Driving to the gym the other morning in the oh bright early hours, I passed a person in a gaudy and colorful sweat suit (or are we now saying 'work-out togs?') strolling along in the general direction of the gym smoking a cigarette.
We're talking electric lime-green shirt and international emergency orange pants while puffing away on a Benson and Hedges or some brand of cigarette that has popped up in the 22 and half years since I stopped smoking that you can buy in a gas station for a skosh under ten bucks a pack.
I have no idea how anyone can afford to smoke name brand or cut-rate cigarettes anymore (said the guy who smoked three packs a day for twenty-three years), but acknowledging how much the taxes are on each pack, you have to wonder about what happens to all manner of federal, state and in some instances, city. projects if every smoker in the USA looked up tomorrow and said 'that's it! You've hit my pain threshold with taxes, I quit!'
Luckily, for the projects, not the people who smoke, that will very likely not happen (but if it does, remember you read it here first) leaving me to ponder the point of the clothes and the behavior in terms of fitness. Lest you think I'm either a phitness phanatic or enrolled in the fitness relocation program, I am neither.
I go to the gym most weekday mornings, passing the Tastee bakers on my way there, to relieve some of the accumulated stress I've picked up in the course of the previous day scurrying around on this ant farm with beepers because $10 a month for membership is a lot cheaper than lawsuits for bodily harm to scads of people who richly deserve the beating I'm not going to dispense because I have this nice guy reputation to project, I mean protect.
If wearing the clothes helped to lose weight or tone muscles, I'd already be there. I have the tops that 'wick' perspiration away (no idea where the word 'wick' came from), the cunning little towels I can drape around my neck and over my shoulders (under my 'wick' shirt, together with the baggy shorts I choose deliberately because my knees look like Edward Scissorhands was massaging them after more knee surgeries than I can almost count. And don't let me forget the headbands-the crowning touch to my work-out ensemble especially as it matches (I think) the two I have for my wrists. Yep, the spiffy, sporty, doofus, that is I.
Of course, I was disappointed to learn first-hand that I had to do more than wear the clothes to get any benefit from exercising and I'm sure the Marlboro Man has reached the same inevitable conclusion. He's just a little winded as a result.
-bill kenny
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