GOOD MORNING?

Not so fast, I’m going to the gym, and I don’t want to.

C’mon, who wants to jump out of bed in the morning and go somewhere where you have to sweat, and if you don’t, you feel guilty all day long? Who needs to be out of breath as if you are about to have a heart attack?

Being a creature of habit, things have to be aligned a certain way for me to apply myself to them. Be it food, business or even cleaning, I do things a certain way under certain conditions.

When it comes to the gym, I have a routine I follow. First thing in the morning I look for an excuse not to go, when I exhaust all those many options I reluctantly get dressed and go to the gym. It is here that things start as I park my car in a certain spot in a certain way, backed into the spot next to a curb. I pull out my cell phone and activate my gym app and head into the gym. I’m sure to greet the young lady behind the counter as I head downstairs to my play area and into the locker room and locker #33. It is positioned in a strategic place, lining up with the toilet, shower and TV mounted into the corner.

Once I put on my workout gloves and grab my water bottle, I lock the locker (That’s why we call it a locker) and head to the theater, where, as you step down into the bowels of the building there is a room with three giant treadmills, as Stairmaster or two and some other exercising equipment, overlooked by a giant movie screen.

Now the treadmill is designed to give you a near-death experience, taking you on a speedy walk to nowhere and quickly. As I speed along, the heart beats faster and faster, causing me to hang on and pray that this is not how it all ends for me, slumped over the hand rests with my toes scraping along at 3.6 MPH. I imagine the night watchman saying to the investigators: “We thought he was just showing off, and boy what stamina he has! Little did we know he had signed up for an eternal treadmill experience. The poor man and so old!”

Once I leave the treadmill, I head up to the crunch machine, the machine I worked out on every time, and it MUST come after the treadmill. Usually, the pound indicator is set at a much lower number than I do, and this makes me feel good about myself, thinking some young guy is doing less than me, then I realize it was probably an old lady who last used it. Damned old ladies are always showing me up! But this is a revolutionary piece of equipment, you SIT DOWN on this beauty and try to suffer at least an aneurysm of your tongue as it sticks way out, across the gym floor and into the trainer’s room! The idea is to lose weight by crunching your abs enough to explode from the inside out. If you have gas that morning it is advised not to use this equipment for it will send you into the stratosphere as you squeeze those muscle!

To round off events at the gym, I like to hang myself. Now understand going to the gym is reason enough to hang oneself afterward, but this goes a little further. It is a double-handled weight resistant apparatus that you must pull down on two handles and repeat the process at least 10 times, after each pull-down, you hang in the air by your arms.

Once I consider myself punished enough, missing precious hours of sleep and feeling out of breath, sweaty and can just about walk, I limp back to the locker room and locker #33, then home sweet home. As I drive back to my house, I wonder what is wrong with me, why in God’s name I would even get out of bed at 4:30am?

I walk into the house and there sits TLW (The Little Woman) eating her breakfast as she looks at me, well rested and not hurting, WHILE eating breakfast! Looking up she must wonder… “Poor dumbass”