comms are compromised. I don't need to bring my problems to where good nice people go to worship and pray. Recently, as part of what I can best describe as an attempted multimedia art project (read: protracted multi-forum flame war), I got dressed up in a latex catsuit and a silicone incubus mask and emotionally terrorized every gay in the region, for completely professional and morally justified causes. Scientific even, perchance?
Now like all healthy upright ethical citizens, I wake up at 3:33 in the morning from the horrors and sprint straight to the gym to make good use of all that adrenaline! But this morning, I decided to be kind to myself and sleep in (3:47), took a nice hot shower with pumice and a deep hair conditioning, then took a leisurely morning stroll to the gym. It was 66°, misty and foggy and the red sun hung lazily beneath shredded cotton wisps of mauve clouds, heaving with rainwater in their electrified wombs. Swallowtail butterflies and goldfinches and bumblebees had begun coming back to the area for the nightshade & peach trees, and a den of fox kits have dug a Ranger Grave near the park basketball court. I think it's important to savor the sensory experiences of the living, breathing world around us, rather than absentmindedly relegating it to a subject of academic interest – only ever theory, never practice...
I had outlived my proselytizing zealot phase of Christendom around the time I was 16, but I can speak to the mindset and headspace of religious fundamentalism – an important distinction. I was proficient enough in ceremonial magic and Kundalini yoga that it went places too – but that's not the central focus of our article this Sunday. No, I'm a unique witness to the things that come to pass on this world, and there is not much need to expound upon that statement any further because you would not believe me. But for the sake of this article, we're going to discuss the proliferation of the fitness industry as observed through the lens of it's transition from a fringe hobby to an enforced cultural expectation and a cornerstone of commercial retail industry. When I take that train downtown, I see increasingly bizarre advertisements that could not appeal to any consumer let alone I, along with no less than a handful of promotions for GLP-1 injectable fat-loss drugs and peptides and other such chemicals whose properties I have not dedicated the necessary time to study. The author of this article will assume that his readership has done their own homework because I don't have them time or patience to break this down for you Barney style, privates. While I have no formal education, that has blessed me with an inferiority complex that lead to semi-competency in physics and chemistry. I'm vaguely aware that Joe Rogan recently lobbied the President to legalize ibogaine, but I haven't gotten around to reading that article yet. Kava and Kratom and tinctures of flowers that I've never even heard of are on offer at the small local smoke shop that I frequent for aromatic tobaccos for my churchwarden. In the timeframe between 16 and 17 I'd gotten over a particularly troubling breakup with a rabbi's daughter (guess why) and taken up smoking marijuana in the advent of salvia divinorum and K2. For those who aren't tracking, K2 is JWH-018, which is an isolate of the cannabinoid in THC that gets you stoned – the problem being is that when you smoke reefer, you're getting a full bouquet of hundreds of different chemicals that all work in tandem to properly align with neurotransmitters and produce the desired and intended effect of the aforementioned drug in the brain. JWH-018 is delivered via spraying it onto consumer variety grade potpourri using naptha as an evaporative (allegedly) binding agent to then pass the blood brain barrier via smoke inhalation, but that lack of said other cannabinoids means the end user often experienced severe disruptions in their body's homeostasis which caused overheating, dehydration and subsequent violent hallucinatory psychosis. The two fat girls coming back from the world's lamest “goth” (-18) nightclub agreed to blow me in the park ended up rolling a grape blunt with that stuff and reader, as someone's who's done real legitimate LSD by the tenstrip and most of the TiHKAL/PiHKAL catalog? It's probably not a bad thing they made that shit illegal because I tossed my cookies during the party, and I will never forgive it for that. Ah yes, the halcyon days of Erowid. In a different article, I'll regale you with a story of smalltown Robitussin abuse eipdemic that ended up getting a French emo's throat slashed. Which brings us back to the focus of this article, the gradual cultural proliferation of the fitness industry and enforced beauty standards, and how we can extrapolate general intel about civilian subjects at my gym on a Sunday morning. But funny!
