| Current mood: |  hungry |
| Current music: | BBC WORLD NEWS NOW |
Just got back from the Peterborough gym. It's quite the setup considering it's for a small town of alcoholic construction workers. It's small and the floor has hollow spots that bend and BOOM if you stomp on them, but it has just about everything I need to continue my progress towards physical invincibility.
Sometimes I really hate the iron heads who live in this and seemingly all gyms. They wear muscle shirts and baggy pants from the 80's and are prone to chest puffing, like birds, when they walk by. But sometimes it's also entertaining, and a bit mysterious. The best way to describe the scene would be to compare it to a zoo's mating range. It's just Darwinian science at the end of the day, but it never ceases to amaze me how perfect certain members of our species are for illustrating particular principles of natural selection, survival of the fittest, and dumb female attractibility.
Sometimes the chest-puffers are funny. They peek at you to see how much weight you are lifting, even if it's just your warm up, and then quickly look away if they sense you'll see them. The other peekaboo routine occurs while walking past them. As you approach, they scan you over, puff, widen their arm-hang, suck in a little, stomp past, extra bounce from the calf. Maybe a sniff.
Sometimes they can be a bunch of motherfuckers. They talk loud. Leave protein bottles and towels and sweat marks everywhere. The leave weights on the bars so the person who follows will know that someone in the gym can lift huge amounts. They hog equipment. They say they're still using this or that rack when they really aren't. They gawk at women and make them uncomfortable. They try to talk with women and generally bother them. They walk around in constant flexion. They walk around like royalty. Sometimes I fantasize about fighting one of them. It would have to be the leader... the guy who comes in wearing a sleeveless lumberjack shirt and bandana. I bet if I beat him, the others would mellow out, like when you kill the lead Orc or the lead nasty in a Zelda dungeon. The Zelda case would be better because then the follower goons would just vaporize and leave me jewels and money.
They equate maximum squat weight with overall strength, and thus they tend to have enormous, fat, disgusting -albeit muscular- asses. Sadly, they also equate maximum bench press weight with fighting prowess. Ask a boxer what his max bench is. Or better yet, ask a full contact mixed martial arts fighter like Sakuraba, or Tito Ortiz... or even a Navy SEAL. Typically they can't bench 400 lbs, but they can bench pretty heavy weight 400 times (and then start a 7 mile ocean swim, in the case of a SEAL). For the Peterborough Gym goons, moving big weight is an invincibility meter. In the real world, weight lifting strength is only part of someone's overall invincibility.
Actually, using brute strength as a benchmark for invincibility is ok, to a degree. Individuals who can bench over 500 lbs are generally mammoth sized naturally, and the general rule is, avoid fighting people who are freakishly large unless you are freakishly strong or as freakishly large as they are. But the fucktards in my gym only look the part of freakish from their attire and attitude and accessories, right down to the custom chopper lifting belts with "MAD DOG" burnt into them. I'd like to serve them a steaming bowl of creamy justice. But it's pointless.
At the end of the day, let them have the one aspect in their life where they feel superior. If someone's going to enlighten them to their silliness, it's not going to be me.
Besides, I want a ride on one of those choppers. And these guys make great allies in times of need. So, tomorrow, maybe I'll throw a "nice bike" onto the floor in between chest puffs. See what happens.
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