Health Clubs: Medication for Modern Passivity and Poor Eating Habits

Within a single square mile of the South Beach area of San Francisco, there are over two dozens health and fitness centers, each with high-tech equipment that shine and pivot and plug into walls. They are the result of tribal America’s effort to fight overweight and obesity and to attain the ultimate nirvana that is the culture’s ideal look: a normal healthy body weight.

In tribal America there are well over 30,000 health clubs, bearing nearly 46 million members who pay over $19 billion per year, mostly in the effort to attain… a healthy normal body.

Where I come from, we just eat vegetables that grows out of the grown, fruits that fall from the trees, and meats that we kill. And then we move around a lot, mostly to hunt and to gather and sometimes to play. That’s it, really. The only dumbbell my people have ever heard about was Clumsy Dekoo who can’t even catch a DoDo Bird.

Other than the occasional fatal infection from accidents and attacks by saber tooth tigers, which unfortunately lowers the average life-span statistics of my time, we actually lived long and healthy lives free of the modern diseases for which people take all kinds of medication and visit hospitals.

I believe that the health club industry is in the business of compensation. We use its services to compensate for our own unwillingness to move naturally and eat better. I’m not saying we’re moving less (in fact, our $19-billion annual spending on the fitness industry reveals that plenty of us are moving plenty). I’m saying that we’re utterly nuts to pay this outrageous sum of money for a membership we believe is a prerequisite to good health, general fitness, and a healthy body weight.

My primal family and friends back home didn’t have gym memberships, yet they were not fat nor did they suffer metabolic diseases. They moved around normally, hunting and gathering and lifting and sometimes playing; and they ate things that came directly from Mother Earth.

Addiction

In the earlier years a lot of my money came from the business of addiction. The cocaine industry was then calculated to have an annual income of between 6 to 10 billion dollars. Among the mafias, the drug cartels, and even the Peruvian guerillas fighting for their political ideals, I had a small piece of the action for my own personal “ideals” (a moral corruption with which I’m still dealing in shame). But other than feeding a lucrative addiction, I never gave the disease much thought. Until yesterday.

I was doing pull-ups when some middle-age guy walked up to the big glass windows that stretch across the entire front of the health club. Maybe he was a father, a husband, a divorcee, or a CEO of some publicly traded company — but he definitely wasn’t a gym member. Anyway, he wasn’t obese, but you knew with a single glance he wasn’t fit and healthy: he was slouching, his skin was ashy in that cancer-patient look, his gut protruded with the ugly underbelly of self-negligence. And he was smoking. What struck me odd was the irony of which he seemed completely unaware: he stopped in front of the windows of a health club and looked in at over a dozen people huffing and puffing on cardio machines while he was huffing and puffing on Camel filterless.

He casually watched gym members as if standing in front of some electronic store staring at a display of big-screen televisions, while sucking down not just one cigarette but a total of three. So you could only conclude that his addiction was so deep it stomped out his self-awareness, just as easily as he stomped out his cigarette before lighting the next.

And then we all have heard how alternative healthcare professionals consider that food is a drug. I can assure you this can’t be more true. Last week I had dinner with my lawyer, who probably weigh north of 300 pounds. I watched him eat his penne pasta and meatballs with hardly a moment of mastication, shoving  his mouth full of food before swallowing. He did this for the entire meal. I don’t think the guy tasted his food once. He ate with the same urgency a cocaine addict snorts from a vial in a public bathroom.

I also had a friend who was addicted to the thought that his girlfriend was cheating on him. We’d be out for some random activity like handball, or drinking espressos at a cafe, or looking at art, and he’d start to worry that she was cheating on him at the very moment, that she was doing it at her work, at some motel, in her car behind some shopping center. He’d talk about it, and the more he talked about it the more elaborate the imagination became. He said that, like an itch that couldn’t be scratched, he constantly thought about her cheating on him, even though she never gave him any reason for such consuming paranoia. I told him that he had some deep-rooted emotional hang-ups that he needed to work out. I hadn’t seen him much since.

