fighting for your life, for fun

so, i joined a gym recently. it's not like i have all of this excess cash just sitting around, but because the gym has a deal with my place of employment, i get it at a pretty good rate. the reason that i havent really gotten to the gym around here before was partly because i was always under the delusion that i wouldnt be here long enough to make any kind of committment, but i seemed to have hurdled past that particular subconscious quirk.

the reason that i joined this particular gym was that it has a pool. in college, i was lucky enough to be able to go swimming everyday for a good year or two. i always thought that swimming was the most perculiar exercise. it's not really like lifting weights. lifting weights pretty much a past-time, a hobby.

swimming is fighting for your life, for fun.

when i was a little kid, i drowned. i'm not talking about "oh my god, i got water up my nose", i mean, like lost consciousness and woke up on the beach coughing up water onto a hot lifeguard (or maybe a paramedic- i can't remember; i was 6, i had no idea what hot was anyway.....). i have always said that if i couldn't die in my sleep, i would rather drown.

the last thing i remember was the sensation of falling forward and the expectation of my nose hitting the sand beneath me. maybe i was too young to fully grasp what was going on, but once i got past the panic stage, it was very peaceful.

don't get me wrong...whenever i go swimming in lake coeur d'alene and i get a good bit of lake water in my sinuses, i tend to freak out just a little. like, for a split second, i am 6 again. the next week my mother took me to swimming lessons and i have learned to love the smell of chlorine. later that smell would remind me of bath-houses, but more on that some other time.

the pool at my gym is something like 5 feet at the deep end. i find this disappointing. at first, i couldn't say why, but as i've had more time to think on it while i follow the blue tile strip back and forth, i find that swimming takes on more of a hobby role than anything when you can touch the bottom the whole way through.

when i was swimming in LA, i would occasionally run out of energy in the middle of the deep end and i could literally feel that adrenaline kick in as i fought hard to get to the edge so that i could hold on for dear life and recover. like everything else in my life, it's just another bland exercise in going through the paces.

at the gym, i have discovered that running in place can be interesting if you have an IPOD and that pretending that you're actually rowing a boat makes that machine seem kinda less dumb than it looks.

i realized something while i was at the gym today, though.

i have always avoided gyms, for several reasons. the least of which, is that working out always kind of bored me. the invention of the ipod seems to have smoothed over that transition, which leads me to the big one.

as kind of a thought exercise, i went into the locker room and pretended that i was heterosexual. when i put myself in that mindset (if i can ever truly be in that mindset) and i found that a huge weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.

when i am at the gym, i am still that 15yo gay kid terrified that someone will catch him sneaking a glance or something like that. i'm not at the gym shopping, believe me, but the subconscious pressure is still there. it wasn't until i tried to get out from under it for a moment that i realized it was there.

of course, there is the obvious self consciousness of someone who is unfortunately out of shape.

i comment on these things because they are old and familiar, yet i have not had to deal with them, so they become new and interesting as they pass through my dreary days.