Yes, that is definitely how Mike Royko talked.
Actually, I'm not a qualified researcher, I'm definitely not paying for access to research portals, and I'm not under any obligation to do longform journalism for the sake of shitposting about Boomers. Nevertheless reader, this paragraph over here will provide some very superficial data to support my argument, which you may feel free to dispute or point out as logically inconsistent or assumptive. According to data provided by the Health and Fitness Association, the cohort of Americans that attended health clubs at least once a month rose by 45% amongst the aggregate population from the years 2010-2019, and while the fitness industry itself only accounts for about 0.20% of the total GDP, that still accounts for $145 billion annually. Let's step away from the graphs and charts for a moment and get back to this being an op-ed, shall we?
Back in 2012 when I'd allocate my disposable income to supplements at the local vitamin store, I would occasionally buy the beefcake magazines along with my monthly rations of poor tasting overpriced and 80% chalk by volume protein powder, creatine, BCAA's, greens powder, et. allia. The salesman was always too over enthusiastic but he'd been the guy in the neighborhood since my first creatine pills in middle school, so I stayed his customer until he got iced on his motorcycle. Back to the magazines, since this rambling and unfocused narrative hopefully lends to their style, I would read these popular fitness magazines and then compare them against paid articles on coaching websites written by Olympian strength & conditioning professionals, real scientists and endocrinologists. As one would expect, a common complaint that I've observed among science professionals who deign to grace us by becoming science communicators, is that information being transmitted en masse to the public is outright incorrect, often sensationalist in it's claims, and potentially adverse to the end-user. During that era, the public perception of physical fitness outside of athletic or martial prowess or overt sexual appeal was basically relegated to movie stars, popsci misinformers, the earlier iteration of what the common parlance now refers to as “influencers”, and then Presidential Fitness Tests and the American Heart Association's failed war on cholesterol (read: Big Egg). I had been a user of the infamous hacker website known as 4chan since the age of 12, and I'd seen a surfeit of public figures rise and fall. Long forgotten are the days of Scooby, Zyzz and Rich Pianna (PBUH). Now while I may not be pointing to analytical proofs at this juncture my dear readers, I do defy you to open your smartphone and scroll on TikTok, or YouTube, and see what advertisements the platforms proffer regardless of color, age or creed. Open up a newspaper website without using a VPN and an adblocker and tell me what ungents, lotions and potions they peddle and what vain promises they offer? Drudge Report has had to run a goddamned line on protein and whatever Robert F. Kennedy's worm addled brain has cobbled together that morning for the past year at least. And now they aren't even able to gamble and speculate on the protein because there's a whey production shortage! Do you imagine that scarcity would under any circumstances ever be de-incentivized under Capitalism? I don't need to do quantitive analysis because your lying eyes should be doing the work for me, guy. All this to say that broscience has grown like a malignant cancer in the absence of most serious professionals, my anecdotal proof being that most of the Zoomer EMT's on the crew I most recently worked with were barely literate and studied for the exam rather than the material itself, like the Chinese or Indian civil service exams. Literally everything they knew was wrong or absent, to the degree of being occupationally hazardous. I cannot begin to speculate whether or not this (20+) size sampling (ages 18-28 approx.) can be extrapolated to other professions or industries, but it does not bode well. Recent articles have been published regarding Three Cueing Education and the decline of literacy and book readership in the American cohorts, and I would strongly advise directing the reader's attention towards those sources for further information about the dire state of things. Suffice to say I am an old salty veteran who is complaining about some normal observances in daily life that may ultimately mean nothing. And yet...
I start my mornings in the gym by greeting the individual at the front desk with a “good morning” on a resonant pitch that establishes the call to formation or the beginning of a vicar's congregational address. I think that retail workers are among the least humanized, in terms of late capitalism's less than subtle tendency to revert to sharecropping systems. So I look them in the eyes and speak to them respectfully, because the newspaper says asswipes like to attack them. Regularly. And I remember what it was to be young and fit and constantly be bothered by antisocial weirdos and cleaning up waste matter in the showers, knowing exactly who'd done it was also levvying complaints against you to management.
