He brought me a towel. Maybe that was the clincher. The Staff member in the blue button down collar short sleeve standard issue Employee shirt brought me a clean, fresh-outta-the-dryer-warm white towel while I was half ellipticaling/half grading on the elliptical thing. Maybe that was it: a towel-gesture. So, I’m a pushover for clean linens and seemingly random acts of kindness, and I was sorta sweaty. I caved further into our beloved cave. . .
This was day two of a two week trial membership that only yesterday became an actual membership. I have joined. I am now a member of a gym that amounts to the Starbucks upgraded version of my small, corner lunch-counter, pre-coffee house kinda gym I’d been a member of for years and years. At said former gym, much of the equipment is so, well, old, that it literally squeaks. And sticks. And shimmies. All the women know this. Because the equipment is also so limited, we’d have to sign up to use a machine. Upon entering, check out the sign up sheet at the counter on any given day, and you’ll be able to assess which machine didn’t get the heart-rate granting miracle kiss of WD-40 that week. The long, empty column under Treadmill #5 will tell you that its incline still doesn’t have the inclination to incline, and the similar row of vacant check boxes under EFX #3, will tell you: well, shit. No one ever signs up for that one. It had its hay day when Fonda was Cardio.
But it was my gym, and its size and neighborhood proximity suggested something about us. It was where I, well, belonged. I’d been going to that space for over a decade, from the time it had a different neon name on its façade, and I didn’t have forehead wrinkles nor ever thought I would. I’ve watched the equipment shift, sag, decay, and—with much Scotch-Taped Sharpie Marker Proclamation on the back of a Schedule announcing, “Out of Order: New Replacement Coming Soon!!!”—occasionally be retired and replaced. I know all the cliques: the Cardio Crows, the Step Sisters, the Weights Witches, the Elliptical Loners and all the in between: I’ve known them all. It was to this gym I’d rush in order to meet with Linda my Pilates Queen to the Core trainer:
“I’m running late, Linda,” was my ever-crazed, cell phone mantra.
“That’s ok, Rosie. I’ll see ya when ya get in,” was her kind hearted reply, always, a kind hearted reply to my “Late!” or “Can’t!” or “Won’t!” gym routines. It is to this gym that I retuned after a year of a really effing bad back that found me gaining enough weight to see the BMI and size chart as an Enemy Combatant; and it was this gym which cajoled me back to its cardio cure for contested terms and waistlines. Yeah. my gym: with mirrors that have reflected back at least 4 different pants sizes, manifold more hairstyles, and two bruised and broken hearts whose weight and fragmented state could not be measured by the heart rate thingie that never worked on the machines anyway. Yeah. My crappy-ol’ gym. So, after an over-sized wallop of wistful guilt spilled here, you may perhaps begin to understand why I kinda feel like Gilbert when, at the last minute, he has to go to the UBERmarket to get a replacement birthday cake: because, well, they needed a cake (man, I love that movie).
Screen Siren: Adjusting (to) the color line; or Shadow Puppet Theater with Punch & (Judge) Judy! Wooo! Eff grading!
There’s something to be said about the local Mom and Pop being gobbled up by the “local” Stop and Shop (postmodern winkie-quotes included with your Club Card, of course). I’ve been saying it in my own way, been crafting my tirade against “standardization” and all the rest, with all the rest. Recently, at an academic conference that grappled with Higher Ed identity issues and the twin Demons of Standardization and Accountability among other creepy not/words, I was informed by a skeptical panelist that it is thanks to standardization that I was able to get to the conference (transport), partake in and of the conference (chain hotel), and enjoy substance (um, sustenance) at the conference (Viva da ‘Bucks! No “Sugar Free Cinnamon Dolce Latte” at the Hotel ‘Bucks? Well, the one ‘round the corner on 6th should have said syrup. . or the one down the street on. . .or). Indeed: all would be Babble if we didn’t have set standards and charts and timetables and ways and means and all the rest. But it seems as if the world has decided that to give up the eccentric flava of the Nuclear and its alternatives for the kinda creepy Oedipal Drama of the Multinational-bigbox-WallSanto-gentically-modified-sweat shop produced-Apron. Or, short sleeved-button collared
“Staff” shirt.
He was wearing a staff shirt. Staff wear blue; trainers, black. Employees clearly discerned from Rodents, and the rank and file clearly demarcated by color-coded Polo Cred. Black and Blue.
And Louie asked, “Why?”
Ok, ok. Louie asked a way more important question on the color theme and color wheel, but we know color lines haven’t gone away; the old standards remain, and new ones have been rendered and shifted in the name of standardization and customer service, of course. The lines have been outsourced for efficiency, and white washed for Fox News Object Lesson. But I digress (well. . .only kinda). Let us return to a color-less wheel of a different sort; that of the spinning sort. . .
“You might need this,” the arm came out of nowhere: big, sinewy and muscular, perhaps constructed with all things rhyming with “teen,” like creatine, glutine, protein, etc. I only saw the arm at first because I had given up on grading for the siren call of the “state-of-the-art audiovisual entertainment” screens. I didn’t see him because
I was staring at my state-of-the-art audio visual entertainment screen.
