Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

I have a lot of free time down here, what with my limited liquor fund and my not getting laid anymore, so to spice things up a little I joined a gym - a real, honest-to-goodness grown up gymnasium, replete with spandex, grunts, and the ball-sweat of strangers. The humiliation of only being able to bench-press fourteen of something - kilograms, granted, but it’s still a very small number - and the inherent awkwardness of being confronted with other people’s sweaty flesh in an arena other than a Motel Six just over the state line make me desperate for any entertainment or distraction from the thought that other people are watching me and quietly evaluating my fitness.

They’re free to do it quietly, because it’s already been overtly done. When I first joined, I was assigned a little, fit, humorless blond thing to evaluate the attrition 22 years of cream sauces, beer, and a tendency to roll over and go to sleep instead of strive for Round Two had wrought on my body. She pinched various areas of my body with a pair of calipers (”How does that feel?” “Like my back fat is being pinched with a pair of calipers,”) added some numbers, did some shit in metric, and pronounced that my body was 16.7% FAT.

This is apparently “within normal bounds” - a disturbing phrase because of the kinship it implies with the portly, poorly read mass of humanity. I don’t care how normal it is, I am alarmed at the though that nearly one fifth of my body is composed of something you could fry chicken in. Have you been to the grocery store in the South and seen those 25-pound drums of lard? That’s about how much fat is in my body. One drum worth. Seventeen dollars of obesity. Catering size grease.

Then she made me strap something to my torso that looked like an amazingly feeble bandolier, and bade me ride a bicycle as she monitored. Apparently, my oxygen efficiency is barely across the border between the salted fields of “poor” and the rocky but manageable soil of “fair.” There are parts of my extremities that wait, expectantly, for the infrequent Oxygen Train to come to town. Young blood cells in these whistlestop capillaries have heard stories from their elders about oxygenated blood, but have never seen it themselves and are skeptical, sometimes openly scornful, of their grandparents’ pulse-expectant vigil.

Little Blond Gym Lady then wrote me out a schedule of exercises. Some of these are reasonable (get on this machine and pretend to row a boat), some of them are bizarre (get on this bicycle that doesn’t go anywhere and is much, much harder to pedal than areal bicycle), some emasculating (get this giant ball and roll around with it so that you look like you’re reenacting a hard-fought, out-of-scale conception), and some horrifying (go to the area where the large men glisten at each other and allow them to watch you struggle to lift this acorn over your head three times.) I do the ones I can stand to, and that will have to be enough for her. The only one I really enjoy is the rowing machine, because you can play a game on it. How fast you row determines the amount of air in this little fish’s swim bladder, making it float higher or lower in the water. You try to eat the smaller fish and avoid being eaten by the larger ones. It’s a cute, upper-body-toning illustration of Hobbes’ worldview - would that all philosophy had endearing animal mascots.

The Gym People are the standard gym archetypes. There are multiple thin women, in various shades of blond and brown, who run on the treadmill and are then replaced by incredibly similar thin women, who run on the treadmill. It’s reminiscent of one of those endless Escher cycles. Large men gather at one end to be large at each other and occasionally do exercises while making the most awful orgasm sounds imagineable. I don’t even really know why they sound like orgasm sounds to me, because luckily I’ve never slept with anyone who yelled “GGRRRRAAAAAH!” at the moment of truth. There’s this one teenage guy - he’s athletic in a stringy way - who exercises for a few minutes and then admires his muscles in the mirror for a few minutes. I understand doing this, at home, with the door locked and the curtains pulled. I get the urge: this whole week, every time I have gotten my keys out of my pocket I have checked my thigh to see if it’s become a Mighty Oak, rooting me to the earth like peasants of old. (It hasn’t.) But I would never let a stranger - much less a sardonic, judgemental one, although I guess he can’t know that - see me scope myself out, and a person who can do that is beyond my understanding.

There is one aspect of the gym that does scare me - it used to be a bar. It took me a while to realize this, but gradually, like a senile Perry Mason, I figured it out. (’Why is this gym wood-paneled? Why does the sign in front of the shopping center advertise a bar called “The Rose and Crown” when there’s not one here? Why is there a sign in this gym that says “The Rose and Crown?”‘) I fear retribution for this. It is not fitting that a bar should close, ever. A club, sure. Drive the rutting seventeen-year-olds into the street, and have them take the “hip” furniture with them. But a BAR, a real sit-down-and-drink BAR, should never close. It reminds me of an event during the English Reformation (surprise!) Shortly after the War of the Three Kingdoms/British Civil War a fiery Protestant preacheress, Jane Middleton, railed against the idea of holding “reformed” (reformed, heretical, poTAto, poTAHto) church services in formerly Catholic houses of worship, arguing that the land had been set aside for idolatry and it was inappropriate for the “Godly” to worship there. Someone made the counterargument that this would exclude the entire Kingdom of England, because it had been consecrated to Saint George. Middleton is reported to have responded with an outburst of terrifying indignation. But do you see my point? If no bars ever close, eventually, in the fullness of time, every building will be, or at least contain, a bar. And the fact that I exercise in an area that was once a bar and thus indirectly support the supplanting of a bar may mark me for an unspeakable, deserved vengeance.

I guess the whole point of this post was to beg Dionysus for clemency. And to use the phrase “whistlestop capillaries.”