Anyway, I need to start thinking whether or not addiction has its claws on any part of my life. I’ll have to come back to this in another post… though hopefully not.

Tongue Piercing

I love a girl that takes on Hepatitis C , brain abscess, and a potential loss of half a skull so that she could announce to the world how good she is at sucking a dick.

Don’t you?

On The 101 to Nowhere

Driving home along the super-slab that is The 101, I drove along side an old VW Golf that was literally covered in stickers. You could no longer tell the manufactured paint color of this VW. It was a collage of social and political messages in an explosion of colors and bold prints and exclamation points, traveling at seventy miles per hour.

The driver, a young lady with a bob cut, was concentrating on the traffic in front of her until she saw me pacing and reading her car. Whether she thought I was judging her or actually reading her was beyond her stoic expression, which, come to think of it, was probably mostly an amused reaction that some idiot in a Lamborghini would actually take the time to read stickers that her friends probably slapped on the car over the years. But, from my point, I’m always happy to entertain myself while traveling The Mind-Numbing 101.

Of course, the whole thing takes me away from The 101 and back to the days when I was a young and rebellious punk who thought he knew how the world worked, always had something to say, and fired off his mouth at any chance that an ear might have been around. But I think that everyone falls victim to this delusion and sooner or later realizes that the world has a lot more to say back at you and that whatever you had to say gets drowned out by the noise of life. In the end, you don’t have much to say but you’re still traveling seventy miles an hour to a destination you’re not quit so sure about.

Whatever message you have now is not the same as then. And I wanted to holler this to the bob-cut girl in her VW, over the thrashing wind of The 101. But she took an exit to some other destination not too far from my own.

The Thugs in Honda Civics, and The Thugs in Lamborghinis

OK, let’s get down to business. Back in the 80s, I’ve seen my share of rich fuckers in their Luxury sedans, wearing gold chains and diamond-studded watches. I was a high school kid then and tortured myself with contempt when a fat bastard rolls up in his Jag with his Presidential Rolex hanging out the window and a cigar erecting like a fat little penis between his stubby, greasy fingers. 

I suppose I’m that bastard now, although not so much fat but rather, because of the gym, decently muscular (time has changed, but the bastard part hasn’t). But muscles are a sham, neither here nor there. Anyway, I imagine I’m now the source of contempt, despise, resentment — whatever — for others when I roll up to the stop lights in my brand new Lamborghini. To be safe, I keep my arms and feet inside the car, and I try not to car-window shop while in traffic, for even a random glance can be interpreted as a judgmental stare.

Recently I almost got clocked while sitting in the Porsche in traffic and was (innocently) staring at a billboard. The knuckle head in the pimped out Civic next to me thought I was staring at him and so he literally got out of his car and got into my face while I’m strapped down in the belly of the car. I was in no position for self-defense, so I thought about taking the offensive action of pulling his head in through the window and delivering a headlock that would have knocked him out cold in less than 7 seconds. But instead, I defused the situation by asking him if he could blame a man for staring at the bikini-clad girl on a Bud Light billboard. (Until this day part of me wanted to give that punk an involuntary afternoon nap.)

Thereafter I thought about carrying a hand gun in the glove box, but California doesn’t look too favorably upon those who blow the heads off of thugs in Honda Civics. That would make me a thug in a black Lamborghini.

Sleazy Girls

I’m not an ugly guy, but I ain’t no Brad Pitt. I’m that guy who doesn’t get a second look from girls. I mean, girls aren’t repulsed by my looks, but they don’t leave the club with me either. After graduating high school I even tried to improve my looks by joining a gym and hitting the weights. But bigger muscles only made me look like a second-rate thug in some home-spun mafia.

This leads me to an embarrassing confession: I use my wealth to get women. (What, you wouldn’t?) I know, it isn’t real love. But who’s looking?