Had a bad day? Spin, Scratch, and Please do “Try Again”; or Seeking Shadow Names in Aisle 32 of the 80pk Frozen Chicken Wing Warehouse of Multitudinal Multipacks
At my old gym, I used to watch the Sulky Cell-phone Spinnas, the Mirror Maidens, the iPod People, or even more pathetic: myself. Occasionally, of course, I’d actually be paying attention to the spinning world around me and witness something really beautiful, but that’s not something one normally experiences at a gym, local mom n pop or big ass box chain (because we’re so often not looking beyond the fragile glass reflections of our “form”). But here in front of me was a LCD screen. I had to turn it on:
“Excuse me, sir!! Did I ask you to speak?!” um. . . no.
I quickly got tired of watching Judge Judy berate people, so I switched over to the NYSC’s music video channel. The videos were . . . pretty awful. But maybe it’s just that I was paying attention to them as genre as form, instead of using them as some sort of genre as inspiration and motivation for the sweat and burn. The only thing is that I’m not sure how their video offerings would do much more than heighten our isolation in standard shots, plots and 4/4. As I graded, I paused to watch Daniel Powter sing our collective neo-happiness refrain, ie. ‘bad day” theme song and had to keep myself from cracking up. I thought: they’ll think I’m making this up if I write about it. Then, I watched the lead singer from Snow Patrol lay himself down on a street and suggest he might just lay there. . . Cheerful. Yeah; they won’t believe me. It may have been a towel that made me sign, but it was the on-screen machine malaise that made my brain wander: video after video seemed to suggest our particular cultural dialectic: butt shakin’ booty calls or serious full on malaise; odd but telling juxtapositions for our booty shakin’ malaise on display outside of those screens.
So he handed me the towel, and at first I didn’t see him. I’m not sure if I can really recall what he looks like, actually. But I looked beyond the white towel and blue Staff shirt, the sheen of black and hot pink lycra parade, the color I’d ignored upon entering the screen, and began to take in the scene. His gesture of most likely mandated “customer service” suggested something outside the line of color, customer, and all other coded communication: he smiled and nodded to my papers clutched in one hand, I smiled and nodded at the screen, then the towel. So: is this my way of putting a recycled bow on my admitted hypocrisy? Of suggesting it didn’t matter in the first place: “It’s just a gym,” after all?
Maybe; maybe. But, hey! It’s my formula: my shtick. Sure, she be poorly rendered, but what can you do? Can I get credit for havin’ heart? Extra credit? Do u heart that? I’d like to fall on Brotha Walt’s old standby and say, “I contradict myself. . .( I am large; I contain multitudes),” but it won’t hold. The truth is that I’m not quite sure how I feel about signing my name on that line, about giving into the lure of shiny static screens and the big new! new! new! all around me: shrubbery so new, that the Home Depot plant tags are still sticking out from within the branches, and hell, I even got a free cup of green tea because they hadn’t even programmed the tea prices into the register. Imagine that! But that whole scene by the highway is new. Right across from the Barnes and Noble, Stop and Shop and Sports Authority-Plex, we now have a new Bed, Bath and Beyond, Vitamin Shoppe, and of course: a Starbucks (among other new names). Of course, said Towel Temple and Supplement Paradisio are only a few miles down the road from another pair of Towel Temples and Supplement blah. . . but never mind that. Your town might look the same, but you might not have the stream.
Behind the new Towel-Vitamin-Java-Plex, you gas up your hybrid at the Costco; but to get there, you must cross a shiny new little black bridge built over a stream that maybe had a name once but is overshadowed by bigger names that are echoed and repeated again and again if you follow that stream few miles west. Cross the now-nameless stream, beyond the 80pack frozen chicken wing warehouse, and you’ll find the still tagged shrubs, and the shiny, shiny screens. On occasion, or at least three times a week, you might find me; it’s just hard to see with all those screens.
. . .
Before I left I switched the channel. I wanted to see what there was to see, I guess. I missed the end of something or ‘nother, but was soon confronted by a commercial where laughing and seemingly “happy” couples and school children bore LCD screens as revelatory placards of their sad, sad selves; on these burden-screens, their projected pixels of pain, isolation, anger and anxiety portrayed what their bodies and faces buried. Yes, the metaphor has shifted apparently. LCD is not “Liquid Cave Display,” but something else, something “true”. “Reality LCD,” I suppose. The last shot displayed a middle aged, satisfied and smiling woman, strolling on the beach; on her LCD was the image of a little girl with arm held aloft by some unseen comfort: parent, or God, signaling the United Methodists promise of The Way back to Yourself guaranteed and revealed onscreen(s). I got off.
The towel-gesture made me sign, but the screens made me write, those screens, and this one before me, before you. Regardless of the performance, of the calories expended or the promise kept, I keep signing on to try again.
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