The official reasoning I was let go was for sounding the Lunk Alarm too much, but I digress. On a weekday, during the very early morning hours are when people who are sincere about their fitness goals come in, if they are ugly or foreign or fat or trans or some flavor of queer. On a Sunday morning, that is when all the quaint normie denizens wear their brightest and most colorful feathers to do their most elaborate and performative mating dances of masculinity and struggle or female might!
I am insane and also cheap, and I enjoy consistent looks. Whenever I go to the gym, my ensemble consists of a black pair of shorts/wifebeater/hoodie and hi socks, and I have a strong degree of preference for Under Armour's running shoes because they're sexy and prevent plantar fascitis and bouts of tendonitis or sciatica. Most people don't account for the foot striking the ground with 3 times the force of it's body when running, not that the Department of Defense cares to acknowledge that. I'm missing a lot of my knees from rappelling out of helicopters in full ruck & kit with a weapons systems. And I'm not getting any younger, either. I've made peace with that, my wardrobe and my demeanor reflect that state of peace (typically). However, I think it's worth noting that the fitness industry exists predominately for implicit aesthetic & social crèche rather than strength or health. Women's representation in media has moved beyond the paltry neologisms of amphetamine commercials and kept domesticity lately, and the updated beauty standards mean that they can either enjoin themselves to the Sisyphean task of obeisance to internal guilt mechanisms, or enjoy the sport for the sake of it! But it's usually the former rather than the latter. Sunday Mornings are vibrant and colorful, like an Ecumenical Easter Sunday at a black church – everyone is in their best finery and pastel plumage. Now normally this would not bother me, self-expression, it's just that somehow, someway, it became normalized at this gym for women in their spandex workout outfits to put on huge headphones and dance around to Zumba music with 2-7lb weights. No, it's not just one lady. No, not the same clique. They're literally doing dances in a line in front of the mirror where everyone is bicep curling. I can't imagine I'm the only one irritated by the weird brazenness of this public display, its uncanny.
I begin in the stretching area, because the most important thing to me in all reality is preserving and maintaining my mobility and flexibility as I get older; I'm not as acrobatic as I once was. I always start with basic leg and joint stretches then move on to a modified Army PRT program before I get started on kettlebell core routines (5 sets of 5 exercises with 10 repetition iteration dependent, sometimes 100), which is around the time every guy with a beard and a baseball cap takes the other 3 corners of the stretching area to sneak glances at me. I think it's because of the platinum blonde hair that these bitchmade civilians in Halloween costumes assume I'm gay and therefore a bottom and transitively an option, since these losers slide on the Kinsey Scale when they cannot get any pussy. I stretch with my shaved bleached bussy and my fun underpants facing the wall, thank you very much! I take off my sneakers to do kettlebell squats so I get the full range of motion on the fulcrum – if you're not engaging hip drive then you may as well not being doing the exercise, and squats cause your body to regulate it's free testostertone-enathanate levels in the bloodstream, so they're cheating themselves out of activating free natural performance enhancing drugs on top of every other sin. This is when the patrons in the stretching area attempt to do more convincing jobs of averting their eyes from me. Ultimately it's kind of my fault for being there on a Sunday and thus allowing them to perceive me.
Once I'm done with my set or too annoyed at the common rabble, I saunter over to the leg press where a quartet of strapping young lads with the broccoli haircut are now misusing a leg press. The gym franchise has decreed that an effective marketing stratagem would be to allow minors to work out for free during the summer months when school is out, in the hopes of capturing a permanent audience. Unlike my generation, these kids tend to be either too meek or respectful enough to approach women working out. People online complain about them but they're usually pretty civil and clean – they're really only a problem at the other gym's location across town where they converge by the hundreds. Once I'm finished up on the other leg press, I'll try the calf extension machine. You have to use it early in the morning, because a Gujurati husband and wife come to the gym and take turns using it for hours at a time on the lightest weight setting. Maybe they think it's for cardio?
