Circus, Circus

I switched up my going to the gym schedule this week as a result of a cold I caught, and think I overcame last week (set up by way too much oh bright earliness and let’s go wander around in damp gym togs instead of changing) so that I sleep in until about half past three and take/make a pause in the course of the day to hit the treadmill (after laboring in the hamster wheel for a living).

There’s a LOT more people in the place now than when I went on the early shift, which sort of weirds me out a little bit as I don’t go to get pumped (guy with what appears to be tattoos on top of his tattoos), or to see how much of me fits in a children’s size spandex leotard forcing others to look at the ceiling when speaking to you (I mean you ginger-haired young woman who spends most of her time chatting up the guy working the overnight desk and tossing her hair every twenty seconds).

My aim is to do what I can to stay alive. I have enough health issues that any and all help that doesn’t kill me is welcome. In another life, little was more boring than a treadmill, but peripheral artery disease resulting in one artery stent and an angioplasty in an artery in the other leg and two heart stents later I find the device endlessly intriguing. 

But during the daytime part of the day, the big screen TVs in the gym have abandoned news (to include Fox, which I usually don’t include as a news channel) for UFC (I was surprised to learn the F doesn’t stand for what I thought it stood for) which is the Ultimate Fighting Championship (nope, not linking to it; it’s disgusting and you can find that trash by yourself).

The struggles in the ring I’ve caught glimpses of bear no resemblance to anything purporting to do with fair play or humane conduct. I find myself wondering if I could get a second career as a UFC ref since it doesn’t seem there are any rules of any kind about any aspect of what is a street brawl with lots of spectators.

Yesterday, perhaps as a change of pace, the TV was sharing  a clip of two ‘competitors’ hurling full-sized  watermelons from a helicopter at some kind of a target with a bulls-eye and various point circles, with cutaways to some geezer (probably the event organizer) pretending this was something that needed a backstory and an explanation.

Yeah, two cretins in shorts with mono-syllabic vocabularies yelling over the noise of the rotors at one another with words mostly rhyming with Mother Tucker (whoever she was) and ‘dude.’ On the next screen over, ironically, was Fox News with scenes (still) of the Paris terrorist attacks and studio stuffed shirts pontificating on how violent a society we have now become with no idea how this has come to pass.

Edward Gibbons, were he to return and start on the treadmill next to me, would probably be feeling pretty good about himself these days, or pretty bad. 

-bill kenny