If my mother were alive she’d kill me for bringing home a different girl every week. It’s not that I’m a playboy, but that I don’t discriminate between women of class and those of sleaze; the girls I bring home reek of cheap booze and nicotine and wanderlust. But it’s liberating. I don’t have to feed them because they don’t stay around long (I make sure of that). And I don’t have to impress people who are themselves unimpressive.

What’s more, I think these party girls sometimes fill the void that a lonely childhood created. And most important, sometimes a man needs to have someone keep him warm at night.

Possibly I Care a Little, Maybe

OK, after only 1 entry, I come across as a jerk — a rich, arrogant son of a bitch whose worldly concerns center around the jacuzzi water not being hot enough to cure a bad hangover and detoxify the body of a late-night party with people who pretend to like me.

But I do care about things; maybe not the same things that you care about. But I do have my glint of humanity, or something to that nature. Like: I sometimes tip a waitress with an exaggerated amount, just so that for one night she can bask in the glorious thoughts of shoving her apron up the ass of the bully supervisor and telling him to go fuck himself. And for months I studied from a distance the homeless lady whose swollen ankles and feet take her from one end of the city to the other in the hopes that the other side might be better, friendlier, and warmer; she makes this roundtrip weekly, and last week I gave her a cashmere overcoat to fight off the cold fog that inevitably blankets the city at night, no matter which side of it she’s in. Also, even though it’s a good chunk of change for me, I had no problem signing a check to support a Darfur immigrant whose hunger is only a small burden compared to the tragedy he’s witnessed in his lifetime.

Between my drunken stupor and my dreadful hangovers, these are some of the things I think about.

I know, I know, not everyone is lucky enough to be in a position to do these things. But I also know many who have the luxury to do them, but don’t. Either way, that’s OK. Because if I’m not burdened by my need for redemption, I probably wouldn’t do these things, either.

But maybe I still would.

New Money, New Life

Since my biological parents died the summer before I started high school and my foster parents cared only about the state check that came monthly, I never had a proper education about money handling. I mean, I knew that money makes the world go round and spews rainbows into the sky and all that magic — all of which were inspirations for my first business enterprise, which I can’t really talk about for fear that the feds will take me in for question.  

But that was long ago. In my lifetime I’ve had not one but two enterprises that brought great financial rewards, particularly the fortune from the second enterprise. Which got me to where I am: sitting in cash and often sitting in a jacuzzi while sipping not a chilled bottle of Crug Champagne but chugging a cold bottle of Coors. (Fuck the bubbly.)

I had started a very lucrative ”healthcare” service and then sold it to a multidisciplinary clinic (owned and operated by a bunch of greedy Scientologists) for a very large sum. Unlike my first enterprise, this venture was said to be legitimate, but that’s debatable. Whatever, that’s for another post.

 

Isn't this how it's done?

Well, I had my nose so deeply into the mechanics of hard work that I forgot what I was working so hard for in the first place. And that, of course, was for money. So when I stopped working I realized that all this money was waiting to be burned. I mean, isn’t that what you do with money?

 

And so, having been liberated from business obligations, the first thing I splurged on was a good steak dinner at Morton’s Steakhouse on Connecticut in Washington, DC. And having broken up with my long-term girlfriend Lily, I ate alone. Which was fine by me. Fuck it. I had the appetite to eat for two, the burden to drink for ten, and the cash to tip for twenty. That, my friend, was how I rolled. 

Piss poor money management, I know. But after a spending binge that involved a penthouse apartment in the city, a Porsche that sits in the garage, and a Patek Philippe watch that costs more than your Ivy League education, I realized that I can easily end up in the

This beast is fast. Unfortunately, I have to burn money just as fast to drive one.

dunk like Mike Tyson or MC Hammer or fucking Lenny Bruce. So I got a four-eyed, bow-tie-wearing financial advisor to manage my finances with the understanding that I have constant and immediate access to spendable cash. (He agreed, but probably only so I would agree to hire him.) Compromises, compromises. I mean, what the hell else would I blog about?