Yesterday I set out to obtain a membership at Gold's Gym locally, committed to not spending an arm and a leg, likewise committed to getting access superior to the free crap gym where I live that comes complete with the gym Nazi who considers any music channel on the televisions to be some insidious and evil influence that has no place anywhere near where people are working out.
To digress immediately from the point of this post, I can understand said middle aged rednecky white guy thinking BET is the mark of the devil or whatever -- not condoning such thinking, mind you, just accepting it as par for the course. But this guy is an equal opportunity music hater, who took the time and effort to use the TV remotes to lock out not just BET, not just MTV, not even just VH-1, but he even took the country music channels off the damn things. I guess you can't fault him for not being fair in his repression.
That gym, while free, was crap anyway, as I think I noted above. Cheap weight machines, cheap ellipticals, okay treadmills and okay free weights (but how hard is it to get free weights right?). With the real downside being that all patrons are army people (well, national guard people, anyway). Don't get me wrong, I love being in the military, and would not trade my present job for anything, not even a hot threesome with Go Go and Flux (hmmm . . . well, would that just be like a one time thing, or maybe a long weekend . . . might be room to negotiate there . . . but still, I love my job, etc etc) but after spending 8-5, or 7-7, ot 7-10, or whatever each day with the (cool) people I work with, the last thing I really want to do is then go to the gym and spend time overhearing (less cool) military people (there, of course, being a hierarchy of coolness here, like everywhere else in life) indulge in shop talk about their markedly less cool jobs.
Not that I go to gyms to eavesdrop on conversations, but still, if you're going to be overhearing shop talk and gossip, I'd rather listen to normal people (read: civilians) ramble about their lives than truck driver school instructors going over tomorrow's training plan while pumping iron. It can be a good thing to get out there in the real world and all that, right? Too much of any one thing can skew one's perceptions of the world in weird directions.
So, anyway, for $35 a month for 24 months (waivable if I move more than 35 miles from the gym to some place like, say, Iraq . . .) I now have access to quite modern and quite nice facilities safely inhabited by a good cross section of the gym-going and working out populace. Now I just have to make myself go . . . I guess that after a couple weeks there will not be so much dragging of self involved, as those gym trips do tend to make one feel much better after the fact . . .
To digress immediately from the point of this post, I can understand said middle aged rednecky white guy thinking BET is the mark of the devil or whatever -- not condoning such thinking, mind you, just accepting it as par for the course. But this guy is an equal opportunity music hater, who took the time and effort to use the TV remotes to lock out not just BET, not just MTV, not even just VH-1, but he even took the country music channels off the damn things. I guess you can't fault him for not being fair in his repression.
That gym, while free, was crap anyway, as I think I noted above. Cheap weight machines, cheap ellipticals, okay treadmills and okay free weights (but how hard is it to get free weights right?). With the real downside being that all patrons are army people (well, national guard people, anyway). Don't get me wrong, I love being in the military, and would not trade my present job for anything, not even a hot threesome with Go Go and Flux (hmmm . . . well, would that just be like a one time thing, or maybe a long weekend . . . might be room to negotiate there . . . but still, I love my job, etc etc) but after spending 8-5, or 7-7, ot 7-10, or whatever each day with the (cool) people I work with, the last thing I really want to do is then go to the gym and spend time overhearing (less cool) military people (there, of course, being a hierarchy of coolness here, like everywhere else in life) indulge in shop talk about their markedly less cool jobs.
Not that I go to gyms to eavesdrop on conversations, but still, if you're going to be overhearing shop talk and gossip, I'd rather listen to normal people (read: civilians) ramble about their lives than truck driver school instructors going over tomorrow's training plan while pumping iron. It can be a good thing to get out there in the real world and all that, right? Too much of any one thing can skew one's perceptions of the world in weird directions.
So, anyway, for $35 a month for 24 months (waivable if I move more than 35 miles from the gym to some place like, say, Iraq . . .) I now have access to quite modern and quite nice facilities safely inhabited by a good cross section of the gym-going and working out populace. Now I just have to make myself go . . . I guess that after a couple weeks there will not be so much dragging of self involved, as those gym trips do tend to make one feel much better after the fact . . .