I watch Olympics gymnastics, but I’m not sure why. It brings me no pleasure.

Shawn Johnson. She haunts me. At 4’9″ she is the sturdy, synew and muscle, fire plug demon of my distant youth.

Of course, I’m not so fucked in the head to not realize she’s a metaphorical stand in for the real demons. She wasn’t born until the 90s. A solid decade or maybe two from when my squat tormentors leapt and twirled their gymnastic wizadry.

In my town in my day, there was a healthy, thriving sports culture and equipment galore. In fact, when the first wave of fucktarded tax-cutting propositions began crippling arts education and other shit that mattered to my little formative brain, the townspeople rallied with a boosters club to save athletics.

A silent tear falls for my no longer being privileged with baking crooked pottery in a proper kiln. But, by god, our town’s young boys had loins that were properly girded for no lack of athletic supporters and their checkbooks.

Along with the Presidential Fitness tests (with the Bay of Pigs, the worst of JFK’s legacy) we, the young, were given opportunities to try any manner of gymnastic apparatus. I remember my sister chalking up and lithely tossing herself across and between the uneven parallels.

I was built for different pursuits.

In my childhood, there were armies of petit, strong Shawn Johnsons compressed into brightly colored leotards. They rose on tiptoes to be about eyeball to my armpits. And, the only leotard I remember owning was a very sturdy, basic brown.

The uneven parallel bars were the showy perch for those armies. The bars were a forbidden zone for the tattered and splintered forces on my team. Rightly so, without infinite liability insurance, some girls, like me, were only allowed to dangle briefly before caving to gravity and more earthbound pursuits on the other side of the gym.

Among the apparati on which I was force marched to engage were the balance beam and the dreaded vault. Why a stroll on four inches of wood roughly four feet off the flooring of thin rubber mats was deemed safe is a mystery to me.

I’m pretty sure I managed to walk, albeit briefly and treacherously, across the beam. Or maybe I crawled. (Assuming I was somehow airlifted or carried or guided onto it.)

Vaulting, though. That was another fish kettle entirely.

My blurred memories are of my trotting with gusto but no speed to thrust myself at an immobile wall of leather. I have no recollection of ever heaving myself onto the other side, let alone pausing for a florish or a flip.

My sole goal was heaving. Heaving the lower half of my body. A recalcitrant, unsteady, weighty sack of potatoes.

Actually, I’ve had far greater success with potato-filled sacks.

My Olympic dream is to lie on the couch and witness just one girl run up to the vaulting horse (least that’s what they called it in the olden days). She’d run at it full steam and screech to a frozen stop, arms out reaching, a stunned look of confusion on her face. That would be the manuever they could name after me.