Hanging in the gym

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The more things change, the more time passes, the more decrepit I get, nothing really changes. In today’s episode of stasis, I’m in a gym.
The air is redolent with sweat and dust. Sneakers squeak and whistle rubbing against the hardwood floor. Grunts echo from above and below in that cave of acoustics where people go to ooze electrolytes and heat from their pores.

Instructors are speaking sounds that enter my earhole and worm their way into my gray matter, translate into meaningful words that describe actions my body cannot mirror. My whole life it has amazed me that some people can listen to a description of physical action and then carry out said action. I am not one of those people.

It’s continually confounding. I hear the words, I understand the thoughts, but my muscles do not obey. In my head, I am a swan. In my body, I am a penguin on dry land.

I’m actually in the main room of the Muy Thai Academy of San Jose. Pretty much any being on the planet, even those that wiggle and squirm with nary a brain cell in their body, anyone that has ever met me knows that I couldn’t be possibly be here by my own design. Nope, gyms and I, fighting and I, athletics and I are strangers.

But I sleep with someone who seems to love all three. And, so here I am.

It’s probably some kind of cosmic twist of fate, karmic payback that I ended up with a guy who loves the gym and is able to move his muscles in line with his desired goals. I imagine the gods are laughing at me. Probably, it’s from that day that I spotted my bespectacled, rail thin English teacher wandering the single hallway of my high school’s gym building. “Ms. Ford,” I yelled after her, “Are you slumming it?”

My sweat-clothed nemesis, Ms. Ciesla, overheard me. Later during the mandatory instruction I loathed the most, perhaps during a detestable field hockey game as I slowly followed a white ball with a wooden stick, she pounced.

“D-Rob,” or any number of various nicknames and butchery of my hard to pronounce last name, “DId I hear you right, D-Rob? Slumming it? Is that what I heard you say? Slumming it? Do you think I work here in a slum? It’s a slum to you? Really, is that what you said?”

It was a rhetorical onslaught not meant to be answered. However, I think I did grunt out a “Yeah.” I think I may have implicated my English teacher and said she would understand.

It was a longer year than usual that year in gym class. It was the year Ms. Ciesla made me play forward in field hockey, scoring zero points to my name and making new enemies on the battlefield. It was the year she made me repeatedly try again and again and again to fling my lower body over a waist-high leather horse. A vaulter I am not, and my stomach purpled by hitting the leather and padded wood full-force in desperate flings vainly trying to will myself to flight attested to the truth. I think it was the year that a tiny little girl spotted me into a handstand that dropped straight to the floor knocking the air from my lungs and ending the class early.

It was the year I embraced myself and my bitter reality of limitations. Mortality and limits crept into my childhood soul.

Talk with me. Please.

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