I don't know anything about it, really. But I have a friend online who bodybuilds. Who builds his body. And he started doing something with little packets that he promised weren't really hormones or anything. I don't remember what it was. He told me several times. I'll call it XYZ. I think it has an X in it, or a Z, one of the extreme letters of the alphabet that makes you feel like you've made a very strong consumer choice. Every once in awhile he'll drop the name and I won't know what he's talking about. "I just took the XYZ so I have to go to the gym in twenty minutes." And I'll go, "What?" I just don't care all that much.
By "friend," I really mean casual acquaintance who talks about himself a lot to me, because I am the only one who doesn't make him stop.
This guy has no imagination. I don't necessarily mean that in a derogatory way. He's one of those scary six-fives who are conspiracy theorists with a whole coldly logical but unreal fantasy life about who they are and where they fit in the world. So I guess he does have an imagination, in that way, but he can't reach out beyond it in any way. If he is prodded to do so, he gets extremely angry about it.
I attract these people. I think it's because I tend to like to compliment people. Once, Mister Aran told me that I had to cut down on My Side Of The Conversation, and that was why I had no friends. So I started really getting interested in what people were saying. And I am not pretending, either. If you say you belong to a society of people who climb city lampposts, I will go to the website, I will google, I will make sure I know all the names of the equipment the lamppost climbers use, the sticky... harnesses... with rubber spurs... I am making this up, but it holds. And that habit of mine has backfired majorly. It does not attract people who are then happy to ask me about my interests. In fact, most of my online acquaintances know nothing about me and don't care to. They do not ask. Oddly, I have started to like it that way.
So anyway, suddenly he says out of nowhere that he's getting hardons again. I do not need to hear this, and I tell him so. "No no," he protests. It's not like he's coming on to me or anything, it's just revolutionary. Usually he doesn't get hardons. It's not that he can't, it's just that he never got excited by stuff before. Now he'll look at something and get a hardon for it, where he didn't before.
He'll tell me his weight every couple of days. I remember sort of being that way, but in the opposite direction. Nobody wanted to hear it from me, either. But once, my hairdresser picked up my Weight Watchers card thing for me, and she looked through it and showed her co-workers, and I was really pleased, because it showed where I'd started, and how much I'd lost each week, and all the little silver star stickers that say Bravo!
*
Today I sat in the car reading while Mister Aran went to the gym. I am not in a gym space today. I went back to my fighting class. This is why, over all else, consistency is important. If you keep taking weeks off between classes, or dieting, you are constantly starting from zero. Or maybe one, actually, because you know the moves, but your body can't do it anymore. It's a weird experience. Your brain is sending the same signals, but the muscle doesn't respond. At one point I looked at the heavy bag with confusion. It's there, I thought. And I am here. Why is it not working?
So I have the sore. My forearms are particularly fucked, so that the rest of my body which is also sore doesn't feel as bad as it would otherwise, but I'm still not working out this morning.
So I was sitting in the car and in the side mirror I saw this guy come to his car after a workout. He was tall and he had the beginnings of that certain physique that guys get from non-functional bodybuilding. To me, it's almost like surgery, this unnatural bodily change.
(Random aside: The Bug is wandering through my room reciting this monologue: Open, it's open, door's open, there you go, what happened, it's the cat, it's the cat...)
The guy was slick on his arms with sweat and at one point he lifted the neckline of his tee-shirt to wipe sweat from above his lip. The whole time, he had his mouth open. Not because he was still breathing heavily, but in an idle, nobody's-watching sort of way. It made him look dumber than he probably was.
He set out on the roof of the car an elaborate setup that emerged from a reflective zip-up cooler. Two bottles of Dasani water, a small baggie of powder, and a cup with two complicated-seeming lids. He pulled and twisted and popped the lids off the cup and then poured a little water into it, then the powder, then the rest of that bottle of water and half the next. He downed the rest of the water, then pushed and twisted and popped the lids back down, then shook and shook and shook the cup. He put the cooler back into the car, and put on wire glasses, which was a little endearing to me somehow. Then he got into the car - at first I thought it was the passenger seat, but later when he drove off I realized my mind was just mixed up from looking at him through the mirror - and continued the shaking. From where I sat, all I could see was the top half of his head, bobbing fast with the shaking. It looked like he was jerking off. I wondered if he were shaking the cup and jerking off, and thought of that online acquaintance. But then the head bobbing stopped and he took a pull from his drink, and left.
I wondered about him, cleaned up, meeting girls at the bar. If he told them about his regimen and rituals. I wondered if the girls found it sexy. I thought it would be better if he didn't tell them, if he were like one of those quiet men who you wouldn't know was a Buddhist until he made you dinner at his house, and you found the little prayer-type altar space. I wondered why I immediately figured he was single. Then Mister Aran came back, and we went to buy some kettlebells.
posted by Samus @ 12:37 PM
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