I walk past the treadmills and look out onto a sea of white hair and sweaty jiggling flesh in very expensive designer clothing. They're all looking back at me like dim barnyard animals. I'm really more of a weighted jump rope kinda guy, good VO2 max is important for fighting and fucking. I mostly don't even acknowledge the existence of the people doing cardio because I would consider that disruptive and rude, but there have in fact been some very curvaceous butts that I have seen (not intentionally). There's one fatty that uses the treadmills that wears full Grindr merch for all his clothing accouterments. Subtle is not the word I would use, and I've only seen him there twice. They were 5lb dumbbells, he does not need fingerless gloves for that. Any serious runner goes to MeetUp and signs for groups to meet hundreds of other runners at a time, but I despise those motherfuckers.
The hamstring and quadricep machines are typically taken by the only other 2 serious gym goers during that time bloc – the fat red cop that's gay for me, and the most jacked guy in the entire gym, clearly on steroids and doing the maximum weight on a single leg. y'know I'm no big city lawyer, but I have a theory that building sarcoplasmic muscle tissue faster than your body can build new CNS skeletal fibers or strengthen accessory stability recruitment tissues will end up causing catastrophic problems later in life, but what do I know? And why are you on gear but still at Planet Fitness, like bro what?
The hip and glute machines are in the ab area, that's where you'll find the most jacked ladies in the gym, they're invariably former marines or law enforcement, all Latin and all giving themselves traction baldness with tight braids – or maybe I'm just being salty because there is no avenue of approach to speak with them. Any other day of the week it's mostly timid young women working their hardest to complete sets, even if it's at lower weights and repetitions. I think most women fail to make proper gains and become discouraged as a result of the aforementioned broscience epidemic, because their primary vectors of information do not have objective unbiased interests. Like most problems this could be resolved with education reform, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that.
And LAST, OF COURSE, is the nice gentlemanly ER physician that I recognized from the V.A.! I think he may recognized me too, because I was using a free V.A. Umbrella, rather than my nice fancy fashionable umbrella that shoots a .22 caliber bullet. He was waiting in the entrance foyer to the gym with his age appropriate and handsomely dressed wife, and they were both clearly very fit and healthy so it stands to reason they would not need an expensive gym membership – they probably have nicer equipment at home and want enrichment in their Saturnian Ivory Tower lives by indulging with the hoipolloi. Unfortunately, Doctor Col. Chaz Spiffinton IV neglected to bring an umbrella to the gym this morning, and his wife was apprehensive because she'd just gotten her hair colored. He looked me in my eyes as I EXTENDED UMBRELLA!!! I walked away bathed in glory, like the Morton Salt girl! And as I sit in the porch in my Birkenstocks getting splashed by harsh rains with my beloved feral cat, it is not the sickening PR's that I hit on leg press that I am most proud of, dear reader, but rather how fucking badly I mogged that nice respectable elderly couple that didn't have an umbrella!
I know that this has been a rambling and unfocused piece so I will provide you thus with my thesis: Calvinism (secular) is the foundational ideology of the protestant work ethic and through the transitive property = capitalism, inequality, and death. Under late stage capitalism, the workplace self and the public persona under axiomatic individualist maximalist materialist dialectical philosophy as their default operating system will result naturally in body dysmorphic disorders, looksmaxxers, individuals developing athleticism based paraphilias and implicit aesthetic fascism. Because Babylon (America) is godless and ruthless, this is encouraged. In the absence of a conceptual Original Sin, your new fault is whatever you’re persuaded into believing that you are unfuckable or ugly or unpopular for, and the gym is only one small slice of the pie in the variety of ways to assuage one’s physical guilt – I’d refer the reader to a saliently prophetic book “Bowling Alone”, regarding the atomization and isolation of American society as a result of Globalization, for further insights on how we arrived here civilizationally. Fin ~