DelBloggolo: MY INNER SELF HURTS

Friday, November 21, 2014

MY INNER SELF HURTS

As you may remember if you read this blogue, I go to a gym now. After all those years of sedentary lifestyle, I decided to motivate myself and go so by torturing my body and enjoying the suffering and pain (self-inflicted of course), I can be trimmer and more fit as I sit here typing. Your job is to say when you read my blogues now is: “Wow! His blogue today sounds like he lost weight and is trimmer!”

My plan is a simple one, go to the gym, spend a half hour and exercise enough so that when I walk out of the place, my legs will feel like they are on fire and rubbery, perhaps taking short breaths and sweating as I hit the cold air for the long walk across the parking lot, trying to remember where I parked my car, passing my favorite Chinese restaurant and the guilt rushing through my head, and knowing just a few feet away is a Burger King for breakfast that I must ignore!

I have finally found a reason to carry a bottle of water around, and still feel silly in my exercise shorts, self-conscious with all these young people who are well into their exercise programs and routines. There are a few older guys like myself there, but I try to ignore them, I don’t need healthy well-fit friends, I need the ones that look like me. I carry this black bag that holds my water bottle, keys with entry card, wallet, and phone, something like a man purse, but is really an old fogey purse. The phone is to count time, not for exercise so much but to have when I fall, can’t move anymore and call for help, it will tell me how long it took them to come: It should be useful in my obituary.

I have a personal trainer: his name is Attila, a nice fellow from the mid-East. Attila is young, full of energy, slurs his words and the ones he does seem to say, he mumbles. His credentials are rock solid, he studied from a handbook I saw on his counter top called: The Gestapo’s Complete Guide to Interrogation Techniques, with a forward by Heinrich Himmler. He has the hard job in our relationship, the stopwatch.

The first time I belonged to a gym, I worked out faithfully, the problem was it was too early in the morning to do it, shower, eat breakfast then jump on the Long Island Expressway for an hour and a half and stay awake in the traffic! Every morning I was getting up at 4:00 am to begin this routine.

There is a drawback to all this exercise and good intentions: mirrors! Yes, they have mirrors all over the place, and this fat guy and me, old like myself (I swear I know him from somewhere) who seems to follow me wherever I go who looks like we need help! Him more than me.

I look forward to these little trips to the gym because I know they will annoy me, get me nowhere in the end, but pretend it will. As they lay me in my pine box (although a lawn bag and place me at the curb will do), if anyone comes they can look at me and say: “Wow! He looks terrific!”